Música festera, coexistence and multimusicality during the making of The Unknown Spanish Levant (Egypt)

This article addresses the development of música festera, a musical style with over 3,000 compositions, for the celebration of the Moros y Cristianos festival in eastern Spain that has been held since the nineteenth century, within the compositional framework of The Unknown Spanish Levant (Egypt), part of a series of nine albums which I researched and composed. Recorded between 2021 and 2025 in Turkey, Brazil, Mexico, Uzbekistan, Germany, Spain and Egypt, The Unknown Spanish Levant series combines música festera with multiple musical styles. The article specifically explores the legacies of al-Andalus in the creation of The Unknown Spanish Levant series from two key perspectives: by fostering geographies of musical circulation between Egypt and Spain, both historically and in the present, and by reconsidering the concept of multimusicality. This concept, which I have employed in my previous work, examines musical practices that incorporate multiple idioms across geographic regions in Asia, Africa, Latin America and Europe. The notion of multimusicality highlights how the composition of this album, which utilizes various musical systems, challenges the dichotomy of self-Orientalism and the experience of being Orientalized, in this way raising questions regarding sonic al-Andalus, nostalgia and the broader concept of al-Andalus.