Leopoldo Flores Valenzuela
Greenleaf Visiting Library Scholar
Leopoldo is an ethnomusicologist specializing in religious chants of indigenous and peasant communities of Oaxaca (Mexico) and examining their symbolic, political and anthropo-historical dimension. He is the author of Alabanceros: canto religioso en el Valle de Oaxaca. Politicidad, simbolismos y sublimación músico-ritual, among other articles. He is a scholar of brass bands and orchestras of the 19th and 20th centuries, both in Oaxaca and the Colombian Caribbean, co-author of a specialized methodology for the classification and cataloging of sheet music. Leopoldo is a professor of several chairs at the National Conservatory of Music of Mexico and for the Master's degree in Performance of Mexican Concert Music. He was a researcher in the project Ritual sonoro en catedral parroquias y pueblos: catalogación e investigación musical en Oaxaca at Centro de Investigaciones y Estudios Superiores en Antropología Social (ciesas, pacífico sur).
Title of Research : The alabados of New Mexico and the Valley of Oaxaca. A comparative history of the feast through the ritual and chants of two united regions in New Spain
Leopoldo developed the project ‘The alabados of New Mexico and the Valley of Oaxaca. A comparative history of the feast through the ritual and chants of two united regions in New Spain’ with the Greenleaf Visiting Library Award. The object of the research was to carry out a comparative study between the tradition of the alabados of New Mexico, especially that of the Penitent Brothers, and that of the Valley of Oaxaca (Mexico) to show the musical, symbolic and ritual relationships of the chants of both regions and, with this, make an approach to a shared sociocultural history of feast.
