Mozambican musician, educator, researcher and instrument builder
*Xilembeni, Mozambique
Luka Mukhavele is a music/Culture scholar, artist, instrument builder, and language teacher, from Mozambique. He engaged with music from early age, influenced by family members and community, which were very musical. Since buying toys for children was no a common practice, Luka and his friends taught themselves to build their own, and this included musical instruments.
In 2005, Luka founded Mukhambira-musical, to research on the construction and performance of African musical. Adding to Mukhambira, Luka's PhD thesis “African Musical Instruments from a Contemporary Global Perspective —Mbira and Xizambi”, competed at Hochschule für Musik Franz Liszt Weimar, emerged as his artistic-academic approach to the reinvigoration African music and instruments and their integration in the global body of artistic and scientific knowledge in musicology, a discipline which he finds to have many ideological, conceptual, and paradigmatic detriments.
Currently, Luka is the Editor/Designer of the course “Living Heritage in Africa: Music and the Performing Arts”, a freelancer consultant, artist, and lecturer. Both his artistic and his academic work are grounded on his “African Contemporary self-built instruments, from which he draws otherwise lost concepts and paradigms, aiming to address the shortfalls and inherent detriments of musicology in a global perspective.
Some of his work can be viewed on:
