Daniyal Ahmed

Ethnomusicology

Daniyal Ahmed is a musician, researcher, producer, and curator from Pakistan. He runs an independent record label called honiunhoni, and serves as General Secretary of the All Pakistan Music Conference, Karachi. His work has been featured in The Guardian, BBC, Pitchfork, Songlines Magazine, The Wire Magazine, Dust-to-Digital, WDR, MDR Kultur and several other publications and media outlets globally.

At Hildesheim he is teaching courses in Ethnomusicology, and is working on his doctoral project on the music of Balochistan. His areas of interest are south asian musics, sound studies, field recording,  and audiovisual ethnography.

Before joining the University of Hildesheim, Ahmed was Assistant Professor of Practice at Habib University in Karachi, where he continues as affiliate faculty. Ahmed began his musical journey, performing in Karachi’s underground scene.  He also worked as a theater actor, and was part of an improvisational comedy troupe with whom he toured across the country. He completed his B.A  in Humanities from LUMS in Lahore. His bachelor's thesis was an oral history of resistance movements against the Nawabs of Kalabagh. This work was presented at an international conference on Oral History in South Asia at the Royal Holloway College, University of London, in 2013.

Ahmed then taught experimental humanities courses to secondary school children in Karachi. During this period, he became a disciple of the Bansuri maestro, Ustad Salamat Hussain, with whom he continues to learn Raag Sangeet and folk styles. He then completed his M.A from the South Asia Institute at the University of Heidelberg, and continued to play music in different formations and on different instruments, including the Afghan Rubab, and with performances at venues like Zentrum für Populäre Kultur und Musik in Freiburg, Karlstorbahnhof in Heidelberg, and in the theater production, "Die Grünen Schuhe", which was featured on German television ARD’s Tagesschau. For his M.A thesis, he wrote about the soundscapes and music cultures of an asylum seekers accommodation in Heidelberg. This work was presented and published via an international workshop on music and the making of new muslim identities at the University of Freiburg. 

Ahmed then returned to Pakistan and began teaching at the Habib University in Karachi, simultaneously co-founding Karachi Community Radio (KCR), with which he remained involved until 2021. In 2020, he was inducted into the Executive Committee of the All Pakistan Music Conference (APMC), Karachi, for whom he continues to produce recordings of Pakistan’s greatest living ‘classical’ musicians as well as work on long term documentation and archival projects on South Asian Raag Sangeet in Pakistan.

Since 2019, Ahmed has been researching and recording music in different regions of Pakistan. Ahmed has delivered public talks and lectures at the Staatliches Institut für Musikforschung in Berlin, Rudolstadt Festival, the House of Music in Hungary, and the Sjöviks Folkhögskola in Sweden, among others.  In 2022, his recordings of Balochi Benju player Ustad Noor Bakhsh received global acclaim. Since 2023, he has been touring with Ustad Noor Bakhsh, initially as his sound engineer, and later joining him on stage playing Bansuri and Damburag.

Honiunhoni continues to release more music and bring musicians to festivals, cultural houses, and clubs across Europe and the UK. 

Kontakt: ahmedd(at)uni-hildesheim.de

 

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Raum: KC 2.102
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