Thursday 6th October | 7:00 - 8:15pm
Join Classics for All for a magnificent evening of live performance, shining a light on the power and beauty of ancient Greek sounds, recreated for the modern day.
Hosted by Classics for All’s Chairman, Jimmy Mulville, this splendid evening will feature a talk by Professor Armand D’Angour (Jesus College, Oxford) on the process of bringing ancient Greek music back to life and live performances by world-leading musicians Stef Conner (voice and lyre), Barnaby Brown and Callum Armstrong (aulos).
Thanks to scholars like Professor Armand D’Angour, great strides have been made in understanding how ancient Greek music sounded. Ancient instruments such as the aulos (double pipe) and lyre have been recreated on the model of archaeological remains, and ancient texts with musical notation have been discovered and reconstructed, revealing music that was sung and played as early as the 5th century BC.
In this exclusive event for Classics for All, Professor D’Angour will explore how ground-breaking research has led to revelations about the nature of ancient Greek sounds. You will have the chance to hear performances of ancient Greek music at their finest – surrounded by the stunning acoustics of the Royal College of Music’s state-of-the-art Performance Hall.
Armand D’Angour pursued a career as a cellist before becoming a Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford, in 2000, where he teaches Greek and Latin literature. In 2013-14 he was awarded a British Academy Fellowship to undertake research into ancient Greek music, for which he was awarded in 2017 the Vice Chancellor’s Prize for Public Engagement with Research. In addition to numerous broadcasts on radio and television, a short film posted on Youtube has attracted over half a million views since its publication in December 2017. More details of his research and activities are available on his website
Stef Conner’s music infuses ancient texts with new creative energy, forging channels of empathy into the deep past. Although rooted in the classical tradition, her musical style is distorted into something uniquely her own through the vivid palette of sounds (real and imaginary) she has absorbed, from reconstructed Mesopotamian lyres, medieval chant, and Old English poetry to spectral harmony and experimental vocal music. A former member of The Unthanks and Royal Philharmonic Society Prize-winning composer, she comfortably inhabits the borderlands between the classical and traditional music worlds.
Barnaby Brown leads the revival of the northern triplepipe, the precursor of the bagpipe in Britain and Ireland. He also champions the art of canntaireachd, a chant which imitates the sound of the Highland bagpipe, and plays pibroch on a reproduction of a chanter owned by the Blind Piper of Gairloch (1656–1754). Recently, he began exploring pipes reproduced from Ancient Greek, Sumerian and Paleolithic finds.