Cara Nicol

Cara holds an MSt from the University of Oxford entitled “A Comparative Analysis of Ancient Greek and Swedish Musical Pitch Accents” and a BMus from the University of Toronto in musicology. Her doctoral dissertation is entitled “Melodic Non-Conformity to the Greek Musical Pitch Accent” and examines nonconformity, mimesis, and other extra-musical features of the extant Greek musical fragments. By learning how and why composers broke pitch accentual rules, she aims to increase understanding of how ancient composers used the inherent melody of their text to create music. This will further provide insight into the unanswered question of whether or not certain genres of music, specifically the strophic song, regarded the pitch accent at all. Cara is a classically trained harpist and frequently performs both ancient and modern music at venues around Oxford.