Songs from Antiquity: Conference
Day 1: Performance Theory
Brasenose College Old Library, 09:00-12:00
Elisa Anzellotti (Art Historian Officer of the Italian Ministry of Culture)
Dancing the Antiquity: The Eternal Ephemeral
The attempt to reconstruct ancient dances through the analysis of iconography and primary sources serves as a bridge to the past, offering a deeper hermeneutic key to the sources themselves. When integrated with aesthetic-philosophical reflection, this process yields a more comprehensive and evocative framework.
In this context, the ancient Greek conceptions of time are particularly illuminating, as dance represents their perfect synthesis:
Chronos: The dance is embodied in the metric regularity of linear time. Kairos: It erupts through the expressive efficacy of the fleeting, decisive moment.
Aion: Through the ritualization of sacred gesture, it aspires to immutability, transforming the performer’s body into a nexus between history and the eternal.
The ultimate objective is to reanimate images from a past embedded in our cultural DNA—to breathe life into the Warburgian Pathosformel. The images condense a singular moment of dance, a fragment of a whole that remains latent yet retains the full kinetic power of the entire sequence.
Reconstructing and reenacting ancient dance today is an aionic act. It is the conviction that a gesture from over two millennia ago can still resonate with meaning, dissolving temporal distance and rendering the Past eternally present through the living body.
Rosa Fragorapti (Independent Scholar)
The Ancient Lyre in Practice: Κροῦσις, Ψαλμός, and Musical Gesture
This presentation explores the performance practice of the ancient Greek seven-string lyre through a dialogue between iconography, ancient sources, and practical experimentation. It focuses on hand positions, finger gestures, and the use of the plectrum, trying to explain how iconography can be “read” in relation to technical terms such as κροῦσις and ψαλμός, which denote different ways of producing sound on stringed instruments.
Rather than presenting reconstructions, the talk develops a set of exploratory hypotheses emerging from the interplay of images, texts, and embodied performance practice. Collaborative work with an aulos player has further refined this perspective, playing a key role in shaping a practical approach to combining strumming and plucking. The aim is not to present a single model of ancient practice, but to show how different kinds of evidence can enter into a productive, critically informed dialogue.
Keywords: Ancient Greek music, lyre, κροῦσις, ψαλμός, musical gesture, performance practice, iconography
Felipe Aguirre Quintero (Conservatori Superior de Música de les Illes Balears)
The Sound Ideal in Ancient Greek Music: The Aesthetics of Clarity, the Ontology of Transparency
This paper reconstructs an ancient Greek sound ideal centred on clarity and transparency, arguing that a «clear sound» was not merely an acoustic preference but, more significantly, an aesthetic and ontological paradigm that shaped musical practice, vocal technique, and the very intelligibility of λόγος and μέλος. Starting from ancient phonetic hierarchies (vowels as intrinsically voiced; consonants as dependent) and emblematic cases such as the euphonic syllable (τ as the «smoothest» consonant; α as the primal, naturally produced voice), the study shows how Greek authors link sonic value to models of purity, luminosity, and formal distinctness. A close reading of technical, rhetorical, and medical sources (grammarians on εὐφωνία; Peripatetic accounts of τραχύτης; physiological explanations of hoarseness; Aristotelian resonance theory; Vitruvian typologies of acoustic space) reveals a consistent opposition between roughness— understood as fragmented airflow, friction, and perceptual discontinuity—and the desideratum of a smooth, continuous, resonant emission. Crucially, the lexicon of ‘brightness’ and ‘transparency’ (λαμπρός, διαφανής, λευκός, σαφής) indicates a systematic transfer from the visual to the auditory: clear sound ‘shows’ (φαίνει) its form, enabling recognition, persuasion, and—at a deeper level—noetic apprehension. The paper concludes that ancient Greek μουσική articulates an ontology of appearance in which sonic clarity functions as a condition of perceptibility and meaning, thereby bridging performance aesthetics and metaphysical accounts of manifestation.
Keywords: Ancient Greek music; sound ideal; aesthetics of clarity; sonic transparency; euphony; vocal timbre and intelligibility; acoustic theory.
Day 2: Performance Practice
Brasenose College Stoker Room, 09:00-12:00
Alex Silverman (Jesus College, University of Oxford)
How (not) to write for ancient instruments - a modern composer's perspective
In this paper, I document my experience of writing music for performance on reconstructed ancient instruments, a task that holds many challenges for a composer more used to working with oboes and guitars than with the aulos and lyre. I explain my technical approach to the creation of Mesomedes' sundials, a new work which draws on the texts of two ancient songs, and how it incorporates three essential elements: meter, mode, and breath. The apokroton, an anapaestic meter, forms the rhythmic basis for the ancient source and is preserved - with some repetition and variation- in the new work. The harmonic structure is a response to the range of chords that derive from the chromatic tonos of the ancient Greek Lydian mode. These two factors are synthesised in a melody, which is further shaped by the breath of the aulete and singer, and with the support of the lyre, becomes a sort of quartet. I share the many questions, errors, and practical solutions encountered in the process of researching, composing, editing and rehearsing the piece, and conclude by reflecting on the creative opportunities that await other modern musicians interested in expanding the repertoire of these remarkably versatile and expressive ancient instruments.
Callum Armstrong (The Aulos Collective)
Interpreting Early Greek Auloi: A Tracelogical Approach to Surviving Models
In collaboration with Caleb Simone and Max Brumberg
While the remarkable Poseidonia and Pydna auloi offered secure evidence to establish the ‘early’ type of aulos, it has remained unclear how these wide-bore instruments systematically relate to the Classical modes (harmoniai). To date, attempts at interpreting early auloi have focused on the application of harmonic theory to the theoretical design of the instruments. By contrast, we attend to the connection between instrument and player, emphasizing the material traces of that dynamic interaction: that is, evidence of wear on the toneholes of the instruments. This talk presents our latest work documenting, analysing, and experimenting with fingerwear patterns on early Greek auloi. Our project is based upon a comparative analysis of early Greek auloi from a traceological perspective, identifying a consistent pattern of use-wear that, we contend, sheds light on how auloi of this period were played. In addition, we introduce our working hypothesis for how these patterns were employed in playing reconstructed models of early Greek auloi.
Benjamin Hebbert
Cupids playing with the tributes of Apollo at Herculaneum and an adventure in reconstructing a Hellenistic Kithara
A year ago as a violin restorer and maker, the idea of making a kithara couldn’t have been further from my mind, but with the encouragement of AMO and friends, my journey began with an attempt to recreate the instrument in fresco SAR 22872 at the National Archaeological Museum in Naples, perhaps the most detailed of all surviving iconography from this period. At the beginning of the project the intention was to make an instrument using the closest tools to Roman technology and to consider the woods to be used. Soon, however, the project was derailed as it became clear that the artist of this astonishingly detailed fresco had worked hard to retain features that the maker had intentionally created in order to indicate the proportional elements of the instrument. As I began to test these markers on a drawing board, and began to investigate the iconography of this form of kithara further, what seems to emerge is an entirely new kind of design that has its origins sometime around the 4th Century BC. The design draws on the architectural and sculptural elements of Polykleitos, Euclid and Pythagoras. It proves to be an optimised design for small-scale manufacture; it embodies the Homeric myth of how the instrument was first made by Hermes from tortoise and cow parts, and simultaneously it evokes a proportional and sculptural anthropomorphic form that I believe is deliberately evocative of Psyche. At the emergence of New Music in Classical Greece, with the multi-layered complexities of the time, could this sculptural and architectural form that is found so readily on Hellenistic-period coins be viewed as a commonplace metaphysical embodiment of a kind of music that expressed the soul? Could it equally represent a political vision of man-made order whose rule over the natural world even extended to Harmonia? The intention of my talk is not to provide concrete answers but to explore the questions that arise from analysis of the object as a kind of text, and that emerge from the practical experience of making.
Benjamin Hebbert is a violin maker and restorer based in Oxford. As a fellow in Art History at the Metropolitan Museum of Art he worked on similar ideas of harmonic proportion and geometry in the design of Renaissance stringed instruments, and he is currently completing a doctorate (Northumbria University) on Music as the Measure of the Soul from a sixteenth-century English perspective. His research blog is at www.violinsandviolinists.com, and having gone down a considerable wormhole of Kitharas, he is happy to develop the project and make further instruments to order.
