Professor%20Armand%20D'Angour: List of publications
Showing 1 to 38 of 38 publications
Centenary ode for Roman society
January 2023
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Journal article
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Journal of Roman Studies
Meter and music
May 2022
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Chapter
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A Companion to Greek Lyric
Most ancient Greek lyric poetry was composed to be sung to melody, and was regularly accompanied by the poets themselves on stringed instruments such as lyre, barbitos, and kithara, or by fellow-performers playing double-pipes. Something of the melodic element may be conjectured on the basis of theoretical expositions of the tunings used in archaic times, and from musical documents from later times that employ notation systems devised around the fifth century BC. Rhythmical units consisting of identifiable sequences of long and short positions form the meters of all Greek lyric poetry. The dochmiac colon happens to be represented on the earliest extended piece of notated melody on papyrus, and this virtually unique piece of ancient evidence for the music of classical lyric is worth dwelling on. It preserves a passage from a chorus of Euripides' tragedy Orestes of 408 BC, and the melody seems likely to be that composed by Euripides himself.
Most ancient Greek lyric poetry was composed to be sung to melody, and was regularly accompanied by the poets themselves on stringed instruments such as lyre, barbitos, and kithara, or by fellow-performers playing double-pipes. Something of the melodic element may be conjectured on the basis of theoretical expositions of the tunings used in archaic times, and from musical documents from later times that employ notation systems devised around the fifth century BC. Rhythmical units consisting of identifiable sequences of long and short positions form the meters of all Greek lyric poetry. The dochmiac colon happens to be represented on the earliest extended piece of notated melody on papyrus, and this virtually unique piece of ancient evidence for the music of classical lyric is worth dwelling on. It preserves a passage from a chorus of Euripides' tragedy Orestes of 408 BC, and the melody seems likely to be that composed by Euripides himself.
SBTMR
How to innovate: an ancient guide to creative thinking
October 2021
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Book
What we can learn about fostering innovation and creative thinking from some of the most inventive people of all times—the ancient Greeks.
SBTMR, philosophy
Recreating the music of Euripides’ Orestes
March 2021
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Journal article
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Greek and Roman Musical Studies
The fragment of the chorus of Euripides Orestes preserved on Pap. Vienna G 2315 leaves
a host of unanswered questions. For whom was the papyrus inscribed? How much of
Orestes was preserved on the roll? Whose music is it, and what melodic and harmonic
sounds does it preserve? Can the gaps in the melody be filled so as to (re)create performable music based on the papyrus for the Euripidean text, and if so how? This article
sets out in detail the steps that led to the creation of a score that has become part of
a widely viewed Youtube video presentation of a performance in Oxford in July 2017.
INTIMATIONS OF THE CLASSICAL IN EARLY GREEK MOUSIKĒ
February 2021
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Chapter
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Classical Pasts
Ancient Greece
December 2020
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Book
4705 Literary Studies, 36 Creative Arts and Writing, 43 History, Heritage and Archaeology, 47 Language, Communication and Culture, 4303 Historical Studies, 3603 Music
Ancient Greece
December 2020
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Chapter
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Oxford Handbook of Music and Philosophy
This chapter outlines the evidence for musical history in ancient Greece, connecting it to philosophical approaches represented by Plato and others, as well as to recently elucidated documents with Ancient Greek musical notation. Ideas of ethos and mimesis are related to what may be known about the sounds of ancient Greek music as elicited from descriptions, surviving scores, and replicas of instruments such as the aulos (double pipe). The chapter seeks to elucidate the notion of mousikē (‘music’, as derived from the name of Greek divinities Mousai, the Muses) in its cultural context, and to connect elements of ancient musical traditions such as metre and harmonics to contemporary aural and musical realities.
Greek texts preserve reflections by ancient musicians and authors on striking developments in musical styles that took place in Athens in the course of the fifth century BC. To many observers, the sounds and practices associated with the New Music signaled a dramatic change in the very nature of musical expression. The New Musicians enjoyed great popular success, but the explicit and implicit ideology of their music attracted the censure of traditionalists. However, New Music drew on earlier styles and techniques as well as diverging from them. This chapter considers some of the specific forms in which the much-vaunted newness of the New Music presents itself, and seeks to contextualize the innovation in relation to the music that preceded it.
SBTMR, revolution, mimeticism, aulos, Euripides, New Music, Timotheus, modulation
The musical frogs in frogs
June 2020
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Chapter
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Festschrift Ewen Bowie
New suggestions about the implications of the agon in Aristophanes' Frogs, including the assimilation of the aulete to a frog because the visual aspect of circular breathing involves puffed-out cheeks.
Socrates in Love
March 2020
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Book
Translating Catullus 85: why and how
April 2019
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Journal article
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Philologia Classica
Hearing ancient sounds through modern ears
October 2018
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Chapter
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Sound and the Ancient Senses
Sufficient evidence exists for us to hear with reasonable accuracy some of the rhythms, melodies and timbres of ancient Greek music. But even if we were to reconstruct a body of sound that faithfully represented Greek musical expression, could we really appreciate the kinds of effect this would have created in the ears of ancient hearers? One way to do so might be to match what ancient authors say about the effects of music with specific musical sounds (harmonies, rhythms, etc.) that we can recreate. This chapter examines how one might hear ancient sounds through modern ears by seeking to understand evidence of ancient rhythms, melodies and modes, as well as the sensations these musical sounds were said to have aroused in their time.
SBTMR
Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece
March 2018
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Book
The Musical Setting of Ancient Greek Texts
March 2018
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Chapter
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Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece
These essays illustrate the importance of music for intellectual culture in ancient Greece and the ancients' abiding concern to understand and control its effects on human behaviour.
Literary Collections
Vocables and microtones in ancient Greek music
September 2016
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Journal article
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Greek and Roman Musical Studies
This article discusses ways in which non-lexical utterances are linked in ancient Greek music to the representation of musical phrases. It first considers the possible use of ‘vocables’ in ancient Greek, i.e. vocal utterances lacking lexical content which may be substituted for the rhythms of a song for the purpose of the instruction or transmission of music. A system of vocables (distinct from solmization) outlined by Aristides Quintilianus is investigated to see if it can be shown to be related to principles of vowel pitch modification, whereby phonetically ‘high’ vowels tend to be enunciated at a higher pitch than ‘low’ ones. Since such variances could be heard in the context of microtonal music as creating wholly different musical notes, the Orestes papyrus is examined in detail to see if the enharmonic musical setting is affected in any way by principles of vowel pitch modification, with the conclusion that it is.
Between Scylla and Charybdis: Text and Conjecture in Greek Lyric Commentary
January 2016
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Chapter
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Classical Commentaries Explorations in a Scholarly Genre
This rich collection of essays by an international group of authors explores a wide range of commentaries on ancient Latin and Greek texts.
Classical languages
Sense and Sensation in Music
July 2015
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Chapter
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A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics
Greek speculations on the nature of artistic experience have profoundly shaped our culture, and this volume explores the many ways in which the arts were experienced and conceptualized in the ancient world.
History
Plato and play: taking education seriously in Ancient Greece
June 2013
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Journal article
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American Journal of Play
In this article, the author outlines Plato’s notions of play in ancient Greek culture and shows how the philosopher’s views on play can be best appreciated against the background of shifting meanings and evaluations of play in classical Greece. Play—in various forms such as word play, ritual, and music—proved central to the development of Hellenic culture. In ancient Greece, play (paidia) was intrinsically associated with children (paides). However, both children and play assumed a greater cultural significance as literacy—and, consequently, education (paideia)— developed during the classical age of 500–300 BCE. Uniquely among ancient thinkers, Plato recognized that play influenced the way children developed as adults, and he proposed to regulate play for social ends. But Plato’s attitude toward play was ambivalent. Inclined to consider play an unworthy activity for adults, he seemed to suggest that intellectual play in some form, as demonstrated in the dialectical banter of Socrates, could provide a stimulus to understanding.
Socratic dialectic, play and child development, play and Plato, play and education, education in ancient Greece
Music and movement in the dithyramb
January 2013
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Chapter
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Dithyramb in Context
Euripides and the Sound of Music
January 2012
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Chapter
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The Blackwell Companion to Euripides
Horace's Victory Odes: Artifices of Praise
January 2012
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Chapter
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Reading the Victory Ode
The Greeks and the New: Novelty in ancient Greek imagination and experience
October 2011
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Book
Casts new light on ancient Greeks' attitudes to novelty in order to change scholarly understanding of their history and culture.
History, Greeks, novelty, innovation, kainos, neos, new music, competition, Athens
Pindar at the Olympics; the Limits of Revivalism
January 2011
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Chapter
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Thinking the Olympics: The Classical Tradition and the Modern Games
Olympics, Pindar, Ode, dactylo-epitrite metre
Archinus, Eucleides and the reform of the Athenian alphabet
March 2010
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Journal article
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Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies
Metre
March 2010
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Chapter
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The Edinburgh Companion to Greece and Rome
This chapter gives an overview of the elements of Greek and Latin metre, introduces the main technical terms and symbols used, and offers some suggestions for learning and for further study. It is written to be read continuously; technical terms are indicated in bold when they are first introduced or explained, and later paragraphs assume a grasp of the explanations given in previous paragraphs.
SBTMR
Language and Metre
May 2009
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Journal article
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Language and History
Language, metre, Greek, rhythm
Catullus 107: a Callimachean reading
February 2009
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Journal article
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Classical Quarterly
Extract:
<p>‘Excitement struggles with the restraint of form and language and the artifice of verbal repetition… runs riot.’ The repetition is more pronounced and personal here than in another Lesbia epigram, no. 70, where ‘the repetition dicit…dicit makes it certain that Catullus had [Callimachus, Ep. 25 Pf.] in mind’. Poem 70 illustrates how Catullus might allude to and adapt a Hellenistic model in expressing his personal feelings; while the longer elegiac poems in particular (and 66, the translation of Coma Berenices) show the depth of his engagement with Callimachean literary technique. We should not be surprised to find Callimachean elements here too, given the demonstrable correspondences with poem 68 in particular, a composition noted for its use of Alexandrian artifice. But while there are close echoes of the high emotion, the doctus poeta of 68 seems to be largely missing from 107. Here Catullus exults ipsa refers te / nobis (5–6); there his mistress se nostrum contulit in gremium (132).</p>
The Sound of Music: modulations and innovations in drama and dithyramb
November 2007
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Chapter
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Debating the Athenian Cultural Revolution Art, Literature, Philosophy, and Politics 430-380 BC
Musical innovations in drama and dithyramb interacted to create richer instrumental, melodic, and rhythmical techniques which left earlier music sounding at best sweetly nostalgic, and at worst monotonous and repetitive.
History
Conquering love: Sappho 31 and Catullus 51
May 2006
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Journal article
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Classical Quarterly
Drowning by numbers: Pythagoreanism and poetry in Horace Odes 1.28
April 2006
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Journal article
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Greece and Rome
Ad Unguem
September 1999
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Journal article
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American Journal of Philology
How the dithyramb got its shape
December 1997
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Journal article
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Classical Quarterly
Extract: Pindar's Dithyramb opens with a reference to the historical development of the genre it exemplifies, the celebrated circular chorus of classical Greece. The first two lines were long known from various citations, notably in Athenaeus, whose sources included the fourth-century authors Heraclides of Pontus and Aristotle's pupil Clearchus of Soli. The third line appears, only partly legible, on a papyrus fragment published in 1919, which preserves some thirty lines of the dithyramb including most of the first antistrophe (thereby guaranteeing the metre for some reconstruction of the first strophe).
