Armand D'Angour

Armand D'Angour (born 23 November 1958) is a British classical scholar and classical musician, Associate Professor of Classics at Oxford University and Fellow and Tutor in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford. His research embraces a wide range of areas across ancient Greek culture, and has resulted in publications that contribute to scholarship on ancient Greek music and metre, the Greek alphabet, innovation in ancient Greece, and Latin and Greek lyric poetry. He has written poetry in ancient Greek and Latin, and was commissioned to compose odes in ancient Greek for the 2004 and 2012 Olympic Games (the latter commissioned by Mayor of London Boris Johnson). In 2013-15 he conducted a Research Fellowship awarded by the British Academy^[1] to investigate the way music interacted with poetic texts in ancient Greece.^[2][3] He has since given over fifty public talks and presentations on the subject, leading to the award in 2017 by the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University of a prize for public engagement with research.^[4]

Biography

D'Angour was born in London^[5] and educated at Sussex House School and as a King's Scholar at Eton College. While at Eton he won the Newcastle Scholarship^[6] in 1976, the last year in which the original twelve exams in Classics and Divinity were set, and was awarded a Postmastership (academic scholarship) to Merton College, Oxford to read Classics.^[7] From 1976 to 1979 he studied piano with Angus Morrison and cello with Anna Shuttleworth and Joan Dickson at the Royal College of Music, London.^[8] At Oxford (1979–83) he won the Gaisford Greek Prose Prize, the Chancellor's Latin Verse Prize, the Hertford Scholarship and the Ireland and Craven Scholarship, and graduated with a Double First (BA Hons, Literae Humaniores). In 1983, he sat and was shortlisted for a Prize Fellowship at All Souls College, but was ultimately unsuccessful.^[9] He then studied cello in the Netherlands with cellist Anner Bylsma,^[10] and now performs as cellist with the London Brahms Trio.^[11]

From 1987 to 1994 he worked in and managed a family business (Tin Box International).^[12] In 1994-8 he researched for a PhD at University College London on the dynamics of innovation in ancient Athens,^[13] a topic inspired by both his classical background and his experience of innovation in business. During this period he co-authored with Steven Shaw a book on swimming in relation to the principles of the Alexander Technique.^[14]

Academia

In 2000 D'Angour was appointed to a Fellowship in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford.^[15] He extended the chronological scope of this doctoral research to produce The Greeks and the New (published by Cambridge University Press in 2011), a wide-ranging academic study of novelty and innovation in ancient Greece,^[16] and he has applied the findings of his research to business^[17][18] and to other domains.^[19] In 2013 he published a conjectural verse reconstruction of the lost portion of Sappho's famous fragment 31. In May 2015 he appeared in a BBC Four documentary entitled 'Sappho', for which he used scholarly evidence to recompose the music for two stanzas of an ancient Sapphic song; in July 2016 he organised and presented the first ever research-driven concert of ancient Greek music in the Nereids Gallery of the British Museum. In January 2017 he was interviewed about his research into ancient Greek music by Labis Tsirigotakis as part of the programme 'To the Sound of Big Ben' on Greek TV's ERT1 Channel, and in July 2017 the first public performance of his musical reconstructions of the chorus preserved on papyrus from Euripides Orestes (408 BC) and the Delphic Paean of Athenaeus (127 BC) was given at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. His investigations have been claimed as a breakthrough, principally in demonstrating the affective symbolism and tonal basis of Greek music of the Classical period, and thereby affirming its connection to later European musical traditions.^[20]

Olympic Odes

At the request of Dame Mary Glen-Haig, senior member of the International Olympic Committee, D'Angour composed an Ode to Athens^[21] in 2004, in the appropriate Pindaric style, Doric dialect and metre (dactylo-epitrite) of ancient Greek, together with an English verse translation. The ode was recited at the 116th Closing Session of the IOC in 2004 and gained wide media coverage, including a full page spread in the Times headed up by veteran journalist and classicist Philip Howard.^[22] In 2010 Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, commissioned him to write an ode in English and Ancient Greek^[23] for the London Olympics 2012, and declaimed it^[24] at the IOC Opening Gala.^[25] The 2012 ode is engraved on a bronze plaque in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.^[26]

Publications

Books

• The Greeks and the New: Novelty in Greek imagination and experience (Cambridge, 2011). Reviewed, Bryn Mawr Classical Review, Jan. 2013, etc.
• Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece, co-edited with Tom Phillips (Oxford, 2018).
• Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher' (Bloomsbury, forthcoming).

Selected articles

• 'How the Dithyramb Got its Shape', Classical Quarterly 47 (1997) 331–351.
• 'Ad unguem', American Journal of Philology vol.120, no. 3 (1999) 411–427.
• 'Archinus, Eucleides, and the reform of the Athenian alphabet', Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 43 (1999), 109–130.
• 'Catullus 107: a Callimachean reading', Classical Quarterly 50 (2000) 615–618.
• 'Drowning by Numbers: Pythagoreanism & Poetry in Horace Odes 1.28’, Greece and Rome 50 (2003) 206–219.
• ‘Conquering Love: Sappho 31 and Catullus 51’, Classical Quarterly 56 (2006) 297–300.
• ‘Plato and Play: Taking education seriously in ancient Greece’, American Journal of Play Vol. 5 no. 3 (Spring 2013) 293–307.
• ‘Sense and Sensation in music’, in A Companion to Ancient Aesthetics, ed. Paul Destrée and Penelope Murray (Wiley-Blackwell: New Jersey, 2014), 188-203.
• 'Vocables and microtones in ancient Greek music’, in Greek and Roman Musical Studies 4.2 (2016) 273-285.
• ‘Euripides and the sound of music’, in A Companion to Euripides, ed. L. McClure (John Wiley 2017), 428-443.
• ‘The musical setting of ancient Greek texts’, in Music, Texts, and Culture in ancient Greece, co-edited with T. Phillips (OUP, 2018)

References

External links

• Jesus College Oxford
• Personal website