Armand D'Angour

D'Angour was born in London[2] and educated at Sussex House School and as a King's Scholar at Eton College. While at Eton he won the Newcastle Scholarship[3] 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.[4] From 1976 to 1979 he undertook a Performer's Course (piano/cello joint first instruments) at the Royal College of Music, London, where he studied piano with Angus Morrison and cello with Anna Shuttleworth and Joan Dickson.[5] 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 for a Prize Fellowship by Examination at All Souls College, but was unsuccessful.[6] He then studied cello in the Netherlands with cellist Anner Bylsma,[7] and now regularly performs as cellist with the London Brahms Trio.[8] From 1987 to 1994 he worked in and eventually managed a family business.[9] In 1994-8 he researched for a PhD at University College London on the dynamics of innovation in ancient Athens,[10] a topic inspired by both his classical background and his experience of innovation in business. During this period he co-authored a book with Steven Shaw[11] on swimming in relation to the principles of the Alexander Technique.[12]

In 2000 D'Angour was appointed to a Fellowship in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford.[13] He extended the chronological scope of this doctoral research to produce The Greeks and the New [14](published by Cambridge University Press in 2011), a wide-ranging academic study of novelty and innovation in ancient Greece;[15] he has applied the findings of his research to business[16][17] and to other domains, including music and psychoanalytic theory.[18] In March 2019 his book Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher, in which new evidence is proposed for the identification of Diotima in Plato's Symposium with Aspasia of Miletus, was published by Bloomsbury.

In 2013-15 D'Angour conducted a Research Fellowship awarded by the British Academy[19] to investigate the way music interacted with poetic texts in ancient Greece, which resulted in a widely acclaimed scholarly breakthrough in the subject.[20] 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;[21] in July 2016 he organised and presented the first ever research-driven concert of ancient music in the Nereids Gallery of the British Museum.[22] 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;[23] and in July 2017 the first public performance of his musical reconstructions of the chorus preserved on papyrus from Euripides Orestes (408 BC)[24] 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.[25] His numerous public talks, media interviews, and online presentations on the topic led to the award in 2017 by the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford University Louise Richardson of a prize for public engagement with research.[26] He subsequently composed music in ancient Greek style to accompany a series of performances of Euripides' play Alcestis (438 BC) staged in the Greek theatre at Bradfield College in June 2019, and his research has inspired other stage performances including that of Euripides' Herakles at Barnard College, Columbia in 2019.

At the request of Dame Mary Glen-Haig, senior member of the International Olympic Committee, D'Angour composed an Ode to Athens[27] 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.[28] In 2010 Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, commissioned him to write an ode in English and Ancient Greek[29] for the London Olympics 2012, and declaimed it[30] at the IOC Opening Gala.[31] Johnson arranged for the 2012 ode to be engraved on a bronze plaque in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park, and gave a performance of it at the site during a ceremony (2 August 2012) attended by the Lord Mayor of London (Sir David Wootton) to mark the unveiling of the plaque.[32]

Books

• The Greeks and the New: Novelty in Greek imagination and experience (Cambridge, 2011).
• Music, Text, and Culture in Ancient Greece, co-edited with Tom Phillips (Oxford, 2018).
• Socrates in Love: The Making of a Philosopher (Bloomsbury, 2019).

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)

• Jesus College Oxford
• Personal website