Events Calendar – British School at Athens

Panel Discussion – Committee for Society, Arts & Letters

Translation and the sound of ancient Greek music

The second of two panel discussions exploring how the sounds of Greek poetry influence their modern translation into both words and music.

Chair: Dr Emily Pillinger

Speakers: Dr Tosca Lynch, Dr Samuel Dorf, Dr Toby Young

This panel will concentrate on the translation of ancient Greek music into modern music. It will explore the few traces we have of the ancient music that would have accompanied ancient Greek poetry, and reflect on how this has inspired modern composers and thinkers. It will also consider how modern music has responded to purely imagined Greek sonic worlds.

Tosca Lynch is a musician and classicist with unique expertise in ancient Greek music, who recently co-edited with Eleonora Rocconi the essential handbook to ancient music: the Wiley-Blackwell Companion to Greek and Roman Music (2020). She regularly updates an invaluable website: https://www.emousike.com/. Samuel Dorf is a musicologist whose recent monograph, Performing Antiquity (2018), analyses the music and dance used in performing hypothetical reconstructions of Greek lyric poetry in the 1930s, and is now working on what he calls ‘Extreme Early Music’ – that is, on the contemporary practice of reconstructing the sounds of ancient music and the meaning of claims to ‘authenticity’ in this context. Toby Young is a highly experienced and versatile music composer who is particularly interested in the voice and the questions / limitations associated with rigid delineations of musical genre. He has experience reconstructing sound worlds of the past in his role as the music supervisor for ‘Punchdrunk’, a British immersive theatre company.

Online only, 7pm (Greece) / 5pm (UK). 

Register to attend online via Zoom webinar.