Armand D'Angour | |
---|---|
Born | London | 23 November 1958
Academic background | |
Thesis | The dynamics of innovation: newness and novelty in the Athens of Aristophanes (1998) |
Doctoral advisor | Peter Lunt Richard Janko Alan Griffiths |
Academic work | |
Institutions | Jesus College,Oxford |
Website | www |
Armand D'Angour (born 23 November 1958) is a British classical scholar and classical musician,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,innovation in ancient Greece,Latin and Greek lyric poetry,the biography of Socrates and the status of Aspasia of Miletus. He writes poetry in ancient Greek and Latin,and was commissioned to compose odes in ancient Greek verse for the 2004 and 2012 Olympic Games.
D'Angour has conducted research into the sounds of ancient Greek music (since 2013),aiming to recreate the sound of the earliest substantial notated document of Greek music (from Euripides' drama Orestes),and to establish connections with much later Western musical traditions. [1]
D'Angour's book Socrates in Love (2019) presents new evidence for a radically revisionist historical thesis regarding the role of Aspasia of Miletus in the development of Socrates' thought. How to Innovate:An Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking (2021) distils for the general reader some of the findings relating to innovation explored in his academic monograph The Greeks and the New:Novelty in Ancient Greek Imagination and Experience (Cambridge 2011).
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 (full academic scholarship) to Merton College,Oxford to read classics. [4]
Having learned to play the piano from age 6 and the cello from age 11,from 1976 to 1979 D'Angour undertook a Performer's Course,with piano and cello as 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]
D'Angour went on to read classics at Oxford (1979–83),during which 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 1981-2 he conducted the Kodály Choir and orchestra,with performances including Brahms' 1st Piano Concerto (with Colin Stone,piano),Poulenc's Organ Concerto (with Michael Emery,organ) and Fauré's Requiem (with Rudolf Piernay,baritone). 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 D'Angour 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 the course of his doctoral research,D'Angour published his first scholarly article (in Classical Quarterly 1997) "How the Dithyramb Got Its Shape",in which he restored [13] the opening lines of a fragment of Pindar (fr. 70b from Dithyramb 2,first published in 1919) to show that it refers to the creation of the 'circular dance' (kuklios choros),the form in which the dithyramb was performed in Athens in the early fifth century BC. The article contributed to a renewed interest in the ancient genre of the dithyramb,and has featured in numerous articles and books (including Dithyramb in Context,ed. B. Kowalzig and P. Wilson,Oxford 2013) that explore the subject from different angles. He also published an article (1999) detailing the technical and political background to the adoption of the Ionic alphabet (still the standard Greek script) by a decree of Eucleides in Athens in 403 BC. [14]
In 2000 D'Angour was appointed Fellow 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), [16] a wide-ranging academic study of novelty and innovation in ancient Greece; [17] he has applied the findings of his research to business [18] [19] and to other domains,including music and psychoanalytic theory. [20] His TedED lessons on Archimedes' Eureka Moment and the Origins of the Ancient Olympics have attracted millions of views.
In March 2019 he published Socrates in Love:The Making of a Philosopher,in which he presents new evidence for the identification of Diotima in Plato's Symposium with Aspasia of Miletus.
D'Angour became Professor of Classics in 2020 Oxford Recognition of Distinction. His book How to Innovate:an Ancient Guide to Creative Thinking (Princeton,2021) summarises some of the ideas that were presented in The Greeks and the New,and offers a four-part template for understanding how innovation comes about and how it might be fostered.
In August 2024 D'Angour began hosting the podcast series It's All Greek (and Latin) to Me with comedian and television presenter Jimmy Mulville for Hat Trick Productions. The series "aims to shine a light on the ancient world through expressions,stories and quotes from Classical literature that we use in our everyday lives". [21]
In 2013-15 D'Angour conducted a Research Fellowship awarded by the British Academy to investigate the way music interacted with poetic texts in ancient Greece. [22] [23] In 2013 he published a conjectural verse reconstruction of the lost portion of Sappho's famous fragment 31.
In May 2015 D'Angour 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; [24] in July 2016 he organised and presented a research-driven concert of ancient music in the Nereids Gallery of the British Museum. [25] 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; [26] and in July 2017 the first public performance of his musical reconstructions of the chorus preserved on papyrus from Euripides Orestes (408 BC) [27] and the Delphic Paean of Athenaeus (127 BC) was given at the Ashmolean Museum,Oxford.
D'Angour has argued for the affective symbolism and tonal basis of Greek music of the Classical period,and for its connection to much later European musical traditions. [1] 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. [28] 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 [29] 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. [30]
In 2010 Boris Johnson,then Mayor of London,commissioned D’Angour to write an ode in English and Ancient Greek [31] for the London Olympics 2012,and declaimed it [32] at the IOC Opening Gala. [33] 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. [34]
On behalf of the Society for the Promotion of Hellenic Studies,D'Angour wrote a poem in Latin Sapphics in honour of the Society for the Promotion of Roman Studies for its 2010 centenary. [35] [36] Two compositions in Latin verse (elegiacs and Sapphics) celebrating the land of Luxembourg (Terra Ego Sum and Wou d’Uelzecht) were commissioned in 2020 and set to music by composer Catherine Kontz. They were part of a series of full-scale choral performances put on in France and Luxembourg in June 2022.
With his colleague Melinda Letts at Jesus College Oxford,D'Angour has pioneered since 2019 the revival of the use of teaching ancient languages in the original language (the "Active Method") at Oxford University. [37] In April 2022 he was invited to deliver a talk in Latin entitled Musica linguae,Lingua Musicae ('The music of language,The language of music') at the Delphi Economic Forum Archived 17 August 2022 at the Wayback Machine ,Greece,to demonstrate both the use of Active Latin and the enduring tradition of ancient Greek music. In July 2022 his impromptu translation into Latin Elegiac Verse of Philip Larkin's 'This Be The Verse' was cited in the Times Literary Supplement.
D'Angour's research into the early life of the philosopher Socrates led him to propose an argument for Plato's modelling (rather than identification,as had long been suggested by 18th and 19th century writers) of Diotima in Symposium on Aspasia of Miletus. His book on the subject,Socrates in Love,was reviewed in the Wall Street Journal in May 2019,with reviewer Jamie James writing:
It is a tour de force of scholarship, and D'Angour sifts through his vast reading with judicious care. Open-minded but not credulous, he accomplishes what was long thought to be impossible: a reliable, consistent account of the man who forged the matrix of Western philosophy [...] D’Angour rehabilitates Aspasia's reputation and ingeniously argues that she originated the concept of Platonic love, one of the first principles of Western philosophy. Moreover, he moots the "attractive and compelling possibility that the advent of Aspasia into the young Socrates' life" may present "an appealing and credible image of Socrates in love". [38]
Reviews also appeared in the Times (by Patrick Kidd), [39] Telegraph (by Nikhil Krishnan), [40] Financial Times (by Peter Stothard), and numerous other journals. [41] In a detailed review published in 2021 in Ancient Philosophy, philosopher David Hoinski accepts D'Angour's contention that the contribution of women such as Aspasia to ancient philosophy has received too little attention by modern scholars.
Tim Whitmarsh, reviewing Socrates in Love in The Guardian , commends D'Angour's application of prosopographical methods to the Athenian male elite, but avoids addressing the arguments made for the Socrates–Aspasia relationship. [42] David Sansone in Bryn Mawr Classical Review comments that the book "presents us with an intriguing alternative to the usual view of the real Socrates” rather than the standard ones that neglect the reality of Socrates having once been young. [43]
Whitmarsh early on observes in his review that "This is a learned, agile and slickly written book, but it is not without its problems"; he concludes that the portrayal of Socrates and Aspasia in it is a "donnish just-so story ... best left to the Victorians." Sasone is even more cutting: "it is necessary to ensure that all the evidence be presented accurately and evaluated with care. It cannot be said that D’Angour has succeeded in doing this.
Books
Selected academic articles
Euripides was a tragedian of classical Athens. Along with Aeschylus and Sophocles, he is one of the three ancient Greek tragedians for whom any plays have survived in full. Some ancient scholars attributed ninety-five plays to him, but the Suda says it was ninety-two at most. Of these, eighteen or nineteen have survived more or less complete. There are many fragments of most of his other plays. More of his plays have survived intact than those of Aeschylus and Sophocles together, partly because his popularity grew as theirs declined—he became, in the Hellenistic Age, a cornerstone of ancient literary education, along with Homer, Demosthenes, and Menander.
Sappho was an Archaic Greek poet from Eresos or Mytilene on the island of Lesbos. Sappho is known for her lyric poetry, written to be sung while accompanied by music. In ancient times, Sappho was widely regarded as one of the greatest lyric poets and was given names such as the "Tenth Muse" and "The Poetess". Most of Sappho's poetry is now lost, and what is extant has mostly survived in fragmentary form; only the Ode to Aphrodite is certainly complete. As well as lyric poetry, ancient commentators claimed that Sappho wrote elegiac and iambic poetry. Three epigrams formerly attributed to Sappho are extant, but these are actually Hellenistic imitations of Sappho's style.
Greek literature dates back from the ancient Greek literature, beginning in 800 BC, to the modern Greek literature of today.
The Bacchae is an ancient Greek tragedy, written by the Athenian playwright Euripides during his final years in Macedonia, at the court of Archelaus I of Macedon. It premiered posthumously at the Theatre of Dionysus in 405 BC as part of a tetralogy that also included Iphigeneia at Aulis and Alcmaeon in Corinth, and which Euripides' son or nephew is assumed to have directed. It won first prize in the City Dionysia festival competition.
A Greek chorus in the context of ancient Greek tragedy, comedy, satyr plays, is a homogeneous group of performers, who comment with a collective voice on the action of the scene they appear in, or provide necessary insight into action which has taken place offstage. Historically, the chorus consisted of between 12 and 50 players, who variously danced, sang or spoke their lines in unison, and sometimes wore masks.
Aspasia was a metic woman in Classical Athens. Born in Miletus, she moved to Athens and began a relationship with the statesman Pericles, with whom she had a son named Pericles the Younger. According to the traditional historical narrative, she worked as a courtesan and was tried for asebeia (impiety), though modern scholars have questioned the factual basis for either of these claims, which both derive from ancient comedy. Though Aspasia is one of the best-attested women from the Greco-Roman world, and the most important woman in the history of fifth-century Athens, almost nothing is certain about her life.
The Sapphic stanza, named after Sappho, is an Aeolic verse form of four lines. Originally composed in quantitative verse and unrhymed, since the Middle Ages imitations of the form typically feature rhyme and accentual prosody. It is "the longest lived of the Classical lyric strophes in the West".
The dithyramb was an ancient Greek hymn sung and danced in honor of Dionysus, the god of wine and fertility; the term was also used as an epithet of the god. Plato, in The Laws, while discussing various kinds of music mentions "the birth of Dionysos, called, I think, the dithyramb." Plato also remarks in the Republic that dithyrambs are the clearest example of poetry in which the poet is the only speaker.
Ancient Greek literature is literature written in the Ancient Greek language from the earliest texts until the time of the Byzantine Empire. The earliest surviving works of ancient Greek literature, dating back to the early Archaic period, are the two epic poems the Iliad and the Odyssey, set in an idealized archaic past today identified as having some relation to the Mycenaean era. These two epics, along with the Homeric Hymns and the two poems of Hesiod, the Theogony and Works and Days, constituted the major foundations of the Greek literary tradition that would continue into the Classical, Hellenistic, and Roman periods.
Music was almost universally present in ancient Greek society, from marriages, funerals, and religious ceremonies to theatre, folk music, and the ballad-like reciting of epic poetry. This played an integral role in the lives of ancient Greeks. There are some fragments of actual Greek musical notation, many literary references, depictions on ceramics and relevant archaeological remains, such that some things can be known—or reasonably surmised—about what the music sounded like, the general role of music in society, the economics of music, the importance of a professional caste of musicians, etc.
Martin Litchfield West, was a British philologist and classical scholar. In recognition of his contribution to scholarship, he was awarded the Order of Merit in 2014.
Diotima of Mantinea is the name or pseudonym of an ancient Greek character in Plato's dialogue Symposium, possibly an actual historical figure, indicated as having lived circa 440 B.C. Her ideas and doctrine of Eros as reported by the character of Socrates in the dialogue are the origin of the concept today known as Platonic love.
Edith Hall, is a British scholar of classics, specialising in ancient Greek literature and cultural history, and professor in the Department of Classics and Ancient History at Durham University. She is a Fellow of the British Academy. From 2006 until 2011 she held a chair at Royal Holloway, University of London, where she founded and directed the Centre for the Reception of Greece and Rome until November 2011. She resigned over a dispute regarding funding for classics after leading a public campaign, which was successful, to prevent cuts to or the closure of the Royal Holloway Classics department. Until 2022, she was a professor at the Department of Classics at King's College London. She also co-founded and is Consultant Director of the Archive of Performances of Greek and Roman Drama at Oxford University, Chair of the Gilbert Murray Trust, and Judge on the Stephen Spender Prize for poetry translation. Her prizewinning doctoral thesis was awarded at Oxford. In 2012 she was awarded a Humboldt Research Prize to study ancient Greek theatre in the Black Sea, and in 2014 she was elected to the Academy of Europe. She lives in Cambridgeshire.
Sir Denys Lionel Page was a British classicist and textual critic who served as the 34th Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Cambridge and the 35th Master of Jesus College, Cambridge. He is best known for his critical editions of the Ancient Greek lyric poets and tragedians.
The Gaisford Prize is a prize awarded by the Faculty of Classics, University of Oxford for a composition in Classical Greek Verse and Prose by an undergraduate student. The prize was founded in 1855 in memory of Dr Thomas Gaisford (1779–1855). The prizes now also include the Gaisford Essay Prize and the Gaisford Dissertation Prize.
Aeolic verse is a classification of Ancient Greek lyric poetry referring to the distinct verse forms characteristic of the two great poets of Archaic Lesbos, Sappho and Alcaeus, who composed in their native Aeolic dialect. These verse forms were taken up and developed by later Greek and Roman poets and some modern European poets.
James Henry Weldon Morwood was an English classicist and author. He taught at Harrow School, where he was Head of Classics, and at Oxford University, where he was a Fellow of Wadham College, and also Dean. He wrote almost thirty books, ranging from biography to translations and academic studies of Classical literature.
Sappho 31 is an archaic Greek lyric poem by the ancient Greek poet Sappho of the island of Lesbos. The poem is also known as phainetai moi after the opening words of its first line. It is one of Sappho's most famous poems, describing her love for a young woman.
Gregory Owen Hutchinson, known as G. O. Hutchinson, is a British classicist and academic, specialising in Latin literature, Ancient Greek literature, and Latin and Ancient Greek languages. Since October 2015, he has been the Regius Professor of Greek at the University of Oxford, and a Student of Christ Church, Oxford.
"Du, o schönes Weltgebäude" is a Lutheran hymn in German, with text by Johann Franck and melody by Johann Crüger. It was first published in Crüger's 1649 Geistliche Kirchen-Melodien, and was later adopted in other hymnals, such as the 1653 edition of his Praxis pietatis melica. The topic is renouncing the world, hoping to be united with Jesus. While the hymn is no longer in practical use, one stanza, "Komm, o Tod, du Schlafes Bruder", was prominently used in Bach's solo cantata Ich will den Kreuzstab gerne tragen, BWV 56; in English, it is commonly referred to as the "Kreuzstab cantata".
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