Armand D'Angour 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, 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. His research into the sounds of ancient Greek music is considered ground-breaking in establishing connections between the earliest notated Greek music and the Western musical tradition. His book Socrates in Love presents new evidence for a radically revisionist historical thesis regarding the role of Aspasia of Miletus in the development of Socrates' thought.
Biography
D'Angour was born in London and educated at Sussex House School and as a King's Scholar at Eton College. While at Eton he won the Newcastle Scholarship in 1976, the last year in which the original twelve exams in Classics and Divinity were set, and was awarded a Postmastership to Merton College, Oxford to read Classics. From 1976 to 1979 he undertook a Performer's Course at the Royal College of Music, London, where he studied piano with Angus Morrison and cello with Anna Shuttleworth and Joan Dickson. At Oxford 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. In 1983, he sat for a Prize Fellowship by Examination at All Souls College, but was unsuccessful. He then studied cello in the Netherlands with cellist Anner Bylsma, and now regularly performs as cellist with the London Brahms Trio. From 1987 to 1994 he worked in and eventually managed a family business. In 1994-8 he researched for a PhD at University College London on the dynamics of innovation in ancient Athens, 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 on swimming in relation to the principles of the Alexander Technique.
Academia
In 2000 D'Angour was appointed to a Fellowship in Classics at Jesus College, Oxford. He extended the chronological scope of this doctoral research to produce The Greeks and the New, a wide-ranging academic study of novelty and innovation in ancient Greece; he has applied the findings of his research to business and to other domains, including music and psychoanalytic theory. 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 to investigate the way music interacted with poetic texts in ancient Greece, which resulted in a widely acclaimed scholarly breakthrough in the subject. In 2013 he published a conjectural of the lost portion of Sappho's famous fragment 31. In May 2015 he appeared in a BBC Four documentary entitled , 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 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 and the Delphic Paean of Athenaeus was given at the Ashmolean Museum, Oxford. D'Angour's 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. His numerous public talks, media interviews, and online presentations on the topic led to the award in 2017 by the Vice-Chancellor of Oxford UniversityLouise Richardson of a prize for public engagement with research. He subsequently composed music in ancient Greek style to accompany a series of performances of Euripides' play Alcestis'' staged in the Greek theatre at Bradfield College in June 2019, and his research has inspired other stage performances including that of at Barnard College, Columbia in 2019.
Olympic Odes
At the request of Dame Mary Glen-Haig, senior member of the International Olympic Committee, D'Angour composed an Ode to Athens in 2004, in the appropriate Pindaric style, Doric dialect and metre 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. In 2010 Boris Johnson, then Mayor of London, commissioned him to write an ode in English and Ancient Greek for the London Olympics 2012, and declaimed it at the IOC Opening Gala. 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 attended by the Lord Mayor of London to mark the unveiling of the plaque.
Publications
Books
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Selected articles
'How the Dithyramb Got its Shape', Classical Quarterly 47 331–351.
'Ad unguem', American Journal of Philology vol.120, no. 3 411–427.
'Archinus, Eucleides, and the reform of the Athenian alphabet', Bulletin of the Institute of Classical Studies 43, 109–130.
'Catullus 107: a Callimachean reading', Classical Quarterly 50 615–618.
'Drowning by Numbers: Pythagoreanism & Poetry in Horace Odes 1.28’, Greece and Rome 50 206–219.
