Armand D'Angour

Armand D'Angour
Born (1958-11-23) 23 November 1958
London
Thesis The dynamics of innovation : newness and novelty in the Athens of Aristophanes (1998)
Doctoral advisor Peter Lunt
Richard Janko
Alan Griffiths
Website
www.armand-dangour.com

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 he was awarded a Research Fellowship by the British Academy[1] to investigate the way music interacted with poetic texts in ancient Greece.[2][3]

Biography

D'Angour was born in London[4] and educated at Sussex House School and as a King's Scholar at Eton College. While at Eton he won the Newcastle Scholarship[5] 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.[6] 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.[7] 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). He then studied cello in the Netherlands with cellist Anner Bylsma,[8] and now performs as cellist with the London Brahms Trio.[9]

From 1987 to 1994 he worked in and managed a family business (Tin Box International).[10] In 1994-8 he researched for a PhD at University College London on the dynamics of innovation in ancient Athens,[11] 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.[12]

Academia

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 (published by Cambridge University Press in 2011), a wide-ranging academic study of novelty and innovation in ancient Greece,[14] and he has applied the findings of his research to business[15][16] and to other domains.[17] 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.

Olympic Odes

At the request of Dame Mary Glen-Haig, senior member of the International Olympic Committee, D'Angour composed an Ode to Athens[18] 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.[19] In 2010 Boris Johnson, Mayor of London, commissioned him to write an ode in English and Ancient Greek[20] for the London Olympics 2012, and declaimed it[21] at the IOC Opening Gala.[22] The 2012 ode is engraved on a bronze plaque in the Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park.[23]

Publications

Book

Selected articles

Notes

  1. ↑ British Academy Awards Listing 2013.
  2. ↑ BBC Online 23 October 2013.
  3. ↑ Daily Mail Online 30 October 2013.
  4. ↑ "Index entry". FreeBMD. ONS. Retrieved on 21 August 2012.
  5. ↑ "Eton College." Times [London, England] 24 March 1976: 18. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 20 August 2013.
  6. ↑ "University news." Times [London, England] 31 May 1980: 14. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 20 August 2013.
  7. ↑ . Retrieved on 13 August 2012.
  8. ↑ M. Campbell The Great Cellists (London, 2011) p. 208.
  9. ↑ http://www.armand-dangour.com/music/.
  10. ↑ PDF of PhD diss. from UCL Library, p5. Retrieved on 22 August 2013.
  11. ↑ Abstract of PhD diss. from UCL Library. Retrieved on 21 August 2013.
  12. ↑ The Art of Swimming: in a new direction with the Alexander Technique (London, 1996).
  13. ↑ Announcement of appointment to Jesus College in Oxford Gazette, 1999. Retrieved on 13 August 2012.
  14. ↑ Review of The Greeks and the New, John Hesk, Times Literary Supplement London, 6 July 2012.
  15. ↑ 'What's new? Some answers from ancient Greece'. OECD Observer No 221-222 (Summer 2000).
  16. ↑ Isis Innovation 40 (2003) 4–5.
  17. ↑ Interview in Greek Reporter, 10 June 2012. Retrieved on 13 August 2012.
  18. ↑ Text and translation of Armand D'Angour. "Ode to Athens." Times [London, England] 31 July 2004: 9. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 20 August 2013
  19. ↑ Philip Howard and Alan Hamilton. "Olympics ring to sound of winning British ode." Times [London, England] 31 July 2004: 9. The Times Digital Archive. Web. 1 September 2013.
  20. ↑ Olympic Ode lends touch of classics. Text of the ode, University of Oxford Website. Retrieved on 13 August 2012.
  21. ↑ BBC News Story about Boris Johnson declaiming Olympic Ode, 23 July 2012. Retrieved on 13 August 2012.
  22. ↑ Boris Johnson to recite new poem for the Olympics in Ancient Greek, The Guardian, 23 July 2012. Retrieved on 13 August 2012.
  23. ↑ Oxonian's Olympic Ode a success, Cherwell Magazine, 30 July 2012. Retrieved on 19 August 2012.

External links

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