Thyra-Lilja Altunin

University of Oxford

Schwarz Fellow for Research on Music, Gennadius Library

Research Topic: A Comparative Contour-Level Analysis of the Melodic Patterns of Byzantine Chant and Ancient Greek Music

Thyra-Lilja Altunin completed a Bachelor of Arts in Classics and Music History at the University of Pittsburgh, followed by an MPhil at the University of Oxford entitled Ancient Greek Poetry: From Text to Music. She has recently submitted her DPhil in Classical Languages and Literature at the University of Oxford entitled “The Sound of Ancient Greek Poetry: Exploring the interplay between poetic texts, music, accent, and prosody”. Her doctoral research explores the study and reconstruction of the music and prosody of ancient Greek poetic song, with a particular focus on the early epic and lyric traditions. Due to a diverse academic background gained throughout her academic career, Thyra-Lilja’s primary goal is to conduct research that draws together methods and inspiration from the fields of musicology, classics, linguistics, digital humanities, and statistics.

Thyra-Lilja is co-founder and co-organiser of Ancient Music at Oxford, an organisation dedicated to the interdisciplinary study of all different elements of ancient music, their reception, and performance, based at the University of Oxford. At the ASCSA, Thyra-Lilja’s project will investigate how melodic patterns from ancient Greek music may have been preserved, adapted, and transformed in the Byzantine chant tradition through comparative ethnomusicological analysis of ancient Greek musical fragments and Byzantine hymns. It will also explore whether the close relationship between linguistic prosody and musical melody that characterises ancient Greek music continued to shape Byzantine chant as the Greek language evolved from a pitch-accented to a stress-accented system.