The Fredösphere

Greek poets and dramatists regularly set their work to music themselves, and from at least the fifth century B.C. on they used a highly sophisticated system of musical notation. The very idea of poetry, in fact, originally tended to imply music, and Athenian tragedy at its artistic peak, in the fifth century B.C., was a complex combination of poetic text, solo and choral song, recitation with instrumental accompaniment, and dance. This has an unsettling if little-recognized implication: watching a play by Euripides or reading poetry by Sappho is perhaps as incomplete an experience today as watching a "play" by Wagner or reading "poetry" by Stephen Sondheim would be.

Yatromanolakis aims to bridge the gap. He has degrees in the classics from the University of Athens (B.A.) and Oxford University, in England (M.A., Ph.D.). He recently completed a postdoctoral fellowship at Harvard and has just finished a three-year appointment to Harvard's distinguished Society of Fellows—a sort of incubator for exceptional young academics from all disciplines. He also happens to be a lifelong student of the history and the historical performance of music; a fan of classical Chinese music and world music; a composer in his own right; and a practicing countertenor who also plays the piano, the classical guitar, the sitar, and an ancient Greek plucked instrument called the cithara.