John Franklin is Associate Professor and Chair of the Department of Classics at the University of Vermont. Trained at the New England Conservatory in Composition, he completed an MA in Classics at UW before going on to do his PhD at University College, London. He has written extensively on ancient Greek music and on connections in musical and cultural traditions between the ancient Near East and the Greek world. In 2015 he published Kinyras: The Divine Lyre (CHS Harvard University Press), an 834-page study of the culture-hero and legendary king of early Cyprus in which he investigates ancient Near-Eastern traditions of the divinization of musical instruments, cultural interactions between Hellenic, Eteocypriot, and Levantine groups on Cyprus, royal ideology and ritual poetics, musical archaeology, and much else besides.

Professor Franklin will speak about the composition of music for his recent production of Euripides’ Helen, training of the chorus, treatment of choral odes, and how he used meter and pitch accent, ancient musical fragments, and ancient scales in composing melody. The talk will include video clips of the production and demonstrations using Professor Franklin’s reconstruction of an ancient lyre.