Annie Bélis

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Annie Bélis, born in 1951, is a French archaeologist, philologist, papyrologist and musician. She works as a research director at the French CNRS and specialises in the music of classical antiquity, ancient Greece and ancient Rome. She studied at the École normale supérieure in Sèvres from 1972 to 1975, passed the agrégation in classics in 1976 and took her doctorate at the Sorbonne. She then worked at the French School at Athens from 1982 to 1986. In 1986 she published her book on Aristoxenus of Tarentum and Aristotle.

Music and breakthrough

Bélis herself plays piano, organ, flute and cello and learned them with various teachers. Her research covers music theory, such as her study of Aristoxenus's Harmonica, the reconstruction of instruments such as the Greek and Roman kithara and lyre, and the deciphering of music papyri. On a Berlin papyrus she showed that it is a paean to Apollo by Mesomedes of Crete. In 2004 she published her work on a papyrus in the Louvre, in which she recognised a version of Karkinos's Medea. In that piece Medea claims that she did not murder her children, unlike in Euripides and Seneca.

Influence

She directs the Ensemble Kérylos, which performs the reconstructed music of antiquity. In this way she brought sounds more than two thousand years old back to life.

Listening