Listening back: training as vocal archaeology

This is the author accepted manuscriptFrom oratory to musical competitions and from symposia to religious ceremony, voice was practised, conceptualised and trained in plural ways in 5th century BCE Athens. Foundational ideas around selfhood and citizenship that emerged in classical antiquity, and still resonate today, centre on voice: the inner voice of conscience, the voice of the people, God's voice, the voice of the Law. Theatre played out, reflected and debated these ideas through a wide range of vocal performances. Although at the intersections of musicology and classics attempts have been made to listen-in to extant music (e.g. Comotti 1991, West 1992, Pöhlmann 2001, D’Angour 2017), in discussions of Greek classical theatre, voice is routinely considered irretrievably lost and most research focuses on the surviving literature or visual depictions instead (Wiles 2001, Butler 2015, Ley 2015). Since 2016, I have been developing the project Listening Back: Towards a Vocal Archaeology of Greek Theatre. The project seeks to uncover the materiality of the voice in 5th century BCE theatre and to design a methodology for conducting vocal archaeology. The project tackles the challenge of upturning such established attitudes and asks: How can we examine the embodied sound of voices past? Which approaches can be pioneered to overturn the widely-circulated assumption that such voices have been irrevocably lost? How can the sound qualities of the performed voice be retraced through PaR methodologies? Can we listen back to such on-stage voices not only through the philological, visual and musical evidence but also through the work of theatre practitioners engaged in reconstructing the classical voice? The proposed paper will analyse practices developed by theatre trainers (Gardzienice, Chorea, Aris Retsos), draw on my recent research in the Ancient theatre of Dodoni (Therino Manteio Workshop 2018 & 2019) and consider the place of voice training as a method for vocal reconstruction and re-enactment