Lotos Lab uses academic and practical research to inform performance in creative and enjoyable ways. While you make your lyre, you will gain an embodied understanding of seven Ancient Greek and two East African pieces, through movement, chanting, and rhythmic staffwork. These ancestral strategies make great music and complex rhythms easy to handle. 

The Greek pieces were composed under the curatorship of Lotos Lab, integrating the performing, teaching, and research of Barnaby Brown (lead tutor), Stef Conner, Rosa Fragorapti, Ilías Patrinós (online guest tutor), and others. They are designed to be adapted for solo, classroom, and community use and continue to evolve, a collaborative commons serving scholars, teachers, and performers:

Homer: Odysseus strings his great bow [? Ionia, c. 700 BCE]

7 lines of epic describing how a bard attaches a string to a lyre.

Sappho’s Prayer to Aphrodite [Lesbos, c. 600 BCE]

A strophic choral dance weaving 7/8, 6/8, and 2/4 rhythms. 

Homeric Hymn to Hermes [Athenian milieu, c. 500 BCE]

14 lines of epic describing in detail how Hermes made a 7-string lyre.

Pindar’s 12th Pythian Ode [Delphi, 490 BCE]

A strophic choral dance weaving 3/2, 7/8, and 5/8 rhythms, telling how Perseus slayed Medusa and Athena composed a polyphonic aulos piece.

Mesomedes’ Invocations to Calliope and Apollo [Rome, 2nd century CE]

Prooimia in iambics and hexameters, interpreted in 3/4 and 4/4.

Vocable Workout [with Classical Greek, Etruscan and Roman elements] 

This combines vocables found on pottery fragments from Eleusis (5th century BCE) and Tarquinia (early 6th c. BCE) with the ‘te to ti ta’ of instrumental music teaching found in Imperial Roman sources.

Song of Seikilos  [Aydın, Turkey, 2nd century CE]

A stanza in 6/8 notated on a marble stele, composed by a man of Sicilian ancestry living in the Lydian city of Tralles.

Performance of Pindar’s 12th Pythian Ode at the Euterpe School of ArchaeoMusic 2024, Tarquinia. Left to right: Barnaby Brown, Elisa Anzelotti, Davide Poggiolini, Rosa Fragorapti Photo: Guido Sileoni

We know that the works of Sappho, Pindar, and the great Athenian playwrights were performed by dancing choruses; that they (like Homeric epics and hymns) were composed and transmitted by singers who self-accompanied on the lyre. To provide an alternative perspective and the possibility of shifting the biases that those of us trained in Western schools may have, East African techniques of playing, composing, teaching, and moving will be presented by obokano master Dominic Ogari (Kenyatta University, Nairobi).

The obokano has 8 strings. The leading string is called the ‘cock’ (string 4, counting from the farthest string), and its principal partner is called the ‘hen’ (string 3). Ancient Greek lyre players called these strings mesē (‘middle’) and tritē (‘third’). Dominic’s online seminar will be supported in person by his student, Nick Vest, whose obokano is available for participants to try.

Samwel and Dominic Ogari playing the obokano of the Abagusii people, western Kenya.

Deeper engagement with living lineages of lyre-led song and dance spurs us on as researchers to generate and evaluate new interpretations. Whatever our personal goal, integrating multiple views and being open to new experiences is great for brain health.

During the 5-day workshop you will assemble a 7-string lyre and learn how to tune and adapt it to whatever musical or literary culture you are interested in..

Between lyre-making sessions, Barnaby Brown will support the development of new skills through chanting, staff-work, and movement. We will dance and sing daily, learning repertoire using the whole body. By practicing polyrhythms and complex meters using staffs, movements, and mnemotechnical chants, we will discover some of the advantages and pitfalls of using limited knowledge to generate hypotheses concerning ancient evidence.

Online guest tutors will join us from Athens and Nairobi, sharing their expertise on lyre traditions that are respectively long extinct and richly alive. Ilías Patrinós will introduce our Ancient Greek repertoire and the choices surrounding pronunciation, rhythm, how to melodize, and how to accompany. Dominic Ogari will stretch our compositional imaginations by sharing the practical knowledge he received from his father and other tradition bearers in western Kenya.

Our aim is to meet your individual learning needs and interests. Barnaby and assistant tutors Nick and Ayame Vest will be on hand to answer your questions both during sessions and at shared meal times. We will also co-produce videos and notations of exercises for home study, tailor-made for you.

You will connect with great civilisations across time and place and can go home with everything you need to practice lyre techniques that integrate archaeological evidence (Greek, Roman, Celtic, Early Medieval) with lineages of expertise (European, African, Asian) – plus a community to support your ongoing explorations.

Participants of the Euterpe School of ArchaeoMusic 2019 assembling lyre kits in Tarquinia, Italy. Photos: Placido Scardina

Marco Sciascia, maker of our lyre kits, shows Timothy Moore (Classics Department Chair, Washington University in St. Louis), how to attach a string to a kollops (lever-peg), as described in Homer’s Odyssey (line 407). Photo: Placido Scardina

The Lotos Lab Lyre Kit is a trans-historical, culturally-inclusive instrument with a great sound. It can be made to buzz, as is common in Asia and Africa (and Europe before the mid 1600s), or to sound more like a ukulele. It combines low cost with acoustic efficiency, reliable tuning, portability and durability. It has been designed for ease of customization (fitting any hand size or number of strings, with or without buzz), and respect for ancient evidence. This video shows how to assemble the 2019 model: youtu.be/IUIodSBMXvQ. Warm thanks to Placido Scardina for making this video and Marco Sciascia for constantly improving the design:  the kits we will assemble in Buffalo have evolved significantly since 2019.

1st ΜΟΥΣΕΙΟΝ Research Retreat: making ancient Greek and Egyptian doublepipes with Barnaby Brown and Marco Sciascia (Matera, Italy). Photo: Pauline Panetta

Lotos Lab fosters a culture of testing, evaluation, and research. We value public participation and diversity. We aim to spread knowledge beyond the world of Classicists and Music Archaeologists to reach a wider audience. Amateur musicians, music students from all traditions, and singers who want to perform ancient texts accompanied by lyre or aulos are all welcome, as well as composers interested in writing for ancient instruments or understanding ancient tonal systems and metrical craft. Our mission is to unravel confusions arising from theory detached from practice, and to separate historical layers and regional differences that have been compressed over time.

Our aim is to make Lotos Lab Gatherings sustainable, annual co-creations wherever there is local interest, serving learners in this emerging sphere of activity in ways that are flexible, responsive, and inclusive. 

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BUFFALO GATHERING 2024 WORKSHOP TIMES

Tue – Fri 9am – 5pm  Lyre making & musical learning

Sat 9am – 12 noon Lyre tuning & case-making  

VENUE

Benten Music Center

292 Summer Street
Buffalo, NY 14222

Accommodation

58 Park Street
Buffalo, NY 14201

To help build connection in the group, we have booked a house that can accommodate 8 participants in 4 self-catering apartments. The cost for 5 nights (in Oct 7th, out Oct 12th) is:

$720 Private room with double bed:  4 available, 2 in independent apartments.

$480 Sharing with 1 other participant:  1 queen bed and 1 queen pull-out couch.

$360 Sharing with 2 other participants:  1 bunk bed and 1 pull out couch.

Photos:  airbnb.co.uk/rooms/53148218.

If you prefer to stay elsewhere, there are many options. TripAdvisor recommends these hotels: tripadvisor.co.uk/Hotels-g60974-Buffalo_Erie_County_New_York-Hotels.html  

MEALS

Refreshments and buffet lunch (included in the fee), served in the Benten Music Center, with seating inside and outdoors under the covered porch. All dietary preferences and allergies accommodated – please let us know on your registration form.

Evening meals (not included in the fee) will be in local restaurants:

• Mythos (Greek restaurant) mythosbuffalo.com 12-minute walk
• Bellini’s Bistro bellinis-bistro.com 10-minute walk
• Bflo Pizza Bistro bflopizzabistro.square.site 11-minute walk
• Street Asian Food streetasianfood.com 12-minute walk
• Gabriel’s Gate gabriels-gate.weeblyte.com 13-minute walk

It is a 14-minute walk between the self-catering apartments and the Benten Music Center, with a Price Rite grocery store (open 8am–9pm) en-route: maps.app.goo.gl/Tsgbi6exX31FmJy37.

Ayame Vest, host and assistant tutor, in the music room where our workshop sessions will be held. Photo: Neil Urban

FEE

$440 Standard rate  includes a donation which supports access for all and helps to sustain the development of future Gatherings and lifetime resources for participants.

$330 Basic rate  covers the basic costs of running the Gathering.

$220 Supported rate  for those whose circumstances make it difficult to pay the Standard or Basic rates. 

The Gathering fee includes refreshments and buffet lunch, served in the Benten Music Center. The fee also includes materials for making a lyre that is yours to keep, with a polycarbonate hard case and maintenance kit designed by musicians who travel. 

Barnaby Brown, lead tutor is a singing piper, composer, and archaeo-musicologist. He plays reconstructions of reed pipes based on Stone Age, Mesopotamian, Egyptian, Greek, Roman, and Celtic originals. Works written for him include Noli Pater by Sir James MacMillan (2015) and Il sogno di Marsia by Dario Marianelli (2022), the first work for aulos and modern orchestra. His pioneering approach to pibroch performance led to three Edinburgh International Festival appearances and his passion for giving ancient instruments a contemporary voice led to four projects with Delphian Records – In Praise of Saint Columba: the sound world of the Celtic Church (2014), Spellweaving: ancient music from the Highlands of Scotland (2016), Set upon the Rood: new music for choir & ancient instruments (2017), and Apollo & Dionysus: sounds from Classical Antiquity (2018). 

Barnaby’s collaborations are intercultural (Hebridean, Sardinian, Hindustani, Balinese) and interdisciplinary (with archaeologists, instrument makers, composers, linguists, singers, and dancers). He develops activities that engage schoolchildren and museum visitors, making the oldest musical evidence meaningful. His doctoral research at the University of Cambridge examines the technical language of Scottish Gaelic pipers found in sources 1751–1838. He is an Honorary Research Fellow at the Royal Conservatoire of Scotland.

Dominic Ogari, guest tutor (online) was born in 1974 into the Gusii tribe in the Nyamira district of Nyanza Province, western Kenya. After primary school he began playing the obokano as well as the local drums and shakers. He joined the cultural center, Bomas of Kenya in 1994 as a music instructor and performed with them in Cairo, Egypt and in Kampala, Uganda. In 1999, he joined the faculty of Kenyatta University to teach instruments including the obokano, ngutha, kayamba, as well as dances of various communities.

Dominic makes many instruments, including the obokano, nyatiti, adeudeu, litungu, and orutu of Kenya, and the adungu and endongo of Uganda.  His performing engagements abroad have included Istanbul, Turkey; Dodoma, Tanzania; and Helsinki, Finland where he collaborated with the Helsinki Polytechnic Band and the University of Uuru band. As well as being a great traditional player, Dominic has pushed the boundaries of obokano music through composition and creating new instruments with greater numbers of strings. He toured the US west coast with his cousin Samwel, under the name Kamatana, and their album Remember (2010) was reviewed in the UK-based world music magazine Songlines as ‘highly infectious and thoroughly entertaining… a fascinating revelation’.

Ilías Patrinós, guest tutor (online) is a musician from Athens, Greece. He studied Archaeology and History of Art at the National and Kapodistrian University of Athens, specializing in Neolithic Environmental archaeology and Geoarchaeology under Lilian Karali. Wishing to combine his love for music and archaeology, he attended the two-year ‘Hermēs: Music Archaeology Project’ at the University of Athens, tutored by Chrēstos Terzēs with the assistance of Stefan Hagel and Barnaby Brown. In 2018 he received a diploma in ‘Experimental Archaeomusicology: reconstruction and use of ancient Hellenic musical instruments’, as well as a Certificate in the ancient Greek lyre. He was also taught how to sing ancient poetry following the meter, prosody, and pronunciation. Continuing his own research and experimentation, he founded an ancient Greek music revival group called ‘Thiaseia’ in 2022, and has since set to melody a number of ancient poems. In July 2024 he attended the Euterpe School of ArcheoMusic in Italy, where he was tutored by Rosa Fragorapti on the ancient Greek lyre and by John Franklin on ancient Greek notation. There he presented his own reconstructions of the melodies of a song by Anacreon and the first 21 verses of the Iliad.

Nick Vest, host and assistant tutor is a multi instrumentalist, performer, composer and guitar instructor. He was trained in throat singing by the Tuvan band Chirgilchin, and has taught throat singing at Lark Camp in Mendocino, CA and on behalf of the UC Davis experimental college. His guitar instructors include John Doan (harp guitar), Matthew Grasso (classical and microtonal), and Alex De Grassi (contemporary fingerstyle). In Los Angeles, he taught for the afterschool program Everybody Deserves Music and performed different world music styles every month, from Africa to Asia, in Melrose Gardens. Nick is currently exploring ancient mediterranean music using Lotos Lab and Luthieros instruments. As a student of Michael Levy, he has reimagined the sounds of the Greco-Roman world, releasing his first album of lyre compositions, Caesar’s Dream, in 2024. As a student of Barnaby Brown, he is learning ancient Greek and Egyptian doublepipes and deepening his engagement with ancient evidence.

Ayame Vest, host and assistant tutor was trained in the Kodaly Method of music instruction and has a BA in Music from UC Davis. Before moving to Buffalo, she taught violin and piano at Westside Music Conservatory in Santa Monica, California; at the Conservatory of Performing Arts in West Los Angeles; and at a variety of afterschool programs. She also studied classical shamisen (Jiuta) under Sumiyo ‘Naoko’ Geurena and modern shamisen (Tsugaru) under Mike Penny. As a signature artist for Uchida Handbells, Ayame has organized and trained multiple handbell choirs for adults and children in partnership with Sky Edutainment and Uchida Yoko Global Co. She has also performed at the National Association of Music Merchants trade expo with noted handbell artist ‘Keiko’.