This lecture-recital presents preliminary findings from ongoing interdisciplinary research retreats at Moyseion Matera, Italy, in which we have been collaborating with performers and classical philologists to investigate the rhythmic-metric properties of ancient molpē, the culture of song-dance in which every ancient Greek citizen participated. Our central question concerns how the metrical units of ancient grammarians (metra, feet, and morae) are realised in embodied practice. To enable participants to experience the musical rhythms of the words (‘linguistic’ metre) as an embodied phenomenon, we generated provisional melodies as an heuristic rather than as an end in themselves. Tools such as konnakol were used to decouple musical and linguistic layers, facilitating the rehearsal and testing of multiple hypotheses, including the effects of metrical dissonance.

Our project offers a productive model for interdisciplinary collaboration, in which scholarly interpretation and practical musicianship inform one another. We argue that performance-led enquiry usefully exposes implicit biases arising from linguistic and musical conditioning. For example, native speakers of languages that are predominantly stress-timed (e.g. English and Modern Greek) or syllable-timed (e.g. Italian and Turkish) have long traditions of aligning musical pulses with the long syllables of Ancient Greek, leading to practices in the classroom and on stage that contradict Roman-era scholarship. While no reconstruction can claim historical authority, iterative testing of experimental – even wrong – solutions yields useful new insights into the musical qualities and kinaesthetic logic of the choral verse that was foundational in Greek education before Plato and has never ceased to influence composers.