I’m having fun with the Seikilos song, prompted by a collaboration with Aleksandra Szypowska. I met her last month in Mark his Words, a semi-staged dramatisation of St Mark’s Gospel in Greek, by Patrick Boyde, in which we were both performing. Yesterday, she gave a presentation on Ancient Greek Music at the Faculty of Classics, University of Cambridge, singing three items of ancient notation. In the first two, she explained and illustrated the nature of the problems; in the third, I had the pleasure of accompanying her on Louvre aulos.
This morning, I took forward the idea of using this melody as a study to develop my aulos technique. I practised tonguing each reed separately and, at the end (26:17), explained the good practising habit drilled into me by Seumas MacNeill at the College of Piping in Glasgow when I was 8 years old.
