When Rosa Frangorapti was offered a place on the soundtrack of an unnamed film production, she had no idea what she had agreed to. The project came with a code name and almost no detail. It was only once she reached the recording studio that she discovered she was about to play on Christopher Nolan’s long awaited adaptation of The Odyssey, released in cinemas today.
For the Thessaloniki based musicologist, the surprise was not simply the scale of the production. It was the brief. “They were looking for something special. They didn’t want an orchestra. The director asked for something that went beyond the ordinary,” Frangorapti tells WIRED Greece. Composer Ludwig Göransson, a regular collaborator of Nolan’s since Tenet, had been searching for a sound outside the usual grammar of the epic score. He found it in two instruments nearly erased from history: the ancient Greek flute and the seven stringed lyre. Frangorapti plays the lyre.
“They were looking for something special. They didn’t want an orchestra. The director asked for something that went beyond the ordinary.”
Frangorapti arrived at the sessions with no fixed score. Göransson gave her latitude instead of instruction, asking her to explore what the instrument could do against the film’s images rather than perform to a page. It is a working method she still seems slightly amazed by. “There was no such thing as anxiety by the end. It was one of the best musical experiences of my life, if not the best. Both as an environment and as a collaboration. The composer gave us tremendous freedom of expression and opinion,” she says.
She is careful, though, to locate the significance somewhere other than her own credit. “It’s very important. Not for me playing, but for the instrument, which will finally become known.” A production of this size introducing an instrument that most people have never heard of to an audience in the millions is, in her view, the real event.
Frangorapti’s route to that studio began at the piano, aged eight, and continued through conservatory training in Italy, where she first encountered the surviving fragments of ancient Greek music. “I had no idea there were so many elements, even preserved pieces,” she says. “And I, being Greek, was learning about this for the first time.” The turn towards the lyre came later, through a chance meeting with a Thessaloniki musician who owned a reconstructed instrument, seven strings, all left open. She remembers wondering what such a thing was even capable of, aware that lyre players once competed to prove themselves at the Delphic Games, and reasoning there had to be more hidden in the instrument than met the eye. She has been trying to find it since 2011, and still is. “We still discover something new every day,” she says.
Part of what makes the work slow is the sheer size of the gap. Unlike the violin or the piano, the lyre has no unbroken line of teachers and students carrying technique forward through the centuries. It simply stopped being played, and the record went with it. Reconstructing how the instrument was held and struck means working across disciplines that do not normally speak to each other: philology, vase painting, instrument making, performance. There are no recordings to check the work against, only inference. “We have a huge gap, the instrument suddenly stopped existing,” she says. “And now we suddenly have to figure out what it did, with very little evidence.”
Vase painting turns out to matter more than one might expect, because in ancient Greece the lyre was a compulsory part of education. Every free man learned to play it, which means the artists depicting musicians on pottery generally knew how the instrument was actually held before they painted it.
Vase painting turns out to matter more than one might expect, because in ancient Greece the lyre was a compulsory part of education. Every free man learned to play it, which means the artists depicting musicians on pottery generally knew how the instrument was actually held before they painted it. Consistency across images becomes its own kind of evidence. “When you see a particular pose in 99 out of 100 vases, the same grip, the same accessory, the telamon, the button, you start to put the puzzle together,” Frangorapti says. The telamon was the strap, of leather or fabric, that secured the instrument to the player’s wrist. The plectrum, made of bone, wood or metal, was used to strike the strings.
Cross referencing image against text does the rest. The word krouo, she explains, refers specifically to striking the string with the plectrum, distinct from psallein, plucking with the fingers. The distinction matters more than it sounds. “If I play with my fingers, the other person will tell me it’s a harp or a guitar,” she says. “From the moment I touch the key, it becomes a lyre. The whole soundscape changes.” It is why she insists on a firm line between an instrument merely inspired by the ancient lyre and a genuine reconstruction of one, built, in her case, in close collaboration with instrument maker Nikolaos Brass.
That insistence on historical fidelity later produced a genuine first. Working with composer and scholar Nikos Xanthoulis, Frangorapti became the inaugural holder of a diploma in ancient Greek lyre, an initiative designed to bring the instrument into a modern conservatory setting. The qualification carries no official state recognition, unlike a piano or violin diploma, but she sees it as a foothold, a way of pulling the instrument out of a small circle of specialists. She has already introduced it to schoolchildren and reports a reaction she did not entirely expect. “It’s a free string and it has contact with your body, and this vibration relaxes you immediately. It also helps with concentration. There wasn’t a single child who wasn’t interested in playing. Even in sections that usually make noise, when they heard the sound they quieted down.”
The path to The Odyssey itself, though, ran through video games rather than film. Frangorapti and flautist Callum Armstrong recorded a duet for lyre and flute, Orestes’ Torment, and posted it online. It was picked up by the makers of Diablo IV, who wanted the instruments for the Vessel of Hatred expansion, set against a darker, heavily processed orchestral score. It was her first attempt at placing something so quiet against something so large. “The sound of the orchestra is a titan. And these instruments are very gentle and quiet,” she says. The mismatch in scale was severe enough that an experienced sound engineer told her he was not sure where to put the microphone.
The reception to that work, by her account, is what put her in the room for Nolan’s film. Göransson, known for pushing against genre convention, wanted the score built around the lyre and flute rather than treating them as ornament. Frangorapti’s role stayed confined to the recording sessions. She did not meet the cast or the wider production team, and worked instead from glimpses of the footage she was scoring for. “I would see what scene I was playing for and then listen to how it sounded. It was something crazy, I still can’t capture it.”
The instrumentation, by design, stayed spare: lyre, flute, percussion and voice. “Imagine the amount of research that went into all of this, over so many years. It may not have been done for the film, but it made it into the film,” she says. “The laconicism, even in the sound, gives a lot of emotion. It moved me.” She is reluctant to comment on the historical accuracy of the film more broadly, but is unequivocal about the score. “There was incredible work done on that side, in the composition and the performance. They placed a lot of importance on historical validity and accuracy.”
“In ancient Greece, The Odyssey was sung, and the rhapsodist used the lyre to narrate it.”
What seems to affect her most is the weight of the association itself. “We’re talking about The Odyssey now,” she says. “The Odyssey was sung, and the rhapsodist used the lyre to narrate it. That thought makes my hair stand on end.” She keeps a small private habit as evidence of how long that connection has run for her: every copy of The Iliad and The Odyssey on her shelves happens to have a lyre on the cover.
Frangorapti does not regard the choice of instrument as a safe one commercially, and doubts many would have predicted a mainstream blockbuster leaning on instruments still being reconstructed from fragments. She sees it instead as an opening. “It’s an opportunity to give space, it’s a big deal for these instruments. Especially for us, who have been involved in their research for so many years, to see interest in something like this is a miracle. Otherwise we’ll stay in a small circle of scientists. Right now we’re giving it wings.”
Photographs courtesy of WIRED Greece and @rosa.frangorapti Instagram page.
Read also Why The Backlash Against Lupita Nyong’o Playing Helen of Troy?
