It was a joy to work with old and new friends on this volume, including several colleagues from King’s. My co-editor, Dr Miranda Stanyon, worked at King’s until her recent move to the University of Melbourne. Dr Justine McConnell wrote a chapter about ancient epic in contemporary hip-hop, and Emeritus Professor Mike Trapp contributed a chapter on how music and drama at King’s in the 1880s was used to support women's access to a classical education
Dr Emily Pillinger, Reader in Classics and Interdisciplinary Humanities
17 February 2026
New book explores how music, from opera to hip-hop, has been inspired by ancient Greece and Rome
Dr Emily Pillinger publishes Music as Classical Reception: Amplifying Antiquity with Dr Miranda Stanyon.
Music as Classical Reception: Amplifying Antiquity investigates music as a site of classical reception from the early modern rise of opera to contemporary hip-hop. The volume's contributors explore topics across musical genres and classical sources—myth, epic, lyric, history, philosophy, archaeology—to demonstrate the importance of music to our engagement with classical antiquity, and vice versa.
The book explores how musicians and composers ‘amplify’ classical antiquity. Drawing on classics, music, sound studies, literary studies, and intellectual and cultural history, the chapters explore three different modes and contexts of reception: musical settings of ancient words; musical reimaginings of ancient lives, ideas, and myths; and the encounters with Graeco-Roman antiquity that are powered by electric amplification and the media changes that come in its wake.
Emeritus Professor Mike Trapp’s chapter about the reconstruction of ancient Greece through music at King’s College London, Homer for High Society: Professor Warr’s Tale of Troy and Its Music, is available to read for free now.
In this story
Reader in Classics and Interdisciplinary Humanities