Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

November 4, 2024

Abigail Arnold | Graduate School of Arts and Sciences

In 2023, Alexandra Burkot’s research journey took her to Athens, Greece. There, the Brandeis University Graduate School of Arts and Sciences (GSAS) Musicology PhD student spent nine months researching the composer Dimitrios Levidis, particularly his 1943 composition setting a passage from the Iliad; the piece was composed when Greece was under occupation during World War II and was presumed lost for decades. Burkot conducted her research in the Gennadius Library at the American School of Classical Studies at Athens, where she received a Schwarz Fellowship for Research on Music. GSAS caught up with Burkot, now back in Waltham, to discuss her research, her experiences exploring in Greece, and how she connects performance and research.

This interview has been edited for clarity.

Tell us about your research and how your fellowship came about.

My research is on the composer Dimitrios Levidis. I started graduate school with a different project in mind, but then a faculty member suggested that I take a look at the American School of Classical Studies because she knew I was interested in Greece. While I was looking through their library’s digitized archives, I found a piece of music written in 1943, when Greece was occupied by the Axis powers during World War II, set to a passage from the Iliad. I thought this was an incredible confluence of factors – a piece of music written during occupation about the most famous and iconic siege in literature – and I had to know more. I then applied to the Schwarz Fellowship, thinking I might get an article out of looking into this topic. Instead, I went way down the rabbit hole, and now it’s my dissertation.

The fellowship is a new one; I believe I was the third person to hold it. Broadly speaking, it’s for research on music that studies interactions in the Mediterranean world. I thought this Iliad piece embodied it perfectly – it’s Greek classical music, so there’s your interaction between Greece and the Western world, and then it has Balkan influence as well. There’s a big pan-Mediterranean dialogue just within this piece of music.

How long were you in Athens, and what did you do while you were there?

I lived in Athens for nine months, which was an incredible experience. As part of the fellowship, I was considered a member of the School of Classical Studies and given free admission to every state-owned museum in the country, and there are a lot of them. I lived in the neighborhood of Kolonaki (kind of like the Athenian Back Bay), which was absolutely gorgeous and just two metro stops away from the Acropolis!

While there, I mostly worked in the school’s Levidis archives to see what his musical style was like and if there was any aesthetic or political evolution I could track. I also worked in other archives, including going to the Bibliothèque nationale de France in Paris for a week. There, they have an early draft of the Iliad piece, as well as Levidis’s memoirs of living in Greece under the occupation. He talks about his process, his colleagues, and his experience of living there at that time, so it was an invaluable document for my research. The head librarian at the school, Dr. Maria Georgopoulou, also put me in touch with filmmaker Maria Iliou, who had a third, middle-stage copy of the Iliad piece’s manuscript, which she’d inherited from her grandmother who was involved in the Greek radio world during World War II. I spent the first half of my time there going through the archives and the second half comparing the three versions of the piece that I had and trying to come up with a unified version.

While you were there, you held a concert with fellow Brandeis PhD student Mariel Mayz of Music Composition and Theory. What was that experience like?

Burkot and Mayz at their concert. Photo credit: Mimi Palomino Gamba.

In April of 2023, before I went to Greece, I did a trial run of a Greek music recital with Mariel at Brandeis. When I got to Greece, I saw that the school had a concert hall on site that I could rent. I emailed Mariel and invited her to come and do the recital again – at the time, she was already in Europe for her piano festival, Porto Pianofest, so she hopped over to Athens and we put on a show! The faculty at the school were so kind and supportive in letting me take the time for this, and I was able to bring in the research aspect by performing some music by Levidis. I hadn’t sung much in a long time, and it was great to bring together my scholarship and my music. The experience was so much fun. Mariel’s a brilliant pianist and a great collaborator, and we hope to do the concert again here or in Chicago or New York. Since most of the other students at the school were classicists rather than musicians, it was also great having Mariel there and having the chance to talk about my project to someone who understood it from that perspective.

Why do you think it’s important for graduate students to collaborate with each other?

Graduate students tend to put ourselves into silos, but we should be collaborating all the time! I’d seen Mariel perform before and knew she was very gifted and smart, and I knew that with our forces combined, we’d be able to bring life to this music project as scholars and performers. We study different facets of the same thing, and it all comes together – you can sit down and study or compose music forever, but until you hear it, what are you doing? We have the opportunity to support each other. In general, making your discipline more interdisciplinary is only a net good, since the divisions between disciplines are artificial anyway. Music has so many aspects – it’s related to science, physics, architecture, politics, religion, policy, and more. Understanding these connections and building them through collaborative work between graduate students will only help us all broaden our research as far as it can go.

What were some of the highlights of your time in Greece?

The Iliad piece was presumed lost until it was acquired by the library in 2010. It hasn’t been performed since 1943 (and I’m not yet fully sure it was even performed then), so no one alive had heard it. I digitally transcribed it into music notation software, and in my progress report, I played the digital version for the academic community at the school. It was the first time anyone had heard it in eighty years. You could see that everyone was really excited by the prospect of this unique musical moment coming back from the dead.

In my off time, I did a lot of traveling and got to see so many incredible sights. And because I was traveling with students who were archaeologists, we got the best tours! I got to go into the Kasta Tomb in northern Greece, which is not open to the public, and walked around Knossos in Crete with the director of the archaeological site giving us a personal tour. It was incredible to learn from such knowledgeable scholars and get the real academic meat of things! Near the end of my time there, I had a friend visit, and I was showing her around Athens and telling her everything I’d learned. Then tourists came over and started asking me questions!

On the personal side, I was really close to my maternal grandmother, who was from Greece, and we used to visit her on Poros, the island where she lived. I hadn’t been there in over twenty years, but my sister came and we visited Poros again and re-lived some of our childhood experiences. It was really special to go back being much more knowledgeable about everything.

Overall, the experience gave me my dissertation project! I also had wonderful networking opportunities. I will be going back in January to do some additional research, and Dr. Georgopoulou put me in touch with a conductor in Athens with whom I’m working on an orchestral version of the Iliad piece. I am orchestrating the full score with parts for everyone, and hopefully it will premiere in the next five years!