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The Guardian - UK
The Guardian - UK
Entertainment
Tom Smail

The music in Nolan’s Odyssey is as well-crafted – and bloodlessly forgettable – as the film itself

A battle scene from The Odyssey. Armed figures silhouetted against burning buildings with intense flames and smoke billowing into the night sky
Struggling to be heard … a battle scene from The Odyssey. Photograph: Melinda Sue Gordon/Universal Pictures

A few weeks ago I came across a video of Professor Armand D’Angour, associate professor of classics at Oxford university. He explained how, through groundbreaking research involving fragments of melody and rhythms found on papyrus and stone and the reconstruction of ancient instruments, it is now possible to hear for the first time in 2,000 years what ancient Greek music would have sounded like.

Given Ludwig Göransson’s beautiful theme for the aulos (an ancient double-barrelled flute) in Christopher Nolan’s latest blockbuster, The Odyssey, and his reputation for dedicated research into his subject matter, it seems very likely that he too has heard these calls from the ancient past.

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