Alexander Lingas

Alexander Lingas is the founder and conductor of the choir Cappella Romana, which specializes in music of the Byzantine, Russian, and other Orthodox churches. He is also a prominent researcher of Byzantine and Greek musical traditions. Lingas was born in Portland, Oregon, in November of 1965. He grew up in a Greek Orthodox family and was active in the church as an altar server and reader. Lingas attended Portland State University, intending at first to major in physics but then switching to dual majors in music composition and Russian languages. He graduated in 1986, composing a setting of the Great Vespers as his undergraduate thesis. Lingas went on for a PhD at the University of British Columbia in Canada, receiving his degree in 1996. By that time, he had founded Cappella Romana. Established in 1991, the choir grew from a performance Lingas organized to benefit the rebuilding of the Annunciation Cathedral in San Francisco, which had been destroyed in the 1989 Loma Prieta earthquake. The name Cappella Romana suggests a focus on Roman music, but Lingas pointed out that the Byzantines often referred to themselves as Romans. Lingas undertook postdoctoral studies at the University of Oxford with Metropolitan (the Greek Orthodox equivalent of a bishop) Kallistos Ware, and he traveled to Greece for studies with cantor Lycourgos Angelopoulos. Lingas has continued his musicological activities. He taught at Arizona State University and then at the City University of London, where he serves as senior lecturer. Lingas is also a fellow of the University of Oxford's European Humanities Research Centre, where he has turned out a steady stream of articles about the performance of Byzantine liturgical music, a field in which he is one of the world's leading specialists. He has led Cappella Romana in performances and on 25 albums. The group's repertory extends beyond the Byzantine world to encompass Orthodox music of Eastern Europe, early music of the Western Church, and contemporary music in the Orthodox tradition, including that of John Tavener and Tikey Zes. Most of the group's albums have appeared on its Cappella Romana label. Some of Lingas' recordings have received considerable attention, including 2019's Lost Voices of Hagia Sophia; that release featured a digital reconstruction of the sound environment of the Hagia Sophia in Istanbul, for centuries an iconic seat of Eastern Orthodox music-making. In 2021, Lingas and Cappella Romana released Hymns of Kassianí, a collection of chants by a medieval Orthodox abbess who may be the first named female composer in the Western tradition.