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 is 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. 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.