Tribute to Andrew Barker (1943–2021)

Andrew Barker made an outstanding contribution to the advancement and establishment of the discipline of Ancient Greek Music, which can hardly be overestimated. Retracing the stages of his extraordinary career is not an easy task, given the vast breadth and high quality of his seminal work. But the importance of his mastery in the field goes far beyond his extensive academic production, consisting of 8 books (two of which are in Italian)1 and more than 80 articles.2 His research and teaching activities, which had even intensified after his retirement thanks to the numerous lectures and seminars he gave world-wide, trained and inspired more than one generation of scholars and students, paving the way for the flowering of the discipline we see today. The main focus of his teaching career was Ancient Philosophy, which he taught in the Philosophy Department at the University of Warwick (1970–1975, 1978–1992) and in the Classics Departments of the Universities of Cambridge (1976–1978), Otago (1992–1995) and Birmingham (1996–2008). He became a Fellow of the British Academy in 2005 and Professor Emeritus on his retirement in 2008. His interest in music began to emerge in the mid-1970s in some articles that already showed what would become the most innovative and authoritative trait of his scholarly approach: that of locating ancient