Cara Nicol

Cara is a Canadian-English harpist and classicist currently based out of Jesus College, Oxford. Her research and musicianship aim to combine interdisciplinary methodological approaches to ancient Greek music. Cara is a founding member of Ancient Music at Oxford (AMO).

Cara's doctoral dissertation is entitled "Melodic Non-Conformity to the Greek Musical Pitch Accent" and examines compositional and extra-musical features of the surviving musical fragments from classical antiquity. It applies ancient theoretical writings on music to the surviving fragments in order to uncover the ways in which ancient composers applied rules of pitch to their melodies. 

Cara holds an MSt from the University of Oxford entitled "A Comparative Analysis of Ancient Greek and Swedish Musical Pitch Accents" which was supervised by Dr Armand D'Angour. She completed BMus with Honours from the University of Toronto in musicology with additional specialisation in Classics. Her undergraduate investigations into Orpheus through both a classical and musicological lens were overseen by Dr Alison Keith (Jackman Humanities Institute) and Dr Caryl Clark under whom Cara became production assistant on the 2023 stage premiere of Joseph Haydn's opera L'Orfeo: l'anima del filosofo. 

Cara is a classically trained harpist and performs both ancient and modern music at venues around Oxford. During her undergraduate, Cara studied with internationally acclaimed harpists Angela Schwarzkopf and Judy Loman. 

Cara enjoys frequent collaboration with musicians, composers, and scholars to create new music that reflects her diverse musical and academic interests. In 2023, Cara premiered a solo recital of seven newly commissioned works for solo and chamber harp. Since then, she has offered her academic insight into numerous projects which seek to revive and rehabilitate the sounds of classical antiquity.