Becka Wolfe

Musician, linguist, librarian

About



Bio

Originally from the UK I started my traditional music journey in Scotland, learning jigs and reels in the bars of Edinburgh.
The violin slowly transformed into a fiddle, arias into murder ballads and sea shanties.
Although this is where I began, it is not where I stayed, straying far from the British Isles into the Balkans, France, the Appalachians and the Mediterranean, particularly Greece, Ottoman music and the Arab world.

Projects past and present

Previous projects include ska/punk/hip-hop band New Urban Frontier, folk duo Gillespie & Wolfe and Americana group Wayward Jane. I currently play viola with the Idumea Quartet, violin with the Intercultural Orchestra of Greek National Opera in Athens, and oud in the Al Tariq trio which focuses on the music of the Arab world and al-Andalus (the Islamic Iberian peninsula). In 2022 I was selected as an artist in residence in Cordoba, Spain where I composed music inspired by the life of Lubna of Cordoba, a 10th century woman mathematician, poet and librarian in the caliphal court of al Hakim II, using poetry by women from that time and beyond, ranging from Wallada Bint al-Mustakfi to Sappho to Nazik al-Mala’ika. Over these past years I have been dipping my toes into the world of maqam-based music, mostly coming from the Arab world, with some Ottoman and a little classical Persian. Life in Greece is incredibly rich from this musical perspective, being at a historical, geographical and cultural crossroads. Moments or spaces of encounter are always where the exciting stuff happens, or that at least is where I like to be. As a result I have often found myself working in multicultural settings, such as Ethno music gatherings as both organiser and/or artistc mentor, or the fun mayhem of the Musikarama band. If not playing music, I am most likely to be found in the ECHO library, a multilingual mobile library created to support people on the move in the Athens area with books and studying resources in their mother tongues.