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This paper discusses compositional methods and interpretive choices behind "new ancient music" for Euripides' Helen , how it supports or complicates the play's musical design as previously understood, and how a newly musicalized "choral plot" can affect audience experience, ancient and modern. It is intended to complement performance recordings and scores, materials which, taken together, may help one understand the ancient experience of Greek dramatic music generally, or to evaluate musical effects of this specific play. It may also be useful for restaging Helen with this music, or new compositions of one's own. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

In the original performance of Sophocles' Trachiniae , song and dance were essential in communicating dramatic theme and character. Tragic choreia is structurally defined by paired stanzas: the antistrophe repeats the melody of the strophe but reverses its direction of dance. In Trachiniae , this antistrophic structure becomes thematic, representing the fateful bond between Deianeira and Heracles and the resulting narrative repetitions/reversals. Digital analysis of pitch accents reveals that this musical metaphor was reinforced melodically through the development of a "shimmering" circumflex motif, culminating in Heracles' melismatic monody. Through this musical framing, Sophocles situates his tragedy in relation to other genres (epic, paean) and to musical developments in the fifth century. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The fusion of Athenian and Ionian identities is central to Euripides' Ion, but this article demonstrates that the play's paeanic monodies conspicuously avoid expressing Ion's "true" origins, and thus challenge the reliability of paeanic performances of identity. While classical paeans were regularly used to articulate communal identities, particularly in Athenian/Ionian contexts, the songs of Ion overtly assert fictional (Ionian) origin myths, and explicitly criticize Apolline music. Thus, although the play seems to close with a successful merger of Athenian and Ionian origins, grave doubts persist as to the ability of paeanic song to properly express this communal identity. [ABSTRACT FROM AUTHOR]

The article examines the musical structure of Sophocles' tragedy "Trachiniae" whose grief is that the principals never meet.

The article discusses the programmatic prologue of the first surviving opera "Euridice" (1600) by Ottavio Rinuccini and Jacopo Peri. Topics covered include the prologue's structure of seven stanzas with four eleven-syllable lines with the rhyme scheme abba, its performance by Tragedia, and the latter's authority in providing rhetorical intensity to the new genre. Also mentioned is the play's composition of five scenes separated by choruses in strophic verse.

Examines prayer and curse in Aeschylus' "Seven Against Thebes". Argument that performative speech early in the play reveals the working of the curse and offers new insight into the central conundrum of the play, Eteokles' sudden change of attitude when he hears that Polyneikes is at the seventh gate; Eteokles' view that the chorus is destroying the morale of Theban citizens with its hysterics; Suggestion that performative speech calls for attention from the beginning of the play, in ways that have not been recognized, in prayer and violation of prayer.