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The rhythm is dochmiac (suggesting a briskish tempo), with some variations between strophe and antistrophe, e.g.  responding with  . The papyrus has pointing, marking the first and third notes of the measure (in its basic five-note form) as upbeats:  . Several long syllables are divided between two notes. |
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The music is for male chorus (representing women) with a heterophonic aulos accompaniment. The notes in brackets are the instrumental ones. On their interpretation and the nature of the heterophony see p. 206. |
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The genus is enharmonic. (So far as the notation goes, it could be chromatic, but we know that enharmonic was characteristic of fifth-century tragedy and chromatic exceptional.) The notes of the pyknon are repeatedly played in sequence, rising or falling, sometimes combining in figures with the tone below (cf. p. 194). There are two of these tone + pyknon clusters, located a fifth apart. The resulting scale, d e  f a b  c', agrees with the Damonian Dorian harmonia (if completed with e') or the Phrygian (if completed with d').2 But the notional upper note seems to play little or no role. The music circles in the tone + pyknon clusters round the two loci e and a. Transitions between the clusters seem to coincide with the arsis. As the composition is strophic, there is no correlation of melody and word accent. |
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2 On these see p. 174. In Aristides Quintilianus' table of these scales the Lydian key-notation is used. and so it is in the Euripides fragment. |
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