Epinikion
Victory hymn of antiquity.
What it means
The epinikion is a victory song of Greek antiquity, sung in honour of a winner at the athletic contests. It is a genre of choral lyric: the text was delivered by a choir, accompanied by instruments and combined with dance. The texts are transmitted, not the music; only general statements can be made about melodies, rhythm, and scoring, arising from the verse structure and from descriptions.
Musical use
For music history the genre is significant above all as an example of the close connection of poetry, music, and dance in antiquity: the rhythm of the verses gave the musical rhythm, and the division into pairs of stanzas with a deviating third part corresponds to a choreographic layout. This connection was lost in later European music and was repeatedly declared an ideal, for instance around 1600, when monody sought to link up with the ancient model — on the basis of very fragmentary knowledge. The epinikion differs from later victory hymns and songs of praise through its fixed cultic and social place.
Performance practice
No secure performance practice can be given. Whoever occupies themselves with ancient music works with the few surviving musical monuments, with the metre of the texts, and with reconstructions of instruments; every sounding realization is a reasoned assumption, not a restoration. In performances, take care to make this difference clear instead of presenting reconstructions as secure transmission. Statements in reference works on melody and accompaniment of this genre should be checked against the state of the sources.
Bear in mind that reconstructions of ancient music always rest on assumptions and should be identified as such: surviving musical monuments are few, and no general performance practice can be derived from them. For programme notes it is advisable to state the state of the sources. Whoever works with metrical texts can take the verse rhythm as a basis but should not claim thereby to restore the original music. Research in this field is in flux; current specialist literature gives the latest state.