Epode

What it means

The epode is the closing section of a choral song of ancient Greece. It follows the strophe and the metrically identical antistrophe as a third section with its own, different verse structure. The division into strophe, antistrophe, and epode formed the basic framework of many choral songs, for instance in tragedy and in choral lyric.

Musical use

How ancient music itself sounded survives only in fragments, so the epode is known mainly as a formal term of poetry and choral lyric. In musicology it serves to describe the three-part structure of ancient choral songs, whose principle of repetition followed by a closing departure finds a counterpart in later forms such as the Abgesang of medieval song.

The epode should be distinguished from the strophe, which opens such a structure, and from the antistrophe, which repeats the strophe's construction. The distinction from the epilogue is also important: the epilogue denotes a closing formal section in instrumental music, whereas the epode is a section of ancient vocal forms.

Performance practice

If you meet the epode in a text on ancient music, note the sequence of the three parts and that the third departs from the construction of the first two. This departure is the mark of the epode and can also serve as a point of comparison when analysing later three-part song forms.