Antigone Songs consists of five slightly re-composed extracts from my dramatic cantata Antigone. In the first song, ‘He is gone’, Antigone mourns the death of her father Oedipus, in a scene from the end of Sophocles’ Oedipus at Colonus. The other four songs set extracts from Sophocles’ Antigone. In the second and third songs, ‘Know you what ill there is?’ and ‘Such is the edict’, Antigone reflects on the news that Creon has ordered that the corpse of her newly-dead brother Polyneices should not receive a proper burial. Finally, in ‘No home with the living or with the dead’ and ‘What law of heaven have I transgressed?’, Antigone, having defied Creon by burying Polyneices, bemoans the punishment she is to face: to be buried alive. The cycle as a whole is intended as an exploration of Antigone’s innermost thoughts as she faces the cruellest of circumstances.