Song & Speech: the Black Language

On Sophocles' Language: 

“[There is] something lifting up, lifting up to great and easy grandeur of cadence...a swell; the phrases or sentences or forms gradually letting out and opening to a great roll and then folding softly back.”

– Robert Fitzgerald, 1939

"Sophocles’ style is smooth, translated into a sparse, plain, but pure and felicitous prose." 

– Penelope Laurens, 1989

On GOSPEL's Language:

“[We used] a Southern-based African American accent from West Africa and is considered West African classicism. 

"Funeral odes are delivered in this accent.

"[We found it] worked better for a Greek tragedy than the Shakespearean accent because it still incorporated the chant, that area between singing and speaking which has been lost in Shakespearean English. It still exists in West African classicism and it exists in the African American church, which is the metaphor we used here.” 

– Lee Breuer, Rome, 2007

The "West African classicism" Breuer was referring to points us to the Niger–Congo language family, which greatly influence the music and speech of the world through Bantu expansion in the 1500s, the Transatlantic slave trade, and African diaspora. Yoruba (one of the three largest ethnic groups of Nigeria) music is traditionally centred on folklore and spiritual worship, imitating the tonality of Yoruba language -- what we might call chant. Listen to "Ogbon" by Yoruba artist Taofique: an Ode styled music that draws on the wisdom in traditional Yoruba chant style music with the talking drum (dundun / gangan) and the Agogo.