Following two earlier works, Harrison Birtwistle returned to texts by Sappho, the great poetess of Lesbos, this time setting the texts in their original, and much more fragmentary, form. The title …agm… has various justifications: the three letters occur in many, if not all, of Sappho’s works; the Greek word for fragment is ‘agma’; and agm is an abbreviation of Agamemnon.