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James Joyce, "Sirens", Episode 11 in Ulysses (1922), chapter in an avant-garde novel.

"James Joyce brings the Sirens down to earth by casting them as slangy barmaids, and the novel's "Sirens" episode shares the fin de siècle view of the Sirens' song as an escape from the constraints of language and meaning, an excuse to experiment." Grafton, Most & Settis, edd. The Classical Tradition, s.v. "Sirens" [M.A.Smart].

Victoria Bond, a contemporary composer, set Joyce's text to music in Sirens as a chamber opera commissioned by The Roger Shapiro Fund for New Music — see it on YouTube: https://youtu.be/FGkYtp4_OZ4 (a performance from 2017.

Classically the Sirens were seductive singers. Like the Lotophagoi and other distractors, Homer's Sirens makes sailors forget their homecoming by distracting them with a song that appeals to the sailors' inner instincts — thus, the song for Odysseus appeals to his great feats at Troy and to his persistent desire to know all things. When the Argonauts sail past the Sirens, the strength of Orpheus' song saves ship and crew by drowning out the seductive song. And in Plato, when Socrates' entrancing ways are likened to the Sirens', the reference is not in the moment sexualized, but his distracting song is described as seductive. (Symp. 216a) The present depiction (at right) suggests that by the time of its conception, the Sirens have acquired properties beyond their classical role.