Philomel (Babbitt)

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Philomel is a 1964 work by Milton Babbitt that blends live soprano singing with taped voices and electronic sounds from a synthesizer. It is one of his best-known pieces and was planned for the Metropolitan Museum of Art, funded by the Ford Foundation, and written for soprano Bethany Beardslee. Babbitt made it at the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, where he was a founding member.

The piece has three parts inspired by Ovid’s myth of Philomela. It follows a maiden who cannot speak, her escape from King Tereus, and her transformation into a nightingale. In the second section, librettist John Hollander has Philomel talk with woodland inhabitants in elaborate echo-like poetry. The third section contains five arias in which Philomel finally regains her voice and sings about her life.

Philomel combines live performance with tape, making it one of the first major works to use a synthesizer with the human voice. Hollander’s libretto was written for a solo soprano with at least four speakers around the hall. The performer’s voice is recorded and then processed by the synthesizer, with much of the music built from taped material in sections where the singer also answers herself. The work was created on four-track tape at Macmillan Theatre and could not be performed effectively by live singers alone. Babbitt described how electronics let him explore fast tempos and new timbres, keeping pitch constant while changing other qualities. The collaboration suggests that music and language can be intertwined, turning spoken words into music and vice versa, in a re-interpretation of a scena drammatica with recitative–arias layout.