Philomel

Philomel, a serial composition composed in 1964, combines synthesizer with both live and recorded soprano voice. It is Milton Babbitt’s best-known work and was planned as a piece for performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, funded by the Ford Foundation and commissioned for soprano Bethany Beardslee. Babbitt created Philomel in the Columbia-Princeton Electronic Music Center, of which he was a founding member.

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The three sections of the piece are based on Ovid’s myth of Philomela, a maiden without the capability of speech, her escape from King Tereus, and her transformation into a nightingale.

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The piece, an example of combined live performance with tape, was one of the first compositions on the synthesizer and shows Babbitt's use of the human voice.

The name "Philomel" or "Philomela" was indeed Tereus' wife (see Ovid's "The Metamorphoses"). The rest of the story might put you off this pretty name -- Philomel was Tereus' sister-in-law, whom he raped and cut out her tongue before returning to his wife who, upon discovering this, murders their son and serves him to Tereus baked in a pie. Then they turn into birds. This story was used by Shakespeare in the plot of his bloodiest play "Titus Andronicus," in which the same thing happens to Titus' daughter Lavinia.