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. John Hollander, a poet at
Yale University, wrote the
libretto for Babbitt under specific conditions – it would be for solo soprano and would be performed with at least four sets of speakers around the performance hall. Essentially, Babbitt would record the soprano's voice and edit it through a synthesizer. To produce the piece, Babbitt had to create the sounds from the synthesizer. Then he had to tape the soprano voice in sections; however, for a large portion of the time, she sang straight but answered herself as she was recorded. The vocal part was fairly straightforward since the soprano was producing the part within the confines of the human voice, but Babbitt wrote for Beardslee in a way that he could not have written otherwise because so much of it depended on what was happening electronically.
Philomel was written, as most of Babbitt's music was, on four tracks, with the set-up for the recording at the Macmillan Theatre. The piece could not have been attempted with live performers. According to Babbitt himself, "I could produce things faster than any pianist could play or any listener could hear. We were able to work with greater speeds. That was one of the things that interested me the most – the
timbre, the rhythmic aspect. And we learned a great deal. It was an analog device and it was given digital information and switching instructions...passing over very expensive gold wires that scanned the information and then recorded it on tape. I could change certain qualities of a tone while keeping other qualities, like the pitch, consistent." The composition is "a re-interpretation of a scena drammatica with its distinct
recitative–
arioso–
aria layout". == References ==