Planned for performance at the Metropolitan Museum of Art, it was funded by the Ford Foundation and commissioned for soprano Bethany Beardslee.
[1] 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.
[1] 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.
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 work is an almost endless range of similarities and differences between speech and song and uses word-music puns which were not achievable without the use of the synthesizer.