CLASSICAL MYTHOLOGY IN MUSIC, DANCE, AND FILM 721Overtures, each bearing the name of a Muse: Thalia, Melpomene, and Euterpe; Adon-
ais, Elegiac Overture, for orchestra, written as a memorial to a friend; and the
symphonic fantasy for orchestra, Aphrodite (1912).
Frederick Shepherd Converse (1871-1940) studied in Munich and in Amer-
ica with Paine and Chadwick, and he taught at the New England Conservatory
and Harvard. One of his orchestral works is a concert overture, entitled
Euphrosyne; two others are inspired by Keats: Festival of Pan, a Romance and
Endymion's Narrative, a Concert Overture, not strictly programmatic but intended
to reflect upon Endymion's emotional changes in the poem.^20
Henry Kimball Hadley (1871-1937) became one of the most prolific of Chad-
wick's students, a veritable "Henry Ford of American composers." Among his
classically inspired works is an opera, Cleopatra's Night (with Frances Aida as
Cleopatra), which was produced at the Metropolitan Opera in 1920 with some
acclaim. The libretto is by Alice Leal Pollock, adapted from Une Nuit de Cléopâtre,
by Théophile Gautier. He also composed the music for The Atonement of Pan, a
festival play or masque written by Joseph D. Redding; a concert overture, Hec-
tor and Andromache; and a piano solo, Dance of the Satyrs.
It has far too long been fashionable among some critics to be supercilious
and derogatory about these early American composers. At last many of their
works are being performed and recorded, and we can hear them for ourselves
and appreciate their virtues.^21 Now, so to speak, the floodgates of American mu-
sical composition have been thrown open.
Some Important Musical Developments. Among the important developments in
the twentieth century, that of electronic music, which began in Europe (e.g.,
Xenakis and Wellesz, identified earlier), deserves to be singled out because of
the significant classically inspired works in that medium. Among the pioneers
in the evolution of electronic music in America was Milton Babbitt (b. 1916), a
trained mathematician who turned to the serious study of music. He became in-
trigued with the twelve-tone techniques of the Europeans Schoenberg, Berg, and
Webern, and was determined to turn them into a real system. Thus he devel-
oped a "systematic serial composition," or "serialism"; and to him belongs the
first serial work ever written. He was also the first to compose an extended com-
position for the synthesizer (1961). Babbitt, combining synthesized sound with
live performance in new and vital ways, has written the highly acclaimed
Philomel (1964) for soprano, recorded soprano, and synthesized tape, set to a
poem by John Hollander that is based on Ovid's legend of Tereus, Procne, and
Philomela. There are three sections: Philomel flees through the forest, vocaliz-
ing sounds that play upon the names Philomel and Tereus; then an Echo Song
follows after Philomel is transformed into a nightingale; finally, the nightingale
realizes her full voice and new power:
On the tape the voice of Bethany Beardsley is now near, now far in the stereo spectrum,
sometimes electronically distorted, sometimes singing in chorus, sometimes echoing or