5 Things to Know About Patricia Barber’s Jazz Song Cycle Based on Ovid

A Guggenheim Fellowship funded the project Barber used the grant to research and compose a jazz song cycle based on Ovid’s Metamorphoses.

The result is an album called Mythologies It fuses classical mythology with Barber’s own jazz idiom.

Barber is a jazz composer, not a classical one The work stays true to her style, not a straight adaptation of ancient texts.

Ovid’s stories are the raw material Barber selected myths from Metamorphoses to reinterpret through music.

The cycle is a single, cohesive work It’s not a collection of unrelated songs but a unified song cycle.