Babbitt and Phenomenology

This is going to need a lot more in depth investigation than I can give it now, but it strikes me, upon reexamination of Milton Babbitt, that something other than what he describes is going on here.
I popped a CD of his piano music, the scholasticly titled Babbitt: Piano Music Since 1983 with Martin Goldray on piano, into the CD player. The reason I did this was to freak out a few of my musically untrained friends - we had just been listening to Mikel Rouse's Failing Kansas, a highly recommended musical theater work, by the way, and one of them commented on how frightening the Counterpoetry technique (more on this later, perhaps) was in its evocation of the voices of schizophrenia. Babbitt, of course, sounds like random piano noise or, as my friend described it, "stalking music." This is the sort of comment that an advocate of this music (wherever they may be nowadays) would dismiss as uninformed and, to an extent, and superficially, they would be correct.
What this kind of dismissal forgets is the phenomenal side of the music: music never exists purely in its writing, in the mathematics or theory underlying its presentation, but only in its presentation. Now, when we're talking about Milton Babbitt - who has written at great length and with great passion in defense of the specialist composer, he whose music can only be understood by those of equal musical training - we forget about this aspect, both because he tells us too, and because it's easy to be lazy about music that is truly difficult to understand when the composer gives us a way out, even if this way out (as difficult as it may seem) does not actually speak to the true difficulty of the work.
The true difficulty of this music, then, is not the structure underlying it. This is relatively easy to understand: anyone with a rudimentary knowledge of combinatorics could make sense of Babbitt's theoretical writings, and there is none of the aura of the occult that we find in the Boulez of say Pli selon pli. Even the aural recognition of these structures in the music, though perhaps daunting, does not place us in contact with the essence of the musical here. As Kyle Gann puts it in his essay on his aesthetic, "It was becoming dessicated, a kind of exercise of constantly active attention. All music had become expressively interchangeable."
Milton Babbitt is no stranger to the power of the musical in music, no more than was, say Bach. In fact, Babbitt's earliest experiences with music, which impressed him enough to eventually draw him away from mathematics, were of jazz and popular music. The Babbitt we hear in the theoretical writings is not the same Babbitt we hear in, say, Philomel. We can hear emotionality in this music if we allow ourselves to. Babbitt speaks almost sentimentally about the piece in a 2000 interview for OHM, saying that, among other things,"Philomel" is very near and dear to my heart."
What is needed is a reevaluation of the work of Milton Babbitt in terms of its musical affect, a phenomenological reading of the extremity (Schoenberg's revolution pushed to its ultimate, translucent conclusion) that forms the basis of his work. What seems like musical arrogance can perhaps be reinterpreted along the lines of the way Bach's music (think of the Mass in B Minor) is heard by millions of non-experts - it is at no point an exercise in fugual technique, although it could not exist apart from this.
What this post doesn't deal with, you will notice, is what such a reevaluation will tell us about the status of Babbitt's corpus. Is he a composer worth remembering, after everything? Perhaps so.

(Slavoj Žižek notes that "someone who contructs his poems in a 'rational' way, for instance, is a poetic fist-fucker"; that is, he sustitutes for the phallus, the organ that is 'inspired' independently of the human will, the fist, the organ of greatest human control, manipulated into its tightest configuration. Note also that this says nothing of the quality of the fistic altercation, to use a phrase of Dickens.)

Two Films (by Bresson)

Over the past couple days, I've watched Michael Haneke's Le Temps du Loup (Time of the Wolf) and Robert Bresson's much older Pickpocket. I was interested when I heard Isabelle Huppert, in an interview included on the DVD, note that many people compare Haneke's pacing with that of Bresson. Superficially, this claim is very valid - they both keep camera movement to a minimum, in general, and tend to rely very heavily on shots of very long duration. However, and Huppert notes this as well, although to make a different point, the uses to which they put these stylistic choices are very different.
Haneke is stretching us to the breaking point - this goes hand in hand with the realism that he seems to be directing his actors to. A very good example of this is in the scene when the central family of the film first arrives at their vacation home in the French countryside. They unexpectedly encounter a family of what appears to be middle class standing, judging by their clothes. This second family has taken refuge in the house and they violently resist the intrusion of the owners. The scene in its entirety deserves a more thorough treatment than I want to offer right now, but it does contain a moment of strange (realistic, perhaps) potency.
The father of the family living in the house responds to the other father's attempts at a peaceful reconciliation by shooting him, by what feels like raw impulse. The specific event I want to focus on is the reaction of the wife, played by Huppert. Her face is blank; she does not immediately scream or freak out, unlike the wife of the shooter, who becomes immediately hysteric, repeating over and over to her husband, "You killed him!" Huppert's character instead looks off in disbelief and, finally, vomits.
What Haneke is offering us, then, is not a psychology as much as a physiology. We do not hear her voice her anguish, but we cannot avoid seeing it. For Bresson, however, there is nothing we cannot avoid. The entire epiphany of the film (as well as the subtle foreshadowing towards it) is easily missed - and that's what gives it its epiphanic quality. The crux of the difference between Haneke's and Bresson's work lies here, and this is perhaps where Huppert is justified in qualifying the comment about their resemblence. For her, Haneke is equal measures Bresson and Hitchcock. This is true in several senses.
First, Le Temps du Loup is structured as by the MacGuffin: the entire setup of world-wide catastrophe is just a device, later almost forgotten, to bring us to the point of seeing the futility of these characters' lives and, by extension, to recognize the West's immense privilege with respect to the majority of humanity.
Second, there is the immense build-up in tension to the final revelation. The quality of the revelation is, more than anything else, what distinguishes this film from Hitchcock and Bresson, but in formula, it resembles Hitchcock. The whole film is a building up to the final scene (excluding the train coda) where we find the young boy trying to burn himself for the sake of the community of survivors. This triggers another character, who is on watch, to come to his rescue and comfort him. This particular character has previously been characterized as xenophobic and unforgiving - these characteristics are perhaps not overridden in these final moments of tenderness, but they are certainly put to the side as Haneke presents us with the movie's first human (in a positive sense) moment. And with it, as a sort of justification for the entire film, perhaps, he lets us know that he does place faith in humanity.
Bresson, on the other hand, is not so obvious with his moments of revelation. Their foundation is the subtle changes in phrasing and expression, the gap between the characters of his film and the humans we know them to be - how else to explain their cryptic behavior but to introduce a human element? It is Michel's task in this film to discover what being human in such a world would mean. For the viewer, as well, his humanity only makes sense in the last moment, with the delivery, the only realistic delivery in the entire film, of the final line. For Bresson, the plot truly matters in a Hitchcockian sense, as it is the experience of each moment of Michel's life, not just the circumstances they allow to be set up, is crucial to understanding of the epiphany.

Alright, so I'm starting this blog with the intention of examining aesthetic issues, specifically as applied to contemporary music and film. One of the most important issues right now, I think, is the question of elitism in music: that is, to what extent do the intellectual pretensions of artists prevent them from communicating to an audience (or expressing themselves if the idea of communication in art isn't to your taste)? What would a progressive artwork that still manages to be politically relevent look like? And how, in all of our sophistication, do we manage to still say something?
This is something of the tone this blog will take. I'll probably start by looking at a couple of Michael Hanecke's more recent films and will probably come to the music of James Tenney, which I've just gotten interested in, in the coming days. And there's always phenomenology, as the title of this blog might suggest to some of you.
Until then.