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.)