Entry 12: Milton Babbitt – Phonemena

Its nice to hear an interactive work. This piece has a pretty dry fragmented sound environment and mainly composed of short durations, but this creates an excellent contrast when there are sustained notes and the long durations actually build a good ammount of tension since they are used so sparingly. The flow of the piece is very disjunct with its segmented ideas and minimal use of reverberation and decay, and there are many electronic sounds that cut off intantly with no decay at all, but despite this I still feel Babbitt creates a strong sense of pharsing especially in the way he ends his phrases. I mentioned the contrast in his use of durations and I beleive Babbitt makes great use of this polarity in his phrasing as he creates these chaotic textures and resolves them with the contrast of his longer ideas thus giving a sense of clarity to his phrasing. Many of the electronic sounds seem to be derived from synth and midi sounds, but perhaps this is just a result of his manner of manipulation in the piece. There are also a small ammount of percussive sounds, and within these few sounds nearly all are pitched despite their distortion. This is not a bad thing, in fact the piece would be different if this was not so, but I found it very interesting that a piece composed almost exclusively of pitched sounds would have such a weak sense of harmony. Of course, with the fragmented nature of the piece I guess this isn’t that surprising, and when there are moments of clear harmony they have a strong effect. The more I think about I realize that it is not so much that there is a weak sense of harmony in the piece, but rather the sound textures do not blend in a way that brings out the harmony or simply put the sounds are very seperated. I found this piece very static at first, but I warmed up to it very quickly as I began to recognize all the subtlties in his craft especially in regards to contrast. Cool interactive work, great ending.

~ by mathiasc on October 21, 2007.