Babbitt's Phonemena

The music of Pierre Boulez’s “Le Marteau sans Maitre”, and Milton Babbitt’s “Phonemena”, where strikingly similar in their styles. Both pieces resembled the style of atonal music, because each piece lacked a tonal center or “stable” key. Both pieces contain complex rhythms, and the scoring of instruments is thin. Both require a virtuoso player, because of the technical requirement to play the music and the range of the music. For example, in Boulez’s piece, the flute part contains multiple leaps, extended range, a plethora of accidentals, and difficult rhythms. Babbitt’s piece display similar technical challenges that Boulez’s piece does, but for soprano and piano/tape. My current musical understanding is revolved around tonal music and not atonal music, so this music is more difficult for me analyze what I hear. The music sounded choppy and it was difficult to find were each measure began. In Babbitt’s …show more content…
Schwarz felt atonal music was falling in popularity and would not be around for very long. Both atonal and tonal composers felt that their style was correct, and along with that thought process came disagreement. People who continued to write tonal music felt their style was being overtaken by the new style of writing music. There was tension, disagreement, and slight disgust for one another, more so against atonal composers. Tonal composers felt they were forced into a box, and were supposed to write atonal music, just to keep the reputation that they had built. Atonal composers felt they had to work harder to get their work recognized as a piece of music. As Babbitt stated, “many people would look at a work, and if they could count up to 12 in it, they would reject it” . This quote shows that serialists had trouble trying to connect with audiences, but the Non-serialists had issues