Review of Essays on the Music and Theoretical Writings of Thomas DeLio, Contemporary American Composer
Reviewed by Benjamin R. Levy, Arizona State University,Tempe, Arizona, USA
Thomas Licata’s collection, Essays on the Music and Theoretical Writings of Thomas DeLio, Contemporary American Composer, is a remarkable new book, the first full-length study of a unique composer and groundbreaking theorist whose contributions to
computer music and percussion literature are undeniable, and whose analytical insights into music of the avant-garde continue to stand out as relevant and thought provoking. The essays included in the volume are well chosen and balance analyses and appraisals of Mr. DeLio’s music by other authors, as well as new essays by Mr. DeLio himself, both analytical and theoretical, concerning other composers and his own work. The collection includes both European and American authors, writings by theorists, composers, and performers, and through this variety of perspectives, succeeds in the difficult task of making connections between the subject’s work as both composer and theorist as well as interdisciplinary connections to other artistic fields. As Hermann Sabbe states in the book’s introduction, “DeLio is, indeed, a scholar and artist in one” (p. v), and this Festschrift brings out many themes and questions that carry over from one side of his work to the other.
The first section of the book is devoted to Mr. DeLio’s work as a composer, and includes several analyses of his works—essays by Linda Dusman, Agostino DiScipio, Wesley Fuller, and Michael Boyd— that represent both electronic music and works for acoustic instruments, most of which are included on the accompanying CD. All of the analysts at some point have to come to terms with some of the strikingly original features of the music, in particular, the composer’s use of long periods of silence, and, related to this, his preference for nonlinear, nonhierarchical structures.
Linda Dusman’s “Luminous Presence: Thomas DeLio’s think on parch (four songs for tape)” begins by responding to the question of how these purely electronic works fit into the tradition of song. Although the composer and poet (P. Inman, whose voice is the principle source of sound material) have closely related artistic sensibilities, their voices remain distinct in these settings. Mr. DeLio’s concern with engaging the audience to reflect actively on the process of perception puts his songs squarely at odds with romantic ideas of narrative. Ms. Dusman points in particular to one instance where the composer’s voice is heard on tape, referring to the process of recording and composition, making this process more transparent and dissolving any sort of imaginary scenario that romantic Lieder often work to create. Christopher Shultis’s article, discussed subsequently, also picks up on this modernist, antiromantic impulse in Mr. DeLio’s work, and the composer’s tendency to question accepted genres and expectations. Ms. Dusman also examines many nonlinear aspects of the music, including the use of silences and the way spatial location and computer processing reflect the stanza divisions of P. Inman’s text. Mr. DeLio manages to give each stanza an audible identity while not necessarily reproducing the text in a conventionally straightforward way—transferring what is traditionally a chronological distinction, based on linear progression of time, into a distinction made spatially, sonically, and synchronously.
Bright seaweed reaping, the subject of Wesley Fuller’s detailed analysis, is a song in the more usual sense—a setting of a traditional Japanese poem, scored for soprano and instruments—and as such leads to interesting comparisons with Ms. Dusman’s essay. Here the poem is more linear and syntactic in ways that P. Inman’s often fragmentary, Beckett-influenced poetry is not, but Mr. DeLio’s text setting, using silence to isolate individual words or clauses, focuses attention on the significance of individual linguistic moments. Mr. Fuller sets up this observation by citing correspondence between the composer and translator (American poet, Cid Corman), comparing different translations, and pointing out how a single word can convey meaning far beyond its simple definition.
Michael Boyd’s excellent analysis focuses on though for piano. Mr. Boyd parses the surface of the work into layers, rather than addressing changes as sections, an approach that seems quite fitting here—each sounding event seems like a representative from some pre-existing strand, which momentarily surfaces and then recedes into silence, an effect that seems more common to electroacoustic music than to instrumental works. Moreover, this approach allows Mr. Boyd to look at the connections between different events (looking at pitch class emphasis and density within particular layers), and address them as related instances of a common type, but not as causally connected to one another. Mr. Boyd supports this reading of the piece with an examination of the lengths of the silences that separate these events, preserving open, non-causal connections between the sound events.
Agostino DiScipio’s essay, “Notes on Digital Silence: Listening to Tom DeLio’s Short Tape Works,” is not an analysis of a single piece, but an examination of features, including extended silences, in several works. Mr. DiScipio points out that there is a difference between technologically “generated” silence, and a recording of natural silence, or of ambient space. Likewise we may observe that the nature of the silence changes depends on the surrounding material, whether acoustic or electronic, if electronic then whether synthesized or concr`ete, and also, whether or not a text is involved.
The authors are in agreement that Mr. DeLio’s use of silence is decidedly not Cagean—it is not an invitation to attend to external sounds happening in the environment as in 4!33!!. Instead, the silence functions as “blank spaces on a page, more graphic or visual than ‘musical’” (p. 28), according to Ms. Dusman, who also equates this silence to “negative space” or “margins.” Addressing silence through an analogy to the visual arts is a common strategy through all the analyses in this volume, and given Mr. DeLio’s frequent references to contemporary visual artists in his own essays, this seems like an effective way of coming to terms with a phenomenon that is less familiar inmusic. This analogy to visual arts also helps address the nonlinear nature of the music, comparing the way we come across events to the way our eyes would come across different objects while scanning the canvas of a painting.
Mr. DiScipio points out that in Mr. DeLio’s music, the “silent segments have a duration that far exceeds what perception psychologists describe as the width of the present (i.e., the time span of 8” to 12”), within which sequential events can in one way or another be connected to the whole” (p. 51). He then relates the silences in this music directly to the issues of nonlinearity, and connects the challenges and complexity directly to human perception. When put to the extreme lengths that we find in Mr. DeLio’s music (Ms. Dusman points to instances where over half of the piece is “negative space”), the functions of individual silences become multifaceted. No longer do we have a purely anticipatory silence before the performance, a reflective one afterwards, and other smaller “breathing pauses” within, as Zofia Lissa presents as the norm in her 1964 article, “Aesthetic Functions of Silence and Rests in Music” (Journal of Aesthetics and Art Criticism, Vol. 22/4, Summer 1964, pp. 443– 454). Here, the inner silences can be longer than the beginning or ending silences, defying hierarchical syntax, forcing listeners both to process the details of the previous sound and to anticipate the next; moreover, the degree to which these functions overlap, or eventually nullify each other, is largely up to the individual listener. One might connect these perceptual issues back to the analogy of the visual arts by saying that there is a conflict, then, between what is perceived as frame and content, and with no resolution to this prolonged conflict, one might do well to abandon the distinction altogether.
Here we really approach the “Complexity of Experience” that Mr. DeLio lays out in his article of the same name (his artistic credo opens this collection). As listeners, the composer pushes us in conflicting directions, and forces us to question a priori categories. The silences, which are ostensibly all the same in terms of content, prove to be quite varied in their function. Moreover, as Mr. DiScipio points out, the long silences can attune listeners to the most minute differences—the hum of different types of loudspeakers, or the acoustic personality of the hall. Furthermore, the impulse to group all of the sounds into a single category, as one side of the opposition “sound versus silence” is immediately undercut by the great diversity in the contrasting particulars of the actual sounds. Rereading “The Complexity of Experience” after the analyses, one is struck by the ambitious nature of Mr. DeLio’s philosophy of composition, questioning the very nature of what we call “unity” and “identity.”
While these analytical essays are self-contained, these philosophical concerns are in the background of all of them; Christopher Shultis’s contribution, “The Dialectics of Experimentalism,” addresses some of these more directly. In what was originally a series of three lectures, Mr. Shultis examines two different views of experimental music as represented by Pierre Boulez and John Cage, and then turns to a discussion of various ways in which composers such as Brian Ferneyhough and Mr. DeLio are, respectively, the inheritors of this dialectic; these two composers are both represented by articles in the “Complexity Forum” of Perspectives of New Music (Vol. 31, Winter 1993), and make for a compelling comparison in Mr. Shultis’s article. Particularly interesting is the discussion of memory and its role in the formation of gestures in Mr. Ferneyhough’s music versus the concept of presence in Mr. DeLio’s music and the ways it leads him to the creation of sound objects as concrete sonic entities; and moreover the contrasting ideas of complexity as seen in Mr. Ferneyhough’s case as technique and virtuosity, or in Mr. DeLio’s case as a complexity of perceptual experience.
The degree to which Mr. DeLio’s works provoke questions fundamental to musical discourse can be seen in Robert Morris’s contribution, “Music, Talking About Music, Talking About Talking About Music,” which appears later in the volume. Mr. Morris posits a three-level system where discourse about music becomes self-conscious at the third level. He mentions certain text pieces (such as Cage’s “Lecture on Nothing”) as examples where all three levels of discourse “can share the same cognitive and experiential space” (p. 242); in the context of the book as a whole, though, one may wonder if Mr. DeLio’s pieces approach this in another way, through self-conscious moments in the music such as the one Ms. Dusman cites, but even more remarkably, non-verbally, through the silences which draw the listener into active consideration rather than passive reception.
The performers represented in this volume address many of the same issues raised by the theoretical and analytical discussions; the change in perspective, though, is quite informative. In his “The Evolution of a Performance Practice: Thomas DeLio’s wave / s,” Morris Palter discusses his interpretive decisions while working on that piece: considering the implications of a pitch/noise dialogue that flows through the piece and how this dialogue effect his decisions regarding instrument selection, attack, resonance, and blend. His essay is a valuable companion piece to Steven Schick’s discussion of Xenakis’s Psappha (in The Percussionist’s Art: Same Bed, Different Dreams, University of Rochester Press, 2006); this comparison will be of particular interest to those familiar with Mr. DeLio’s analyses of Xenakis. The book presents yet another notable connection as Mr. Shultis’s discussion of Mr. Ferneyhough mentions Mr. Schick, and 76 Computer Music Journal conversely, Mr. Shultis’s role as a performer and interpreter of Mr. DeLio’s music comes up in Mr. Palter’s essay.
Tom Goldstein’s essay deals extensively with performing the silences in Mr. DeLio’s music. In light of the previous discussion, one can see how complicated a task this can be. Mr. Goldstein asks, “Should the silences necessarily be intense? Should they even be serious? Should they perhaps be serene?” (p. 201). And it is clear that he recognizes the multitude of functions that happen in these rests and is conscious of how a performer might aid or detract from the sense of openness that is so vital to the composer’s aesthetic. Mr. Goldstein also addresses the difficulty of learning and practicing a type of music where one has no chance to make causal connections between events. It is fascinating to hear a performer’s take on the practical implications of the same issues discussed in the earlier analyses: the nonlinear nature of the music, and the devalued role of memory.
Tracy Wiggins’s interview with Mr. DeLio ranges over his influences, inspirations, and starting points, and his ways of thinking about his own music and the relationships between pieces. The composer seems drawn to the fragmentary and incomplete, and both Mr. DiScipio (in the electronic medium) and Mr. Palter (in the percussion music) discuss interrelationships between works, relating some of the short pieces together in the same way that brief individual sounds are connected across the silences within a piece. When Mr.Wiggins broaches this subject, it is interesting to hear the response: “Actually, I think of all my music as related. Each piece is a different facet of my view of music” (p. 209).
The final section of the book is devoted to Mr. DeLio’s theoretical and analytical work, including essays by the subject and others. Robert Morris’s essay (discussed earlier) is included here, as is an essay by Steven Johnson on “Organic Construction in Music of Morton Feldman”; indeed, the recent boom in American scholarship on Morton Feldman owes much to Mr. DeLio’s The Music of Morton Feldman (Greenwood Press, 1996). Mr. Johnson’s analysis focuses on For Frank O’Hara, stressing the role of texture, register, and timbre as well as harmony in this piece of music, and bringing out an interesting discrepancy between Feldman’s rhetoric and the actual music.
Mr. DeLio’s critique of trends in contemporary music theory comes out in his interview with Mr.Wiggins, and also in his essays Circumscribing the Open Universe,” and “The Open Universe Revisited”—the latter of which appears for the first time in the present collection. In the first of these essays, the author explains how he sees the idea of an “open” work, drawing on Italo Calvino and Allain Robe-Grillet (among others) to articulate the idea of the artwork not as an object, but as something in the process of becoming. In the second, follow-up essay, Mr. DeLio addresses this same idea in greater depth, both from a compositional perspective and also from a theoretical one. He sees a very destructive trend in much of the set-class analysis pioneered by David Lewin and Alan Forte. Although he does not cite specific essays from Mr. Lewin, Mr. Forte comes under direct criticism in Mr. DeLio’s analysis of Anton Webern’s masterwork, Bewegt (Op. posth., 1913). And the two analyses that end the book exemplify the philosophical distinctiveness of Mr. DeLio’s approach to analysis, while pointing out the limitations he finds accompanying the codification of set theory, or other fixed systems of analysis.
Mr. DeLio’s critique focuses on Mr. Forte’s contribution to an Analysis Forum on Webern’s Bewegt (Journal of Music Theory, 18/2, 1974, pp. 13–43) and in particular on Mr. Forte’s statement that “it is reasonable to assume, however, that orchestration was not a primary consideration, whereas the overall pitch organization of the music was a fundamental concern” (quoted p. 322, n. 8).Mr. DeLio points to a snare-drum roll, which fills the noise spectrum as a culminating point for his own hearing of the piece—a convincing argument, using spectrographs as evidence of his claims, and centering around a specific sonic event in the composition that Mr. Forte’s analysis ignores entirely. Indeed, an analysis that focuses entirely on pitch-class relationships would have trouble capturing this aspect of the work’s design, which, given the role of klangfarbenmelodie in Arnold Schoenberg’s work, seems quite plausible in his student’s music as well.
Mr. DeLio’s second analysis focuses on the iconoclastic Italian composer Giacinto Scelsi, and the third movement of his Quattro Pezzi (su una nota sola). The analysis here examines the role of microtonal inflections, attack noise, and dynamics in shaping the form of the piece, again using spectrographs to analyze the full spectrum of sonic activity. The author examines the spectral data and makes observations pointing to a change in the implied fundamental of the single note to which the title of the piece refers. This analysis also points to reasons that Scelsi has been held in high esteem by spectral composers Gerard Grisey and Tristan Murail. More and more composers are taking into consideration the full range of noise and pitch as an integral part of their composition, and although this approach is perhaps most commonly acknowledged in contemporary electronic or percussion music, yet Mr. DeLio has chosen two early orchestral examples for his analysis, showing the need to address timbre in earlier music as well. In so doing he calls attention to the dangers of codifying set theory, and expecting analysis to be based solely around the assumptions of this analytical system. After all, what could a set-class analysis that assumes octave-equivalency say about such a piece, built around the diversity of sounds within a single note? These analyses are thought provoking in that they do not aim simply to describe how the piece goes, but are invitations to explore radically different ways of hearing the works; moreover, when read at the end of the present collection, they resonate with Mr. DeLio’s theories of what an open artwork should do, and also with the aesthetics of his own compositions. Through its diverse essays, the present book succeeds in the remarkable task of showing this crossdisciplinary consistency in ways that few other volumes have attempted.