The Amores of John Cage (review)

This examination of Cage’s 1943 work, Amores, for percussion trio and prepared piano, continues a promising trend of book-length studies of individual Cage works. For over twenty-five years, Thomas DeLio, a composition and theory professor at the University of Maryland, has been at the forefront of developing new analytic approaches to Cage’s music.¹ In this case, he devotes a separate chapter to an analysis of each of Amores’ four movements, charting the minutiae of Cage’s varied soundscape, from prepared piano timbres in the first and fourth movements to composite rhythmic structures and “density of percussion attack points” in the second (for nine tom-toms and pod rattle) and third (for three sets of woodblocks).

While immersed in the book’s detailed charts, scores, and graphs, a nagging question arises: what would Cage think of all this theoretical attention?² In a moment of rhetorical whimsy, he himself once scribbled (then crossed out) two questions: “Why analyze music? Why not listen to it?”³ Cage’s thinking at the time was premised on moving beyond formalist positions in order to open our ears to the wide range of sounds around us. He notes in “Listening to Music” (1937) that since modern music (and non-Western music) does not follow the rules of traditional Western art music, listeners are free to hear sounds without fear that they “mistook the Development for the Recapitulation.” As Cage sums up, “music need not be understood, but rather it must be heard.”⁴

Though DeLio’s mission is clearly to help us understand Amores, he does so on Cage’s terms by treating all sounds—pitched or percussive—equally. By organizing these sounds into a logical schema, he then uses analytic methods far removed from the formal and harmonic methods familiar to Cage in the late 1930s. For example, he draws on statistics for an analysis of the second movement, tracking the “density” of tom-tom attacks and their mean average per second throughout (59). The result reveals a previously unknown symmetry to Cage’s rhythmic language.⁵ This is one of many insights to be gleaned from DeLio’s work, and while this book is geared primarily toward theorists, and especially to those interested in exploring new modes of nonharmonic analysis, this is by no means a typical collection of analyses.

In the opening chapter, “Introduction: A Modernist Vortex,” DeLio sidesteps the worn debates of twentieth-century music: high art versus low art, serialism versus indeterminacy, Stravinsky versus Schoenberg, and so on. Instead, he grounds his reading of Amores in modernist poetics and the opposition between organic and inorganic form, drawing on Marjorie Perloff’s delineation of two streams: the Symbolist (T. S. Eliot and Charles Baudelaire) evolving from Romantic notions of organic form, and the anti-Symbolist (Arthur Rimbaud and Gertrude Stein), characterized by an inorganic or indeterminate approach.⁶ The organic is characterized by a clear interdependency between form, content, and artistic intention: “The artwork becomes an image of the individual; its form and process one with the self” (4). Conversely, the inorganic severs the link between artist and work in order to more directly conjure the phenomena of experience.

Traditionally these two approaches have been separated in modernism studies. DeLio, however, argues that they should be considered together, contending that their coexistence and interdependence is a “central paradigm” of modernism. Using Amores as a case study, his assessment is unequivocal: Amores “represents a farsighted and historical moment in the evolution of music in the twentieth century—a vortex of oppositional impulses within which the organic and inorganic are drawn together in order to reveal their mutual interdependence. I refer to the design of Amores as a vortex in that it draws vastly different, seemingly unrelated ideas together” (15). DeLio uses Ezra Pound’s term “vortex,” defined as “the point of maximum energy,” to capture the dynamism of Cage’s oppositional aesthetic.^7...