Essays on the Music and Theoretical Writings of Thomas DeLio, Contemporary American Composer, with Accompanying CD of Selected Compositions of Thomas DeLio (review)

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...