Interview by Jerry Tabor and Scott McCoy (excerpts)
Tabor: This is an interview with Thomas DeLio in Washington D.C. on April 18th, 2015. Thank you for being here with us. The first question, please tell about your studies with theorists Robert Cogan and Ernst Oster. What are the highlights of that time that inform your thinking today?
DeLio: Well, that would have been when I was an undergraduate in the late 60s/early 70s at New England Conservatory in Boston. As you know, I was an undergraduate composition major there with Robert Cogan who was also head of the graduate theory program. Oster travelled from New York one day a week to teach at NEC. Both men were brilliant theorists and extraordinary teachers. When I think of the way they taught it seems quite different from the way many theorists teach. Both were very flexible, conveying a sense that you really analyzed your experience of a piece. So, for example, your notation may change, even for the same passage, from time to time. Oster was very critical of some American Schenkerian theorists who tended to want to formalize everything, That was not his way. He taught us to be very flexible, to really try to notate what we heard, and then understand what was going on in the passage. I think that was the heart of Cogan’s approach to music theory also, you can tell from his books. I think what I learned from both of them is that it’s the specific piece that counts. When I was a grad student I studied with a very great mathematician, Robert MacPherson, who’s now at the Institute for Advanced Studies at Princeton, and I remember him saying to me, the specific case is always more interesting than the general theory. I think that’s true. I mean, I think that’s certainly true in music.
McCoy: There’s a presence of anxiety which is never found in your analysis at all, or in anything that Cogan’s ever done. The need to formalize results through a very, very constrained viewpoint.
DeLio: That’s right. Too many theorists have decided that there is one way to talk about a piece, or a concept, and it’s really absurd to take that approach. You should take the exact opposite approach. What is your experience of a piece, then formulate some way to talk about it. You’ve probably both heard me for years say this, that the way you talk about something completely colors the way you think about it, so you have to be very, very flexible in the way you talk about things and be willing to change the way you talk about them, because if you always talk about something exactly the same way you’ll be stuck listening to it one way, never hearing any other possibilities. When my Morton Feldman book came out, one British musicologist wrote that one of the things that bothered him about the book was that every author who contributed a paper used different terminology to discuss structure. In other words, I used the word region instead of section, and I explained why, and someone else used area, someone else used section…different terminologies…and he said that, as an editor, I should have just said there’s only one way to speak about things and we all should have used the same terminology. Of course, I’ve said many times exactly why I didn’t do this, because there should never (could never) be one just one way to talk about one’s experience of music, because everybody’s experience is different. Moreover, with respect to music like Feldman’s… who possibly could know if there even could be a single right way to talk about it, who could possibly know yet what that is? And I don’t believe there ever will be a single right way.
Tabor: Do you think that influenced the way you look at all the music you analyze, and your compositional approach? That openness, that flexibility?
DeLio: It gave me the sense of freedom to try to analyze music that no one was analyzing. I mean, no one had been analyzing Feldman before I wrote my first analytical papers on him. So, I didn’t have to worry if there was an orthodox way of analyzing Feldman. That was simply not an issue. Many people at the time that I wrote my paper on Cage’s Variations II, the early 80’s, thought that this music was also un-analyzable.
Tabor: Yes, impossible.
DeLio: Right, but it’s not. You can think it through. There’s no system to think from, which is a very good thing. Even if there was such a system, which I don’t believe there is…
McCoy: It’s also a very scary thing too.
DeLio: Well, depending on your mentality, it’s either scary or it’s exciting. To me it wasn’t scary it was just…this is an adventure, let’s do it.
Tabor: I think that one way that you’ve influenced a lot of young theorists is how you ask the question: why study theory? Or, why analyze music? Can you address your feelings on that?
DeLio: I think you’re a musician because you think through sounds and you try to understand your experience of these organized sounds we call compositions, to borrow from Varese. Theory is one way of thinking about music and it can help you think about music in ways that performing doesn’t. I mean, performance is an experience of a piece of music in real time: you’re playing it through, you’re experiencing it that way. Theory, it’s out of time. You’re analyzing it, you’re hearing a passage over and over before you go to the next one, you’re trying to relate forward and backward and things like this, something you can’t do from a performance. So, there’s different ways to experience music. And musicologists teach us to experience it in yet another way, through an historical context. So, I think that it’s very important to recognize that these are different activities which give us different perspectives.
Tabor: You mention these different types of experiences of music: composing, analyzing, performing, thinking about it, etc., is there, in your view, a hierarchical or preferred experience of music? I understand that you’ve chosen to be an analyst and a composer, but in terms of the experience of music is there any hierarchical element there, and does it on any way touch the structure of the music?
DeLio: I’m not sure how to answer that…I mean…I tend to be non-hierarchical in many ways. You’ve probably read that in comments I’ve made about my own music. I’m not convinced experience is itself hierarchical.
McCoy: Your answers intrigue me because I can remember, from my first class with you twenty years ago, the first thing that you said in the room: why study music theory? And you said, it’s just another way of experiencing music. I think if there’s any sort of hierarchical structure imposed on that it has to do with the amount of time and intention that you decide to spend with it.
DeLio: One of the things that’s always been great to me about Cogan’s work is, when you read an analysis he’s done, no matter how detailed it is, you always have the sense that… I think you were alluding to this before Scott…that this came from a direct experience of the music. He is mapping what he experienced, and it becomes convincing because he spends so much attention to every detail that the evidence simply builds. Finally, he crystallizes his experience in words. Of course, that’s what theory should do and it just doesn’t very often. It’s funny, not to get off on a tangent but, one of the trends in theory today…you hear it discussed at conferences more now...is the study of perception. We want to study how music’s perceived etc., but the discussions are really rarely about perception. They’re really talking about generalizations…you cannot talk about the perception of music (or anything for that matter) without studying individual cases, specific cases, in great detail. And I just find so much writing about theory lacking in this respect.
McCoy: I don’t think it’s a tangent at all Tom. Those conferences are about learning how to file correctly. Which filed folder does this go in…
DeLio: That’s right, but what I find disturbing is that there is now a new file folder called perception, and it really has nothing to do with study of perception.
Tabor: Is there such a thing as a generalized theory of music.
DeLio: A general theory of music…it doesn’t interest me, and I don’t believe it even…I can’t prove this…but I don’t believe it even exists, for any music, no matter what the period or language. Otto Laske, of course, may be an exception, as you would well know Jerry having written the book on him, but he’s really dealing with what he himself terms composition theory, which is a theory of compositional processes, and that’s quite different from theory as most people think about it. He tried to generalize the process of composition, and that’s different from the examination of finished products. I don’t really know how far you can generalize that or not. Otto could obviously address that better than I could. But, certainly no one’s gone further in that area than he has. I mean, he’s really thought about that his whole lifetime.
Tabor: I’ve always been fascinated with your perspective on set theory. I remember you telling me one time that you were not convinced of its validity.
DeLio: That’s a mild way to put it! Actually, on occasion, when I’ve had an essay published, I’ve had editors say, can you recast this discussion of pitch in terms of set theory? And I’ve always refused…and my answer has always been the same. I’ve spent my whole life saying that this is nonsense, and this is a very bad way to talk about pitch structures, so I’m not going to be hypocritical and rewrite my essay using that language. They’ve always gone ahead and published it. I have never read an analysis using pitch class sets that’s convinced me that even the author hears music that way.
McCoy: It’s basically just…okay you have these pitches together, and this is the notation label we’re going to use for them as a set. It’s abstract. It has no context whatsoever, and there’s no relationship between the two (the set and its context). The set would have to articulate itself through application, but it doesn’t.
Tabor: …and that’s the whole point…I mean, you’re interested in context.
DeLio: And cognition. I think in every Feldman paper I’ve written I’ve used different terminology, so I can try to convey an experience of the music which can’t possibly be the same from piece to piece. As I said before the way you talk about something determines the way you think about it. And if you always talk about different things the same way, you’re never going to hear their differences, because you’re always limiting your ability to think about them from different perspectives. Okay, that’ll be my final word on that!
Tabor: From my point of view, and many people feel the same way, you’re one of the most significant theorists of recent decades, because you’re actually able to approach these, so called ‘impossible to analyze works of art’. I think that this actually takes us directly into something else that is fascinating about you, and that is the definition of art that you often cite: making art is simply a way of thinking about things.
DeLio: It was the great visual artist Robert Irwin who said that, and I never forgot it. I mean I think it’s just…it is just true. Musicians think about the world through sound. And making art out of sound is a way of thinking…it is their way of thinking. And going back to what we’ve been discussing, it’s all based on perception. You’re thinking through the medium through which you connect with the world. We’re all musicians in this room and we think about the world through our musical experience. I’m not saying exclusively, but it is our strongest connection. I have always thought Irwin a very important visual artist because his work is all about non-objectivity; trying to create an artwork which is the experience of the moment rather than an objectification of an experience.
Tabor: I think what you have just described is…maybe why you yourself compose?
DeLio: That’s interesting because I don’t want to give the impression…switching to my composition…that these views evolved consciously. I mean, I don’t think any of us…we’re all composers here…any of us could say, if we are honest, this is why I compose. It is subconscious. We all develop in different ways, and certainly, from the very beginning of my life as a composer, I was interested in the same things that I’m interested in now. I wasn’t as good at it then as I am now, but I was interested in them, and I think over time I’ve come to realize that that Irwin definition applies to me. But, I wouldn’t want anyone to think that I consciously started out trying to emulate Irwin’s views, working consciously that direction. It’s something internal. It comes from the way you’ve developed your whole relationship with the world, through your perceptions, and that becomes part of your music. Yes, you’ll ask different questions along the way because you’ll want to approach the same issues in new ways, in fresh ways, but I think the same issues are still going to be there. For instance, when I started doing electronic music, after doing purely instrumental music for some time, obviously I started asking a lot of different questions, (the medium is so different), but it’s remarkable to me, and I think other people have noticed it too, how similar my instrumental music is to my electronic music, because there’s just this certain way that I relate to sound, that transcends those differences. So even though there are differences along the way, there is a fundamental attitude that I don’t think ever changes.
Tabor: This actually is a fascinating topic for me, because, your history as a composer, and theorist, seems different than that of a lot of musicians. For example, a lot of composers I’ve talked to, when they first heard the Rite of Spring, it just was totally unacceptable to them because it was just too far out. A few years later they may love it, after they start asking totally different questions. But for you, it seems that your way of experiencing music, and the questions that you’re dealing with, has been fairly consistent over time.
DeLio: I would say that the first time… I think I do actually remember this… the first time I heard the Rite of Spring my first thought was, is there something even more wild than this? It was not that this is too wild. It was that this is great, but maybe this is tame compared to other musics. So, this was opening the door, and I didn’t want to stop there, and you may have had the same feeling, because I know you’re a very adventurous composer too. There are some people who experience new things and it creates a desire have more new experiences, and I don’t mean that as a fad, I mean that they want to enrich their experiences more and more. But then there are other people who hear the new thing and just want to shut the door, they don’t want to know what’s coming next, and that’s…I don’t know… maybe you’re born that way, or maybe this is a limitation of education.
Tabor: I‘m curious how the different domains of theory and composition interact or inform one another for you.
DeLio: Actually, I wrote something about this once for the online journal NewMusicBox [reprinted in this volume]. They asked exactly the same question of several composers. Doing analyses of specific, challenging pieces is my way of thinking about music. You know, I think some composers, even good composers, want to try things out, so they write a piece. Usually, if I want to try something out my response is to analyze a piece. I don’t want to imitate, say, Xenakis. Or, if I have an idea for something and I realize, you know Xenakis did something like this, my instinct is, well, let me explore what he did rather than do something that would not be fully my own. I think now that, through my analysis of different kinds of music, I avoided following certain paths that may not have been fruitful for me as a composer.
Tabor: And this part of you that does not want to imitate, this push toward originality…is this essential for making great art?
DeLio: Well, I don’t want to suggest that I sit around thinking, I want to be original, but I do believe that any art of significance will be original. As I said earlier, if I have an experience of sound that I think I might develop into a piece, but I feel that perhaps I have experienced something like that before, I’ll deal with it by looking at somebody else’s music, trying to really understand that that avenue has been explored and I then no longer have a desire to do so as well. I think, in this way, one discovers that the original impulse was not really personal. One of things I’ve never understood about some composers is that they’ll hear some music and they’ll say, wow that was great I want to do something like that, I just simply don’t understand the point of that. Why do something like that? Find out what’s in you that’s different. Find out what you really want to express. No two people are alike. No two people are going to write the same kind of music if they’re really in touch with themselves.
McCoy: In this regard I can’t help thinking about Harold Bloom and the anxiety of influence. But for you it’s just coming from, is this interesting to me.
DeLio: That’s right. It’s not fear or anxiety. Anxiety, it seems, arises when someone has never really gotten in touch with what it is that they need to experience through sound as a composer. If you really are in touch with that…and whether you’re going to be a great composer, an average one, or a not a very good one…if you’re in touch with what you need to experience through sound, something about your music will be an expression of what’s really inside of you, and will be very personal, and therefore will be original. I think that that whole notion of anxiety simply comes from people who are working from images of art that…oh this was what was done, this is what we’re supposed to be doing, but we’re supposed to be doing it better than it was…that’s all nonsense It comes from inside, and if you’re really in touch with what’s inside of you, again, whether you’re a great composer or not, there’s going to be something original there. I mean I’ve had students who are really very good and have given us something original. But I’ve also had students who, really just aren’t going to be good composers. But, if you can get them in touch with something, there are those moments in their pieces when you say, well this is worth it, this is real, this is something I’ve never experienced before.
Tabor: And this is something that I understand as a composer, and that I act on all the time. I’m not concerned about originality, and that sort of thing. Although I realize that what I create becomes original because it’s from inside me. But I’d like to dig a little bit deeper. As a teacher, or maybe as just a fellow musician, how do you get somebody down to that level where they can actually understand, their own experience of things? How can they implement that whole way of thinking and creating?
DeLio: I think a big part of it is just counteracting all the conventions that are constraining people. I had a student once who turned into a very, very good composer. But when he first came to me was writing instrumental pieces of a very conventional nature…very uninteresting, and he was very unhappy with them. And after weeks and weeks of looking over these scores, I finally just closed them and said, there’s nothing in this that tells me your heart’s in this, what do you really want to write? And he had a very hard time working through this. It took many weeks for him to articulate that he’d really always wanted to try a concept of improvisation, notated graphically. Not graphically notating sounds, but graphically notating ways of behaving. I said, well why haven’t you done that? And he said, well I was just told that you can’t do that. And not just by teachers, but I think he meant by everything he had experienced…and you know it was kind of funny…with this one student all I had to do was say, do it, it’s okay, it’s right. And he never looked back. He became more and more creative. Sometimes it’s just a matter of giving someone permission (as I think Feldman once said of Cage), and then your job is to critique…just provide feedback. I think there are a lot of social constraints forced upon you by teachers, by society, and through the quantity of uninteresting music that you hear.
McCoy: Well it’s worked in my case…giving permission. Just this small anecdote… when I first started working with you, you told me about a concert where I could hear Feldman’s Triadic Memories…I’ll never forget it. So I go to this concert and I’m listening to this piece and it goes on and on and on, and I’m thinking when is this piece going to end, I’ve got to catch a bus. Then all of a sudden it actually felt…the sounds, because of the length of the piece, they were becoming very visceral. It got to a point where sound was tactile, which really kind of scared me, because I said, I have never experienced this before at all.
DeLio: This will make you laugh, not too long ago I read an analysis of that same piece using PC sets…
McCoy: Oh no…oh no…
DeLio: Which is like…is like…anyway, that’s absurd, so let’s go on.
Tabor: So, as an analyst/composer, how do you describe the role of structure in your own music?
DeLio: My approach to composition evolved gradually over time…not consciously…but as I worked with materials. I’m very interested in letting form emerge from the juxtaposition of things that are really different to one another…not having one sonic event evolve into the next, but presenting a succession of events that are so different from one another that they create polarities, oppositions. I present a succession of events that continually contradict one another sonically, creating a succession of oppositional relationships. Eventually, these disparities achieve some sort of balance. The funny thing is that sometimes people say to me, how do you know when the piece is over, when are you finished? And, to me, it’s when all of these oppositions finally achieve some state of equilibrium. Now, I’ve found that the best way to create such an experience of form is to project each sonic event in isolation. So, I try to avoid establishing connections among them. No sonic event is ever more important than any other…it’s very non-hierarchical. I never want everything to evolve to one point. To me, that’s not what I want to experience, ever, in my own music. It’s okay if I experience it in someone else’s music, and it’s done in an interesting way, but that’s not me. This is a fundamental principle of my music that has evolved gradually over many years.
Recently, I did a piece based on a text by the poet P. Inman entitled aengus. My piece is called inents. For it I developed a new idea of form…at least for me…also inspired by the often variable formal (often visual) designs of Inman’s poems. First, I created about forty sound events: some containing straightforward, complete readings of the text; others containing words and phrases that I transformed sonically in different ways (filtering, reverberation, cross synthesis…). The events ranged from complete readings, through partial readings, to transformations wherein speech was still partially recognizable, finally to events where the source of the sound material was only barely recognizable at all…as speech. I also created a series of what I call time-frames, each of different duration. Each sonic event sits somewhere within one of these time-frames…rarely starting at the beginning of a time-frame, so there is really no way to perceive when one frame ends and another begins. This seems to convey a strangely open quality to the final composition; a feeling of moments and surfaces floating freely in time and space. I then arranged these events in different ways to create multiple versions of the composition – the shortest around five minutes, the longest around sixteen. No version contains all of the sound events, and all versions present the events in different orders. My goal in determining the order in each version was to create a succession of disconnected events, a succession of events in which similarity and connection would become meaningless in the formation of hierarchical relationships. I actually hope that different listeners will become familiar with different, but not all versions, so that each listener will have a different sense of what the piece is. And, you know this is not as unusual a concept as you might think. It seems clear to me that no two people ever experience the same piece of music the same way. All I have done, as have some others in different ways, is to bring this dimension of our experience…its absolute uniqueness…to the forefront…into the design of the music, acknowledging and enacting it as a fact through the work. I think my work is very Cagean in this sense. Not that my music’s a lot like Cage, but it seems to me his whole life was finding strategies to make music more open, to reflect the nature of our experience more accurately.
The sound material of inents consists entirely of computer generated transformation of readings of the poem. Electronics are very important to me to because they generate sounds that are just really there, really visceral…they’re physical, they’re concrete, and they’re rich. More and more over time, I find it harder to write instrumental music. Percussion music is perhaps an exception because the instruments generate rich, noise based sonorities that I find exciting. I find the composition of pitch based music very, very difficult because I want to treat pitch as sound and not just as an element in a musical language, which is not interesting to me. It’s very hard to create a context in which you can divorce pitch from all linguistic implications (tonal, serial, melodic…) and recapture it as a pure instance of sound. That’s interesting to try to do, and I do try from time to time.
Tabor: So when, for example, you combine percussion and piano, and the piano does various pitches it seems as though you try to blend them in such a way that they don’t function as language but are simply components of these larger, sonic environments that you create.
DeLio: Yes, well I’ll give you an example: there’s a duo out in Ohio, as we speak, recording one of my older pieces, not, for piano and percussion, There are many passages where the piano will sustain pitches and then lift the pedal very suddenly and cut them off, and that’s actually what’s important in the piece, the fact that the resonance that you get from a piano can be really cut, and that moment where sound and silence meet becomes the most important thing in the piece. It’s not the pitches, except with respect to which best articulate that break from sound to silence. Now, that piece is over twenty-five years old, but at the time I remember that this seemed to be a possible strategy to allow me to use pitch as sound, to get into the properties of pitch as sounded by a piano. There’s another piece of mine, for solo percussion called, as though, at the end of which I sound one pitch, the only pitch sounded in the piece. Up to that point we’ve heard only non-pitched sounds… bongos, snare drum, cymbals, and other things…and then right at the end there’s one moment when percussionist plays an E5. He plays a chime softly on that note, and then on a vibraphone repeats the same note rapidly, and that’s it. That’s the only pitch in the whole piece. But it comes after a framing of non-pitched sounds. So to me,…I don’t know if it affects other people this way…that moment makes pitch seem like something very new. So it seemed right to do at that moment… I was able to make pitch just be a sound. It’s like that old quote about Gertrude Stein… that she scrubbed words clean so they no longer had all those clichéd associations that had built up over so many centuries.
McCoy: There’s baggage involved…
DeLio: There’s baggage, that’s right, and pitch has a lot of baggage. But then, you know, there’s just this whole other world of sound that’s out there, so why am I worrying about pitch? Why don’t I just use all of that?
Tabor: In some earlier works, say between for flute, piano and percussion ensemble, it doesn’t seem to me the pitch sounds are treated as pitches. They seem to be more of a recognition of a spectral wash of some sort, or maybe components of a spectrum, because every sound has pitch in it…it’s just a matter of how it stacks up… how it’s synthesized by the ear. In those cases, are you thinking of pitch as a component of a larger spectrum, of a timbre?
DeLio: Absolutely. There’s a passage in that piece [between] where the flute starts off, and it’s playing with very articulated sounds, very sharp attacks. To me the attack, of a flute, or whatever instrument, is as important, or more important, than the particular pitch being played. The non-pitched percussion then pick up the attack noise and amplify it, so to speak. Finally, all of that cuts off and we are left with all this ringing of piano, glockenspiel, vibraphone, chime…all these different colors on a group of pitches. There’s a little passage at the very end of that piece where a quasi-melodic shape comes out, almost as like a remnant of something… of another way of organizing pitch… which is not really what the piece is about, but it has a kind of freshness for me at that moment. Right at the end the flute does this little lick…
It’s very hard to strip pitch of all its baggage. I think Feldman did it. You know, Feldman used to say that he picked each pitch because of the sound it had in a particular octave in a particular instrument. He didn’t pick it because of the pitches that came before, or the pitches coming after, the interval connections, anything like that. I think that that’s part of something that’s special about his music
Tabor: Are these things that you hear, and then construct? Or are they things that you learn to hear while you’re construct them?
DeLio: A really great question. Well, I think it’s both. I certainly think over time… I’ve written so many pieces that do these things in different ways…that I have developed a sixth sense about it. I think many composers develop that over time. But, at the same time, you’re also always exploring, trying to see…is there a new way to do this? Is there a fresh way to do that? You try things and see…ok …this kind of noise-based sound juxtaposed against that kind…what will that produce? Well, sometimes it just falls flat. The opposition between the sounds just doesn’t create a spark, but sometimes it does.
Tabor: So, would you consider yourself an experimental composer?
DeLio: Ah! That word… (laughter) I don’t mind that word…but, really, you can call me whatever you want!
McCoy: No labels!
DeLio: No labels!
McCoy: I’m thinking about how long the compositional process might be for you. If you are trying to avoid connections, and, excuse the hyperbole, but you’re one of the best I’ve ever known at making connections. How long does it take to do this? I mean, how much do you have to struggle?
DeLio: Well, this would go back to something I said earlier, and I think Jerry asked me, what’s the connection between doing analysis and theory, and composing? Not all the pieces I’ve analyzed involve connection, but many do, and, in a certain way, having analyzed so many pieces like that, gives me a context to bounce off my own way of not composing that way. I suppose the one way a composer might develop his/her own unique direction would be to compose pieces in a variety of styles and techniques, but I never really did that. Instead, I’ve analyzed and written about a variety of musics, many quite different from my own. So, when I write music in a certain way - my way - I do have experience of the opposite, and I do have a way then of measuring, in my ear…this is still is too much connection, this is not enough opposition and the like. For example, with respect to the piece I mentioned earlier, inents, I had to develop sound events of of different densities, different timbres, different durations. With respect to durations I tried many different kinds of duration series: logarithmic, exponential… Certain ones really projected the result that I wanted, and certain ones didn’t. It took many days of experimenting with those to really get it right. Then there’s the sound events themselves. What kind of timbres are in this event? What kind of timbres are in the event that follows? What density of sound here? What density there? How many of the words are perceived here? How many of the words are perceived there? All of these things have to be calculated, consciously sometimes, subconsciously other times, in terms of what you hear. You have to measure everything you plan with everything you hear.
Tabor: One thing that impressed me about your writing about the concept of open structure, is the necessity to understand all the possibilities in order to know what could happen, in order to make a structure.
DeLio: Well, I think indeterminacy is about finding boundaries. For instance, my analysis of Cage’s Variations II, is not an analysis of what could happen in a given performance, it’s an analysis of what the score is actually defining. It’s about determining the boundaries established by the piece, finding the limits within which things can happen, and outside of which things can’t happen. One of my students was telling me about a recent analysis of this piece…an old piece by Terry Riley called In C, you probably both know it…it’s not a very good piece, but the analysis simply took a couple of possible versions, and simply looked at them. But that doesn’t really tell you anything about the piece. You have to find out, what is it that this piece is defining, in terms of its boundaries, in terms of its limits. Then, that’ll tell you something about the piece.
Tabor: I know that silence plays a major role in your music. How does it help foster this notion of balance and openness in your work?
DeLio: It’s funny, people do often refer to the silences in my pieces, but I think that they often forget that my work is really about sound…creating a context in which sound can exist in a pristine state, free of linguistic constraints. For me, silence provides that context. My silences are not Cagean silences, in the sense that he established in 4:33, where sounds are allowed in. My silences are really ways of framing sounds so that they have their own individual space. A reviewer, commenting on one of my recent recordings… because I always refer to my music as non-gestural… he said that, all music is gestural. And, of course, that’s wrong. That’s a misunderstanding of gesture. Every sound-event has a shape, right? You have an attack, maybe on a cymbal, and there’s a decay, and the frequencies decay at different speeds. That’s all a shape. If you use that shape over and over, if you develop it, if you expand it, contract it…then you’ve turned it into a musical gesture, which has meaning with respect to the formal evolution of a piece. But, if it’s just a shape, and you follow that after a silence with a different shape, and you follow that after a silence with a different sound with another different shape and so forth and so on…that’s not a gesture. I mean, in fact, that’s antithetical to gesture because gesture is something that becomes fundamental to form in some types of music. Silence is one way that I use to make sure that these sound events don’t become gestures.
McCoy: In Pine, Bamboo, Plum (electroacoustic work), which I love, what strikes me about the first sound is the way it stops. So, when I hear it again, I’m not anticipating the sound, I’m anticipating a juncture where that sound sort of lives for me.
DeLio: That’s very good. You know there’s a funny story about that. When I took that piece to the engineer who mastered it for the recording, our friend Antinino d’Urzo…a wonderful recording engineer…he said to me, you know, the cut-off at the end of that first event is really ragged, I could smooth that out. And I said, no, no, no; it’s got to be ragged, because then it projects exactly the experience you’re describing. And then he understood…I mean, that’s a very good point. I’m glad you heard it that way. That’s the way I hear it. We may be the only two people in the world who hear it that way, but we do.
Tabor: In your teaching you take students to a level of abstraction first, and then you let them identify their own voice within it… you help them find their fingerprint that they put on their music.
DeLio: Yes, that’s right. I really try, at first, to get students to…you know, to open up…to be open to things. And, it’s funny, you would think that some students will open up but most will not. However, I’m often surprised at the number of students who really are open to new experiences. They just have been pressured by society not to feel that way. Doesn’t mean they’re all going to turn into great composers. Some will, some will just try, but at least they’ll have more interesting lives. I think there are a lot of people out there who have just been under such constraints to not be open to new experiences.
McCoy: One question about pedagogy… here’s another anecdote. I remember, we were working together at the time. And one of the hallmarks of your teaching is that, we would meet every week, and I’d bring something in and show you, and you’d look at it, we would talk and then you’d go, oh okay…all right… now go and think about it, think about changing it…and the first time I heard that I thought, what does he mean? What’s wrong with it? And so, I’d be all ready to be combative. But you were always very gracious…just think about it, just think about it…and I’d go out of the room, and fume. But damn if I didn’t think about it for that whole week. There’s a graciousness in the kind of teaching that lets things simmer, allowing people space to think.
Tabor: Yes, something that I’ve talked about with other students of yours is that, anyone who has studied composition with you, and even analysis, feels there’s something different about the way you approach teaching, and I think a lot of it is that openness…trying to…not maneuver, but to expand people’s perspectives so that they can become more open about various things that maybe they hadn’t thought of previously.
McCoy: And yet as your students, we’ve experienced the point, where you’re looking at a work of ours and it takes you about five seconds to narrow down what the focus of the piece is.
Tabor: I’m really curious about how you create linkages between the dimensions of sound and text. You have spoken and written that, in your music with text, the music creates a design that parallels the text, and that you’re particularly interested in finding out how far those two things [music and text] can be separated while still maintaining a connection. Can you talk about that?
DeLio: Well one of the poets I’ve been most involved with for a number of years is Peter Inman, who publishes under P. Inman. He is one of the leading experimental poets in the country. In fact, his collected work was just published to great acclaim in Great Britain. When I first encountered his poetry many years ago, I just knew…I had a sense that he was trying to do very similar things to what I was doing. So, it seemed like a perfect match. Not that one always has to set poetry that matches, but this just was really…to me…it was just something I knew was right. And we’ve done many pieces together since including sound installations. We can talk about those in a bit. Pete’s poetry, just like my music, is really essentially about the notion of decentering. His poetry doesn’t exist to convey ideas, images, or information, it exists to re-contextualize language. To redefine the whole role of language in our lives, and that appealed to me greatly. This paralleled my own notion of how to treat sound… how to recapture sound as sound, not as part of language…musical language that is. So, I gravitated toward Pete’s work and we’ve become very good friends over the years. My settings of his poetry really are not linear in any sense, as his poetry is not linear in any sense. In his poetry words lead to one another in many dimensions. I try to convey this experience of multiplicity in my settings. Sometimes I break the words up into just phonemes, and sometimes he does that as well. Other times I take an entire group of lines or…I hate to use the word stanzas because they don’t really apply to his work…a whole unit of words. And then I present the text in all of these different ways: atomized into smaller components, then re-contextualized into different designs.
I once had a very interesting experience with one of my settings of his poem “sam”, where I took the ending of one word which was…it ended with a ‘ct’, and I kept using it and kept combining it with other words, and one of the words that kept coming up was connect. And I got so used to hearing this word in the piece, that I was often surprised when I would go back and re-read the poem and realize that word isn’t in the poem. But by disassembling words, and then putting them back together again, new words come out. And, of course, this delighted Pete. This was exactly what his poems are supposed to do, help you re-contextualize words in new ways. In the more recent piece, inents, I have these…as we’ve discussed before…these smaller sound events, which, in my view, capture the poem in different ways. In some of them you can’t make out the words at all. You just make out sounds and sonorities from vowels and consonants combined in different ways. In the opposite extreme, you hear different voices speaking different lines of text, combining them in different ways, and you can actually make out what’s being said. And then there’s all layers in-between those opposite poles: in one state the words are simply opaque, in another they are transparent. And I think his poetry goes back and forth between those two extremes…where you’re reading a line and it actually could mean something, but it’s in the context of lines where there’s no connection. So, you’re drawn in and then you’re pushed away. And you’re constantly trying to find a viewpoint…a vantage point from which to understand, but there is none. There are instead so many vantage points… and that’s what I try to do in the music. I find his poems extreme in that regard, and as you know, I like extremes. Pete has said to me that over the years my pieces have affected his poetry and influenced what he’s doing with language. And I think we’ve gone back and forth that way, because, new developments in his poetry have affected me as well. We must have done at least seven or eight pieces together. And sometimes I’ve even set texts of his two or three different times, in different pieces, in different ways. I’ve found that to be very important and interesting to me because I really just don’t believe in this whole notion that there is only one right way to do something. To me, it’s much more interesting to find different ways to set the same thing.
Tabor: Are these ideas related to your installations?
DeLio: Well, the installations are a logical extension, because the way an installation typically works…at least mine…is that the multiple channels of sound coming from different speakers are laid out, let’s say, in a pattern around a space (museum or art gallery). The installation amounts. to. is based on a poem of Pete Inman’s of the same name. The poem consists of three pages, each with a different shape on it. For this installation the words on each page were projected through three different spatial configurations within a room in a museum. One page of text was heard through two standard speakers sitting in two corners of the room. The text on each of the other two pages, was projected through one of two localizers hanging from the ceiling. You’ve probably experienced these devices in museums…you walk up to a display case and you hear someone speaking, describing the display case. But if you walk away you can’t hear anything, and that’s because the localizer (usually an array of speakers) focuses the sound onto one specific location in the room. So, I had a room and I had two localizers hanging from the ceiling, each projecting material drawn one of the pages of the text. And then there were the two speakers in corners of the room that were projecting the third page of the text. The material of this third page could be heard anywhere in the room. So, when you walked under one localizer you would hear what that localizer was projecting mixed with the sounds from two corner speakers. And then, when you walked away from that localizer and stood under the other one, you heard a different text mixing with the sounds coming from the pair of corner speakers. It was a decentering experience…you could never experience the whole thing at once. You had to be moving, and the way the sound was dispersed through the room…it was sort of pulling you to move around. It created this very open situation. Your vantage point was always different. The localizers, by the way, were stereo, so even when you were under one of them you could hear sound moving around.
Now the second installation we did was called “sam”, based upon a poem of that name. That was the first one with video, and it was with four speakers. I arranged the four speakers in a column, each speaker facing north, south, east, or west. You could never hear all four speakers at once, but, as you walked around this column, you would always get the sense of the sound moving either with you or against you. Again, the work provided a decentering experience. These were paired with four different sized TV screens hanging in different positions and heights. One of them actually was outside of the gallery room so that you could never see what was on all four screens at once. At most you could see one screen and a bit of another screen. So, there was this constant need to move and try to experience the sound in different ways, and the visuals in different ways. This is typical of all my installations, they deny the listener the deceptive comfort of the existence of a single vantage point.
The real technical challenge to me, in creating these installations, is, how do you write a piece where a listener happens to walk by a room in a museum, steps inside, maybe spends five minutes, maybe spends fifteen minutes listening, and then leaves. And, you never know when they’re going to come in to the room, because the piece is running all day long. How do you make a piece that has no beginning? No end? And, you can’t know when they’re going to walk in and walk out. Yet you want them to experience the piece. I mean, it’s not just random sounds, it’s a piece. The trick is to try to ensure that no matter when somebody walks in, and no matter how long they stay, they get the piece, they grasp what’s happening. So, that’s been very interesting, and I’ve used different strategies each time I make a new installation to try to do that.
It’s funny, a lot of people do what they call sound installations today, but what they’re really doing are simply performances that aren’t taking place in a concert hall. So, you go into a museum, you go into the lobby, and you have a bunch of performers, and for thirty or forty minutes they play a piece. It may be a very interesting piece, but it’s not a sound installation. It’s just a concert that’s not taking place in a concert hall. Other people do sound installations which are interactive. You know, there’s buttons on the wall you press them, and sounds happen. And that can sometimes be interesting, sometimes not. But again, to me it’s not a sound installation, it’s a different kind of performance. Mine, they just run all the time. There’s a lot of silence in them too, so they’re not just constantly bombarding you.
Tabor: This brings us back to an earlier part of the conversation, when we were discussing the notion of openness, and the fact that there is a certain amount of rigor that goes into creating an effective…field of openness. So, how does Inman view these installations, where you construct and reconstruct that experience of his language in sound.
DeLio: That’s an interesting question, because I’m not trying to…how do I put this…I’m not trying to set his poems, and I’m not trying to present a traditional song where you set the words and you go through the words in the sequence of the poem. First of all, it would make no sense, given the nature of his poetry. What I’m trying to do is, using the sounds of the words, create a musical equivalent, a sonic equivalent to the experience you have reading the poem. In some of my settings of his work you would never make out a single word. All you would hear are phonemes transformed, filtered, spatialized, projected, but you’d never make out the words. In others, I allow the words to come through from time to time. So, you get more layered experience of the poem. Either way I try to make an equivalent sonic experience of the poem, using the poem.
Tabor: I’m really curious, with your kind of approach, about the actual compositional process…the creative process. If we were to map, or maybe just video tape you going through the entire process of making a piece, I’m curious about how linear that creative process is when the result is not linear at all. Do you create in the same way that we experience it, or is there, in your mind, a beginning? Is there a starting point?
DeLio: The notion of non-linearity has to be in the process from the start. That doesn’t mean that it’s not organized. What I usually do when I begin is create a catalog of possibilities. If it’s a text piece, the ways I could project the text: totally atomized, totally transparent, the text is right there, it’s all audible…all these different possibilities and all the gradations in between. So, I have a whole catalogue of possibilities. Then, I try to put those in some sort of time frame…juxtaposing this possibility with that one…then what would come next. And then, even when that’s done, I will go back and reshape the sound events a little bit. I don’t know how to describe it, except to say that it’s not a linear process, but it’s very organized.
McCoy: Your installations are asking people to go deeper than the surface.
DeLio: I think that’s right, and I think it’s asking them to really totally re-orient their whole way of thinking about musical experience. Some people are just not going to be willing to do that, and I can’t worry about that. I mean, that’s really a choice people make. Funny, I had a student in my undergraduate contemporary music class this semester. I started talking about electronic music a few weeks ago and I’m always amazed, when I’m done with that section, how many of the students really love it. But, one of the students who really got into it sent me an email and he said, how can you tell a good electronic piece from a bad one? And I just wrote back and said, how can you tell a good instrumental piece from a bad one? And he came in the next day into my office and said, I thought about that, and he said, well I’ve just heard a lot of instrumental pieces and I can sort of tell, and I told him to go listen to a lot of electronic pieces. And then he got it. He figured that out. It’s all experience. If it’s the only electronic piece you ever hear in your whole life, you have no way of knowing whether it’s good or bad. I don’t care how great it is. You have no context. And if it’s the only sound installation that you’ve ever heard in your life, or ever will hear, you have no context either.
Tabor: So, when you’re talking about the adventurous new music of any kind, you’re saying that in order to determine when something is good that you have to build a context through experience.
DeLio: Right!
Tabor: But that’s totally counter-intuitive to the academic process, because, if I understand you correctly, what you’re saying is that in order to understand what’s good, you have to experience all of the work, or as much work as you can… that has been created…that’s a history.
DeLio: Yes, I think that with student composers it often shows immediately if they have not absorbed a broad range of musics, especially new musics in their minds and ears. It’s really just a question of understanding what’s been done. I mean, really devoting a lot of time to hearing what’s been done. And far too frequently student composers are unwilling to do that. And I just don’t understand it…if you’re a composer, why you’re not digging out everything from the library by Xenakis, Scelsi, Feldman, whoever…and listening to it and getting to know it. The more you do that, the less you’re going to reinvent the wheel, and the more you will find yourself through your work.
Tabor: But this is true not just with composition students, but the evaluation of artwork in general. The evaluation that many people feel is necessary in order for something to be valid.
DeLio: Yes, you know this limitation shows up a great deal, in the U.S. anyway, with regard to criticism. I mean, you meet music critics…the only new music they hear is what they happen to hear on a concert they’re reviewing. You’d think, if you were a serious music critic and you were going go to a concert to hear a new piece, you would have tried to develop a real knowledge of what’s been done in new music. You’d know Boulez, Xenakis, Ligeti…you’d know all of that work inside out, so when you heard some new piece you wouldn’t think, wow this is really original!, when it’s actually derivative of a dozen other composers who are much greater. That happens all the time. And these are the people who are supposedly evaluating for the general public. It’s a very bad state of affairs. It’s very different in Europe I find. Critics there tend to be people who are actually scholars, of new music for instance, who really know a great deal. Who’ve heard a great deal. Here? No. There’s also just a very naïve sense, on the part of many critics that I’ve met who think, well, if I go to a concert, I’m just going to see how I react to this new piece I’ve never heard before. Well, I mean, how you react if you don’t know anything about contemporary music is very different from how you would react if you’ve spent hundreds of hours over many years absorbing what’s been done in the contemporary music world. This is what American music criticism becomes…just sort of these gut reactions to specific moments that are totally out of any context.
Tabor: So, what is the most encouraging thing to you, as a composer/theorist, in the field of music today. What do you see that’s positive, potentially taking us in the right direction?
DeLio: I think there are still a number of people out there doing really original and creative work, and they’ll always be there. These are the people who bring new ideas and experiences to music, and enlighten us all as they do so. This should give us all cause for optimism.
Thank you both.
Tabor, McCoy: Thank you
[1] Jerry Tabor is Professor of Music, Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD; Scott McCoy, faculty, Hill Regional Career High School, New Haven, CT. The interview was videotaped by David Burns, Associate Professor, Communication Arts, Salisbury University, Salisbury, MD.