Against the silence…
"Writing (at the End) of New Music" Christopher Shultis; in The Modern Percussion Revolution, Kevin Lewis and Gustavo Aguilar, eds. (Routledge, 2014).
excerpt:
There were two passions of mine back then: early percussion music, most of it first performed by John Cage and his percussion ensemble, and seeking out new music by younger composers. The former led me to research the music found in the Edwin A. Fleisher Collection in Philadelphia, which is where Cage sent those pieces, through the recommendation of Johanna Beyer. Michael Udow chaired a panel at the percussion convention in Washington, D.C. (1986) where I presented my findings, including performances by the UNM Percussion Ensemble of works I had found in the collection that hadn't yet (to my knowledge) been discovered and performed. And it was in 1986, during the convention, that Stuart Saunders Smith introduced me to Thomas DeLio, just the kind of young composer I liked to work with, who in turn introduced me to a recent composition of his, Against the silence ... (1985). It is a piece that I regard as one of the great percussion compositions of that decade and a real turning point in the history of experimental music. Why?
To understand that, I need to fast-forward to 1993. I was defending my dissertation on John Cage, and Thomas DeLio was an outside reader and present (via telephone) at the defense. The dissertation, "Silencing the Sounded Self: John Cage and the American Experimental Tradition" (later published as a book with the same title), concerned Cage's intentional "silencing" of the self in his poetry and music through 1974. During the defense, DeLio asked me, "Are there other kinds of silence?" referring of course to the Cageian silence my research addressed; it was through my close association with DeLio's work that it was easy to answer "yes." DeLio's silences, found in much of his music and especially prominent in Against the silence ..., display by far some of the most interesting "other silences" I've ever heard.
But that's not what caught my attention at first. Instead, I was practically interested in finding music that could be played by my ensemble without making any mistakes. "Sonic perfection" is what I was after but not at the expense of backing off of my obsessive interest in performing only compositions for percussion that could be regarded as potential masterpieces, regardless of instrumentation. This may seem obvious now, but then I was surrounded by percussionists who played music written by percussionists, often with the sole purpose of furthering careers rather than adding to a repertoire that I thought was developing into a literature of great historical importance—especially music written for the percussion ensemble, which I regarded then (and still do) as the most significant new chamber medium since the string quartet.
DeLio's music, I believe, belongs in this company, and Against the silence ... is a masterpiece of that era. I love the way the verticality of this piece is so rhythmically complex (equal, in a musical sense, to the complexity of Ferneyhough and his followers), and yet, horizontally, those vertical elements create a sonic frame around the silences that become not spaces between sounds in the traditional sense nor spaces for hearing the unintentional in a Cageian sense, but, instead, silence heard as silence. To hear nothing and have that experience be the something you hear. As Cage put it regarding Morton Feldman's music: "something and nothing need each other to keep on going." The amazing thing here is that DeLio puts that in the same space, not as contrasting opposites, but as, instead, two things becoming one thing—"other silences" indeed! The greatest complexity of all is the relationship between those complex frames (which also includes a highly sophisticated electronic component generated through means of a computer) and the varying asymmetrical periods of silence with both electronic and acoustic forces surrounding the audience. There is no center. The music (silent and sounding, acoustic and electronic) is all around, and you can only hear the magnificence of this if every single aspect of the sonic experience is heard as originally composed, in its complete and utter perfection. A mistake of any kind destroys the piece—but it was/is possible to perform it perfectly, and my ensemble did so several times.