Preface to Analytical Studies of the Music of Ashley, Cage, Carter, Dallapiccola, Feldman, Lucier, Reich, Satie, Schoenberg Wolff and Xenakis: Essays in Contemporary Music
by Christopher Shultis
My first contact with Thomas DeLio was in 1986, in Washington D.C. where I was giving a presentation on early percussion music at the Percussive Arts Society International Convention. We met through a mutual friend, the composer Stuart Saunders Smith, at a Chinese restaurant near the Washington Convention Center – probably because DeLio’s music was at that time published by Smith Publications and he had recently composed a piece for percussion ensemble, Against the silence…, that Stuart thought I would be interested in performing. Little did I know then how important that composition would become; nor how highly I would come to regard DeLio's entire compositional body of work. He is, as I've written elsewhere, "among the most significant experimental composers of his generation." I mention this mainly to place my connection to DeLio's work first in relation to his importance as a composer.
In the 1980s, I reserved my summers for full-time reading, score study, and practicing. So, in the summer of 1987, I looked at Against the silence… and wrote the composer
immediately after realizing that this was an extraordinary and uniquely new contribution to the repertoire. In his letter back, he mentioned having written a book I might like to see and let me know he'd send me a copy if I was interested. As a result, I received his Circumscribing the Open Universe (1984) which, along with Marjorie Perloff's classic The Poetics of Indeterminacy (1981), are the two books that convinced me that writing about the arts could be as interesting as the artworks themselves. Or at least that it was possible when the writers were as gifted as Perloff and DeLio!
My reading of Perloff in 1988 presented me – at that time still primarily a performer and conductor – with my first real introduction to the world of literary criticism and its long history of engagement with the written word in poetry and literature. There's a tremendous amount of intellectual excitement involved when following someone’s reading of a poem or book in which they are deeply invested. For those of us who enjoy such criticism, it really adds to the enjoyment of literary works of art. And while this would have seemed obvious in the 1980s to someone involved with the humanities, in music a comparable kind of criticism was not so well established. As musicologist Joseph Kerman wrote in the introduction to his Contemplating Music (1985): "What I would call serious music criticism – academic music criticism if you prefer – does not exist as a discipline on a par with musicology and music theory on the one hand, or literary and art criticism on the other."[i] Two years after Kerman wrote that, I was reading a fine example of "serious music criticism," published one year before Kerman's book was published, the aforementioned Circumscribing the Open Universe. Truth be told, I devoured it like a starving man.
Here was a practicing musician like myself but, unlike me at the time, one with a background in art and literary criticism, citing, among many others, important poets like Robert Duncan and Charles Olson, who themselves were critics. Someone whose expertise in music theory enabled him to provide a strong grounding in analysis focused on the individual work being addressed but also capable, because of his deep reading in philosophy (Merleau-Ponty and Heidegger are especially important in Circumscribing), of then showing how such particulars could have applications that referred outward into a world that was not as isolated as what one found in much musical analysis at the time. I can still remember now, twenty-six years later, how excited I was when I first read the criticism of Thomas DeLio. And I still find myself in that frame of mind as I revisited this important early work while preparing to write this preface.
I've followed his scholarly writings ever since. And it is easier now to distinguish his work from that of Perloff, widely regarded as one of the most important scholars of contemporary poetry but not herself a poet. Thomas DeLio's scholarship is the work of an "artist-intellectual," where creative and scholarly work can be seen as feeding each other and where you can find resonances between, in DeLio's case, the music he composes and his scholarly interests, comparable to how the conducting repertoire of Pierre Boulez can be seen as representative of who he regards as his artistic predecessors and contemporaries. That said, it would be incorrect to compare DeLio's scholarly work with composers who also write about music, especially the kind of writing that Boulez and others like him have published. DeLio is the kind of artist-intellectual one occasionally finds in the United States for whom scholarship, while it may indeed point to influences on the creative side of things, must embrace accepted scholarly processes, such as peer-review, a musicologist like Joseph Kerman or a literary scholar like Marjorie Perloff would approve. In other words, Thomas DeLio's books and essays stand on their own, written by someone who is both an important composer and a highly regarded scholar. This significant body of work, written over the course of two decades and now finally available within a single book, informs us both about the subjects under consideration and the person writing about those subjects in a way that I find characteristic of the best scholarship written by artist-intellectuals. The creative and scholarly "need each other to keep on going," but they can be separated too, and that's an important distinction between it and other prose written by composers.
Informed first and foremost: That's how I feel every time I read essays by Thomas DeLio. I think his writing comes closest to what literary critics bring to the study of poems and novels: an informed authority employed in the careful study of author and work, bringing a broad range of contexts (aesthetic, social, historical) to bear on the examination of whatever specifically is being addressed. In the end, however, as I now consider DeLio's written work as a whole, and imagine how readers who are either discovering it for the first time or revisiting it, what really stands out for me is how inspiring it is. It inspired me to become a scholar myself, that's for sure; and it has also greatly influenced my own journey as a fellow artist-intellectual. May it inspire you too!
1. Kerman, Joseph. Contemplating Music. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press, 1985. p.17.