Book Review: Circumscribing the Open Universe from Reader's Guide to Music

Circumscribing the Open Universe

Reviewed by Murray Steib,  Reader's Guide to Music: History, Theory and Criticism by

Routledge, Dec 2, 2013

 

     In his collection of five analytical essays, DeLio closely examines five open-form works by five composers - Cage, Feldman, Christian Wolff, Robert Ashley, and Alvin Lucier.  The author links these composers by their aesthetic credo that artwork is not a fixed entity but a process, not a "circumscribed object" but a "circumscribing event."  ... his essays are among the most extensive and finest analyses of open-form works ever written.  DeLio's book is one of the few monographs devoted entirely to aleatoric music.

Jeongwon Joe