The Experience of Sound: An Interview with Thomas DeLio

Thomas DeLio is a composer and theorist of international renown in both fields and especially noted for his work in computer music. In this conversation he discusses his musical thinking with over 40 years in the field. His compositions have been performed worldwide and are recorded on numerous labels. Neuma recordings has recently released five volumes of his recorded compositions in an ongoing series of his collected works. The interview itself, conducted over a series of phone conversations in the summer of 2020, begins with a look at his early student years at the New England Conservatory of Music in the late 1960s and early 1970s and navigates through to his current work and thinking today. Numerous aspects of his compositional approach and aesthetics are discussed, including his early influences, his illuminating thoughts on time and silence in his music, his applications of various technologies, and spatial projection, particularly at it relates to his work with sound installations.

Young Man With a Sax

The chapter describes Hodges’s musical household, along with his limited instruction on the piano and saxophone. He received instruction on the saxophone formally, from (among others) a student at the New England Conservatory of Music in Boston, and informally, from other young men in his neighborhood, which came to be known as “Saxophonist Ghetto” because of the large number of musicians who played the instrument living there. Hodges’s youthful introduction to Sidney Bechet at a Boston burlesque show, at which he played a soprano sax, is described. The chapter recounts the saxophone’s history and its development in the jazz genre, as well as Hodges’s early public performances in the Boston area at a very young age. Hodges begins to develop a reputation both in Boston and throughout New England, and he eventually comes to the attention of Duke Ellington in a Boston nightclub.

Boston: Gunther Schuller's ‘Encounters’

Boston's Symphony Hall is celebrated as one of the finest concert halls in the world. It is generally less well known that Boston also has the smaller and equally fine Jordan Hall, located in the New England Conservatory. A fixture of Boston's musical life, Jordan Hall is also literally the heart of the Conservatory, being the venue not only of visiting celebrity solo and chamber music recitals, but of a multitude of the whole range of the Conservatory's student concert activity.