David Del Tredici

After an initial flirtation with modernist styles, composer David Del Tredici adopted a tonal idiom and became recognized as a pioneer of the neo-Romantic movement. Among his major orchestral works are a series inspired by Lewis Carroll’s Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland. Del Tredici was born in Cloverdale, in northern California’s Sonoma County, on March 16, 1937. He began studying the piano at 12. Del Tredici also contemplated a career as a florist, but he progressed rapidly and made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony Orchestra at 17. In 1955, Del Tredici enrolled as a piano student at the University of California at Berkeley, but after clashing with a teacher at the Aspen Music Festival and School, he tried composing. Del Tredici’s first work, titled Opus 1, was heard and praised by composer Darius Milhaud, and he switched to composition when he returned to Berkeley, studying with Seymour Shifrin and Andrew Imbrie, among others. He went on for further studies at Princeton University, studying with Roger Sessions and Earl Kim. Del Tredici was trained in the serialist procedures that were in vogue in the 1960s but quickly rejected them. He wrote various atonal works, but in the late ’60s, he began to move back toward traditional tonality. A major inspiration in this regard was his engagement with the Alice in Wonderland works of Lewis Carroll, stimulated by Martin Gardner’s book The Annotated Alice; Del Tredici felt that a more traditional musical language was appropriate to this subject matter. His first Alice-related work was An Alice Symphony (1969). At first, he combined serialism with traditional tonality, but gradually, he minimized the presence of serialist procedures and finally dispensed with them altogether. Del Tredici was not the first composer to reject atonality (George Rochberg preceded him by several years), but he developed a body of large-scale works, most of them orchestral, that connected strongly with audiences. These included Vintage Alice (1972), Final Alice (1975), and In Memory of a Summer Day (1980), which won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Del Tredici served as composer-in-residence with the New York Philharmonic from 1988 to 1990. He wrote various large works that had nothing to do with Alice in Wonderland, including Tattoo (1986) and Steps (1990), although he continued to write Alice works on occasion, including Heavy Metal Alice for brass quintet (1995). In the late ’90s, Del Tredici wrote the song cycle Gay Life, using texts by Allen Ginsberg, Federico García Lorca, and others. Del Tredici began teaching at the City University of New York in 1984 and remained on the faculty there into the 2010s, also teaching at the Manhattan School of Music and the Juilliard School along the way. He was an influential teacher who numbered John Adams and various other contemporary composers among his students. He remained active as a composer into old age, penning an Ode to Music in 2015. By that time, well over 50 of his works had been recorded. Del Tredici died in Manhattan, New York, of Parkinson’s disease on November 18, 2023. ~ James Manheim