David Del Tredici Piano, Conductor   

A composer known more than anything else for his large series of works based upon Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, Del Tredici has achieved popularity as a composer caught between the extremes of the serialism of his education and a strong drift toward tonality. As a result, his music is often suffused with tonally driven melodies with serialist undertones.

Del Tredici earned his bachelor's degree at the University of California at Berkeley and his master's at Princeton University, studying with such names as Roger Sessions, Earl Kim, Robert Helps, Bernhard Abramowitsh, Arnold Elston, and Seymour Shifrin. As a pianist he earned the Kimber Award in 1955, and as a composer has been given numerous awards, including the Pulitzer in 1980 (for In Memory of a Summer Day) and the National Academy of Arts and Letters award in 1968. He has been on the faculties of Harvard University, SUNY Buffalo, Boston University, City College, and Graduate School, and City College of New York. He has also been composer in residence for several organizations, including Tanglewood and the New York Philharmonic Orchestra, among others.

Final Alice is considered by many to be one of Del Tredici's finest works, if not his finest. The work is harmonically somewhat simple, implying the type of tonality many modern composers have driven away from. However, Del Tredici uses this static harmonic language to draw the listener's (as well as the performer's) attention to the other aspects of the works, such as resolutions that seem continuously deceptive, rarely seen time signatures, and the counting, in Italian, to 13. This last is especially important to note, since "tredici" means "13" in Italian. Indeed, this number plays an important role in his work, especially in this piece, and is used as a type of signature, much as Bach did several centuries before.

This is not to imply that Del Tredici's works are harmonically unimportant, boring, or stagnant. Quite the opposite is true. Indeed, strong comparisons could be made to the music of Wagner, with harmonic alterations taking place over extended durations, and themes based upon fairy tales or stories. His harmonies can also be heard as extensions of ideas presented in the late nineteenth century, giving his music a neo-Romantic feel, a category fitting much of his music in the Alice series.

Because of his use of extended harmonic changes, combination of serial and tonal ideas, and late Romantic style of harmonic writing and orchestration, Del Tredici has earned a place in the world of serious music as an innovator of new harmonic and theatrical writing; it is for this reason and the impression of his music on generations to follow that he has earned his place in musical history.

© Michael Blostein, All Music Guide