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David Del Tredici

 
Artist: David del Tredici
 

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  • Born: March 16, 1937
  • Genres: Classical
  • Instrument: Piano, Main Performer, Editing
  • Representative Albums: "Steps/Haddocks' Eyes," "Secret Music: A Songbook," "David del Tredici: Vintage Alice; Dracula"

Biography

An American composer of music based on Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland and utilizing many different musical styles. ~ All Music Guide, All Music Guide
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Music Encyclopedia: David Del Tredici
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(b Cloverdale, ca, 16 March 1937 ). American composer. He studied at Berkeley and Princeton, and taught at Harvard (1966-72), Boston University (1973-84) and the City University of New York (1984-). Since 1968 he has produced a large cycle of polystylistic works based on Lewis Carroll's Alice books; they include An Alice Symphony (1969-75) and the four-part Child Alice (1977-81).



 
Columbia Encyclopedia: David Del Tredici
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Del Tredici, David (dĕl trədē'chē) , 1937–, American composer, b. Cloverdale, Calif. Originally a pianist, he made his debut with the San Francisco Symphony at 16, and studied composition with Darius Milhaud (1958). He taught at Harvard (1966–72) and Boston Univ. (1973–84) before joining the faculty of the City Univ. of New York in 1984. Del Tredici has composed for orchestra (sometimes including “folk” instruments), chamber groups, piano, and accompanied voice. His early works, e.g., I Hear an Army (1964) and Syzygy (1966), are in an atonal modernist idiom and largely inspired by the verbal pyrotechnics of James Joyce. For some two decades Del Tredici manifested an obsession with Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland and Through the Looking Glass, composing many pieces inspired by them. Usually melodic and popular with audiences, these works include An Alice Symphony (1969, rev. 1976), Final Alice (1976), In Memory of a Summer Day (1980, Pulitzer Prize), and Haddock's Eyes (1986). Since the mid-1980s many of the openly gay composer's songs and song cycles, e.g., Gay Life (2001) and Wondrous the Merge (2003), have incorporated poems that celebrate homosexual love; his style has become lusher and more romantic.
 
Wikipedia: David Del Tredici
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David Del Tredici, born March 16, 1937 in Cloverdale, California, is an American composer.

After making his piano debut with the San Francisco Symphony at 17, he went on to receive a B.A. from the University of California, Berkeley and an M.F.A. in 1964 from Princeton University, studying with composers Earl Kim, Seymour Shifrin, and Roger Sessions.

His early work drew from Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland for inspiration, covering a wide variety of musical styles and forms. He was awarded a Pulitzer prize in 1980 for "In Memory of a Summer Day," the first part of Child Alice. Themes of his later works include literature -- notably, Victorian works, contemporary poets, and the works of James Joyce, Allen Ginsberg, Rumi, Federico García Lorca, Thom Gunn, Paul Monette, James Broughton, Colette Inez, and Bram Stoker -- his own personal stories, and his life as a homosexual.

While trained in serial technique, Del Tredici now writes in a tonal style; he is one of the clearest exemplars of neoromanticism.

In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, he has also received a Guggenheim Fellowship and Woodrow Wilson fellowship, a Brandeis Creative Arts Award, a Friedheim Award, grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, and election to the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters. His works are regularly commissioned by major orchestras in America and abroad. His "On Wings of Song" was premiered in New York City in 2004 as part of the Riverside Opera Ensemble's 20th Anniversary Concert.

His notable students include John Adams and Tison Street.

Notable works

  • Six Songs for voice and piano (text by James Joyce) (1959)
  • An Alice Symphony (1969)
  • Final Alice, an opera in concert form for soprano, folk ensemble, and orchestra (1976)
  • Child Alice ("In Memory of a Summer Day", "Happy Voices", "In the Golden Afternoon", "Quaint Events") for soprano and orchestra (1980 - 81)
  • Gay Life (1996-2000)
  • The Spider and The Fly for high soprano, high baritone, and orchestra (1998)
  • Paul Revere's Ride for Amplified Soprano Solo, SATB Chorus, and Orchestra (2004)
  • In Wartime for Wind Ensemble (2003)
  • Magyar Madness for clarinet and string quartet (2006)

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Copyrights:

Artist. Copyright © 2009 All Media Guide, LLC. Content provided by All Music Guide ®, a trademark of All Media Guide, LLC. All rights reserved.  Read more
Music Encyclopedia. The Concise Grove Dictionary of Music. Copyright © 1994 by Oxford University Press, Inc.. All rights reserved.  Read more
Columbia Encyclopedia. The Columbia Electronic Encyclopedia, Sixth Edition Copyright © 2003, Columbia University Press. Licensed from Columbia University Press. All rights reserved. www.cc.columbia.edu/cu/cup/  Read more
Wikipedia. This article is licensed under the GNU Free Documentation License. It uses material from the Wikipedia article "David Del Tredici" Read more