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david del tredici David Del Tredici is generally recognized as the father of the Neo-Romantic movement in music. He was trained in serial techniques, but his early works, many of them settings of poems by James Joyce, reflect quirky individuality in the handling of those orthodox musical materials. Soon, however, he broke away from the language of his teachers to explore the fantasy world of Lewis Carroll and, in so doing, developed his own unique voice -- a rich musical idiom of color, humor and sentiment -- worked out on vast orchestral canvases of tonal sound. His fascination with Lewis Carroll's Alice in Wonderland books yielded a surprising diversity -- from the spiky, witty settings of Pop-Pourri and Adventures Underground (which include folk and rock ensembles), to the extravagant, theatrical opera-cantata, Final Alice, and the lush, neo-romantic Child Alice. Del Tredici's music has been commissioned and performed by nearly every major American and European orchestral ensemble. Best-selling recordings were made of both Final Alice and In Memory Of A Summer Day (Part I of Child Alice); the latter work won Del Tredici the Pulitzer Prize in 1980. Recent years have seen Del Tredici turn from Carroll to American poetry as a fount of inspiration, yielding more than 50 songs in the past few years. The New York Philharmonic, under the direction of Kurt Masur, commissioned and performed The Spider and The Fly in May 1998, while the EOS Orchestra premiered Del Tredici's monodrama Dracula in March 1999. Chana's Story and Miz Inez Sez - song cycles for soprano and piano - were premiered in October 1998 and April 2000, respectively. For Del Tredici, Victorian sensibility has yielded to urban contemporary realities -- tormented relationships, personal transformations, and the joys and sorrows of gay life. Gay Life, in fact, happens to be the title of his song cycle premiered in May 2001 by the San Francisco Symphony, conductor Michael Tilson Thomas and baritone William Sharp. (In its December 2001 issue, OUT Magazine cited Gay Life in naming the composer one of its people of the year.) Performance artist John Kelly created an hour-long theatrical piece around eight of Del Tredici's songs. The latter work, Brother, was commissioned by both the NEA and the Rockefeller Foundation and also premiered in May 2001, in New York City. Del Tredici's most recent CD, released by Composers Recordings, Inc. (CRI), is a song collection entitled "Secret Music," which New Yorker critic Alex Ross, Fanfare's Robert Carl and critic-at-large Jason Serinus all hailed as one of the best new-music albums of the year 2001. Commenting on Del Tredici's new vocal outpouring, San Francisco critic Marilyn Tucker was moved to write that it "must surely herald a bright new era for the neglected tradition of song composition." Still more recently, Del Tredici has extended his scope to chamber music. In addition to Grand Trio, written for the Kalichstein-Laredo-Robinson Trio, Del Tredici's Wondrous The Merge, commissioned by the Elements String Quartet, awaits its premiere, and a commission for the Da Ponte String Quartet is currently in progress. In addition to the Pulitzer Prize, Del Tredici's many compositional honors include Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellowships, the Brandeis and Friedheim Awards, grants from the NEA, and election to The American Academy of Arts and Letters. He currently sits on the Boards of Directors of Yaddo, the MacDowell Colony and the Aaron Copland Fund for Music and is Distinguished Professor of Music at the City College of New York. A California native, Del Tredici began his musical career as (in his own words) "an old child prodigy." In 1937, he began piano studies at the relatively late age of 12 and studied principally with Bernhard Abramowitsch and, later, Robert Helps. At 17, he made his recital debut ("one of the decade's most impressive debuts," wrote the San Francisco Chronicle), and major orchestral engagements quickly followed. He went on to receive his B.A. (and was elected to Phi Beta Kappa) at the University of California at Berkeley and earned an M.F.A. in 1964 from Princeton University. His composition teachers included composers Earl Kim, Seymour Shifrin and Roger Sessions. Del Tredici lives in New York City with his partner, Ray Warman.
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