Composer David Del Tredici at work.
In Sunday’s (11/19) Village Sun (NYC), Liz Thomson writes, “Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici … died on Saturday aged 86. He had been stricken by Parkinson’s …though he made regular appearances at concerts. He made what would turn out to be his final musical outing last month at Columbia’s Italian Academy, where pianist Marc Peloquin and the Manhattan String Quartet gave the world premiere of Del Tredici’s string quintet ‘Ray’s Birthday Suit.’… David Del Tredici was born March 16, 1937, in Cloverdale, California. He began his career path by enrolling in the University of California, Berkeley as a piano student in 1955. He started his composition studies in Aspen three years later. … Del Tredici came east to Princeton … It was through [Aaron] Copland that Del Tredici received his first Tanglewood commission … Lewis Carroll’s ‘Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland’ was a longtime preoccupation (‘In Memory of a Summer Day,’ part one of ‘Child Alice,’ won him the Pulitzer), and in later life he embraced contemporary American poetry, much of it overtly gay…. His early works employed Modernist techniques … but he soon became a proponent of tonality … Leonard Bernstein … appointed Del Tredici composer in residence at the New York Philharmonic…. He composed works for … American and European orchestras, as well as countless chamber and solo works.”
