Community hub
Recent from talks
Knowledge base stats:
Talk channels stats:
Members stats:
David Del Tredici
David Walter Del Tredici (March 16, 1937 – November 18, 2023) was an American composer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Music and was a Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellow. Del Tredici is considered a pioneer of the neo-romantic movement. He was also described by the Los Angeles Times as "one of our most flamboyant outsider composers".
Del Tredici was born in Cloverdale, California, on March 16, 1937. He came from a non-musical family and began his musical life as an aspiring concert pianist at the age of twelve, taking piano lessons with German concert pianist Bernhard Abramovitch. If he had not been a pianist, he said, he would have become a florist.
Abramovitsch encouraged him to be "very creative" in his playing, which he later cited as prepared him for composing. "I was only interested in playing ... great sprawling things like the Schumann Fantasy, that the performer had to mold and shape", he reflected. Thus he learned how to "sustain a [musical] thread so that it was never broken".
He debuted with the San Francisco Symphony at age 16 and later performed Liszt and Tchaikovsky concertos under Arthur Fiedler. Then he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he continued studying piano. He played primarily Romantic works. He also played "a lot of Schoenberg and Berg and loved their music".
While enrolled at Berkeley, he attended the Aspen Music Festival and School. The pianist he was going to study with was "mean" to him, so Del Tredici tried his hand at composing music instead. He wrote Opus 1 as his first piece and was invited to perform it for Milhaud, who complimented him. Thereafter Del Tredici concentrated on composition. His earliest works were his "own version of German expressionism". Finishing his studies with Seymour Shifrin at Berkeley, he graduated in 1959.
He then studied composition with Earl Kim and Roger Sessions for one year at Princeton University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Princeton was then, Tim Page described, "the center for the American atonal avant-garde". "I was there at the height of the serial movement," Del Tredici said. He felt like an outsider: "[They] seemed to be trying to take the expressionist element out of German expressionism," he added.
Del Tredici left Princeton to work with Robert Helps in New York. He found a mentor in Helps, who supported his instincts. He returned to Princeton, earning his MFA in 1963.
In 1964, Del Tredici met Aaron Copland at Tanglewood; they would be friends for the remainder of Copland's life, and his musical style remained an influence on Del Tredici.
Hub AI
David Del Tredici AI simulator
(@David Del Tredici_simulator)
David Del Tredici
David Walter Del Tredici (March 16, 1937 – November 18, 2023) was an American composer. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Music and was a Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellow. Del Tredici is considered a pioneer of the neo-romantic movement. He was also described by the Los Angeles Times as "one of our most flamboyant outsider composers".
Del Tredici was born in Cloverdale, California, on March 16, 1937. He came from a non-musical family and began his musical life as an aspiring concert pianist at the age of twelve, taking piano lessons with German concert pianist Bernhard Abramovitch. If he had not been a pianist, he said, he would have become a florist.
Abramovitsch encouraged him to be "very creative" in his playing, which he later cited as prepared him for composing. "I was only interested in playing ... great sprawling things like the Schumann Fantasy, that the performer had to mold and shape", he reflected. Thus he learned how to "sustain a [musical] thread so that it was never broken".
He debuted with the San Francisco Symphony at age 16 and later performed Liszt and Tchaikovsky concertos under Arthur Fiedler. Then he attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he continued studying piano. He played primarily Romantic works. He also played "a lot of Schoenberg and Berg and loved their music".
While enrolled at Berkeley, he attended the Aspen Music Festival and School. The pianist he was going to study with was "mean" to him, so Del Tredici tried his hand at composing music instead. He wrote Opus 1 as his first piece and was invited to perform it for Milhaud, who complimented him. Thereafter Del Tredici concentrated on composition. His earliest works were his "own version of German expressionism". Finishing his studies with Seymour Shifrin at Berkeley, he graduated in 1959.
He then studied composition with Earl Kim and Roger Sessions for one year at Princeton University on a Woodrow Wilson Fellowship. Princeton was then, Tim Page described, "the center for the American atonal avant-garde". "I was there at the height of the serial movement," Del Tredici said. He felt like an outsider: "[They] seemed to be trying to take the expressionist element out of German expressionism," he added.
Del Tredici left Princeton to work with Robert Helps in New York. He found a mentor in Helps, who supported his instincts. He returned to Princeton, earning his MFA in 1963.
In 1964, Del Tredici met Aaron Copland at Tanglewood; they would be friends for the remainder of Copland's life, and his musical style remained an influence on Del Tredici.