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". 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.
Del Tredici taught at Harvard University, where he worked alongside Leon Kirchner and was a part of the modernist movement. He stated that "anything bad appeals to any young composer", including himself. He also created works celebrating "gayness", acknowledging that many great composers were gay and that "it's something to be celebrated".
- 2004, Gotham Glory, fp. March 15, 2005, Anthony de Mare, piano
- 2004, Syzygy, Asko Ensemble
- 2013, Bullycide, La Jolla Music Society
Awards
- Guggenheim Fellowship