by Sean Denmark

He was born in 1937 in Cloversdale, California to devoutly Catholic parents, the first of five children. At 12, he began to study the piano; in four years, he was playing with the San Francisco Orchestra. A run-in with a bad piano teacher precipitated a switch in his career path from the piano to composition. He worked with Aaron Copland and labored diligently under the zeitgeist of classical music in the 1950s: austere, modernist serialism. His output won him some praise from critics, if no recognition from the public at large.

All this, however, was pre-Alice in Wonderland.

Recognized American composer David Del Tredici is coming to the University of Texas for a few days before Thanksgiving as part of the music school's Visiting Composers series, and during his stay two UT music groups will perform works from his "Alice cycle." I would like to prepare you against certain questions that might arise while listening to these works. Questions like: Why does a composer devote a thirty-year span of his career to Lewis Carroll's children books? Why abandon "serious" modernism to obsessively return, in composition after composition, to a piece of "fun" literature?

Del Tredici's early works included smaller instrumental pieces and settings of early poems of James Joyce. I must confess I find these difficult on my unschooled ears. 1968 marked a switch, with the piece "PotPourri," from the grave and traditional poems of early Joyce and a compositional style of extreme modernism to Carroll's fun and fantastic stories and increasing tonalism. Several "Alice" works followed ("An Alice Symphony," "Vintage Alice," "Adventures Underground," "Annotated Alice"), but it was the hour-long "Final Alice," an opera/cantata for amplified soprano and orchestra, that "really put me on the map," as Del Tredici has explained. "I couldn't imagine setting a Carroll text to dissonant music. Dissonant music can't possibly project the mood that surrounds Carroll's writing. In order to create that mood I had to rethink everything I had done up to that time." Del Tredici's neo-romanticism ran counter to fashion, and whether it was liked or hated, it stood out in the crowd.

Not that the piece is smooth sailing. Sirens blare, the soprano bellows through a bullhorn, a cacophony of percussion is employed. Del Tredici even dusts off the Theremin, a mostly forgotten electrical instrument used to create the unearthly, wildly wavering peels that signified suspense in countless sci-fi movies. I wonder if both of Del Tredici's styles, modernism and chaotic tonalism, don't sometimes mask a lack of thematic development.

One might expect a certain self-consciousness from a composer approaching traditional music from serialism. However, Del Tredici possesses a gift for melody; an example is the piercing purity of the "Acrostic Song" that drifts above the post-apocalyptic landscape at the end of "Final Alice." Neither is the work all fun and games, though Carroll's text and Del Tredici's score play many games with the audience. Del Tredici subtly probes the subtext of Alice in Wonderland, Carroll's questionable love for the young girl on whom Alice was based. Del Tredici, in his obsession, is not afraid to examine the disturbing obsessions of Carroll.

In 1980 the composer began "Child Alice," a monstrous work that would eventually consist of four movements, each originally performed seperately. The UT Symphony Orchestra will perform a portion of the first of these. "In Memory Of a Summer Day" won Del Tredici a Pulitzer; in it he took a new approach to Carroll, as he does with every new Alice piece. It describes a day spent in storytelling on the river by Carroll and the "real Alice," Alice Pleasance Liddell. Del Tredici's preferred soprano voice is paired with, and pitted against, a sweeping symphonic mass. The UT Orchestra will perform only the central section, where the orchestra without soprano probes the work's themes and runs the gamut of emotions, from peacefulness to frenzy.

The New Music Ensemble will perform "Haddock's Eyes," written in 1985 for soprano voice. Del Tredici currently continues work on an opera, "Dum Dee Diddle." It is uncertain when, if ever, the Alice well will run dry.

The division between Del Tredici's early "serious" and latter "fun" music is an obvious one, but it may confuse as much as it delineates. One personality, which swings from earnest to quirky, miniature to monolithic, is recognizable in all of Del Tredici's oeuvre. The chaotic trappings of his tonal work, for example, resemble his serialism. The effect can be unsettling. Does he mock what he once gravely employed? And does he really find Carroll's writing inexhaustible, or is it a way of limiting and controlling countless options? The listener only sees Del Tredici through Carroll. Even if this obscures much, Carroll's work is, upon examination, surprisingly personal, and so is Del Tredici's. The glimpses one is afforded are of a gleeful, uneasy, important artist.

The University of Texas Symphony Orchestra will perform "Triumphant Alice" from "In Memory of a Summer Day" on Monday, November 22 at 8pm in Bates Recital Hall, located on the second floor of the Music Building at 23rd and East Campus Drive. The concert will include Gershwin's Concerto in F and Beethoven's Third Symphony. Tickets are $3 at the door. The New Music Ensemble will perform "Haddock's Eyes" on November 23 at 8pm in Bates, in conjunction with Rafael Hernandez III's "Invocation and Dance" and New Music director Dan Welcher's "Phaedrus."