David Del Tredici

David Del Tredici
Years active	1960s-today
Era	Modernism Neo-Romanticism

David Del Tredici (born March 16, 1937) is an American composer. He has won a Pulitzer Prize, is a former Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellow. Del Tredici is considered a "pioneer" of the Neo-Romantic movement. He has been described by the Los Angeles Times as one of the United States' "most flamboyant outside composers."

He started as a pianist. He has said that if he wasn't a pianist, he would have been a florist. He started playing the piano at the age of 12. Del Tredici attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied the piano. As a young pianist he played Romantic works. During his time 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. He composed Opus 1, his first composition. He was invited to perform it for Darius Milhaud. Milhaud complimented him on the piece and Del Tredici went back to Berkeley to study composition. During the early period of his professional development, he continued to find influence in his piano teachers, specifically Bernhard Abramovitch and Robert Helps. Del Tredici says that his piano teachers were more creative and about trusting "your instincts," versus the attitude and teaching style of his composition professors. After studying at the University of California, Berkeley, he attended Princeton University. He studied composition with Roger Sessions, Earl Kim and Seymour Shifrin.

At Princeton he found influence in and became active in the composition style of serialism. He quit that style of composition within one year of starting it. He left Princeton to live in New York City for two years, before returning to the university.

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