rrizzo@bbncca.ARPA (Ron Rizzo) (08/23/85)
Last week I heard a live performance of Del Tredici's Happy Days (which is the middle section of Child Alice, Part 2) played by the Harvard Chamber Orchestra and was quite impressed. It even made me go back & listen to my copy of In Memory of a Summer Day (the first piece of the Alice series) which I'd earlier dismissed as dreck. Has anyone heard any of the other Alice pieces (like Final Alice for example), or any of the eariler series of compositions based on texts from James Joyce? To explain: Del Tredici has devoted his entire output first to settings of Joycean texts, and more recently (since reading Lewis Carroll's Alice books in 1968) to musical pieces (orchestral, often with soprano) based on various parts of the Carroll books. For example, In Memory of a Summer Day uses a poem of the same name which is prefaced to Alice in Wonderland. Regards, Ron Rizzo
parker@psuvax1.UUCP (Bruce Parker) (08/25/85)
Your first impression was correct -- everything I have heard of del Tredici's is hypertrophic dreck. He is the John Irving of music -- popular but writing the same flawed piece over and over again. There is no truth to the rumor that he's one of a growing number of composers who've been replaced by outer space pod drones to write music about nothing but clouds and bunny rabbits (this rumor is courtesy of the Village Voice.) -- Bruce Parker Penn State Computer Science Department