Thinking Big: David Del Tredici, A Conversation in 13 parts

Thinking Big: David Del Tredici, A Conversation in 13 parts

How to write what you want for orchestra.

Written By

Frank J. Oteri

Frank J. Oteri is an ASCAP-award winning composer and music journalist. Among his compositions are Already Yesterday or Still Tomorrow for orchestra, the "performance oratorio" MACHUNAS, the 1/4-tone sax quartet Fair and Balanced?, and the 1/6-tone rock band suite Imagined Overtures. His compositions are represented by Black Tea Music. Oteri is the Vice President of the International Society for Contemporary Music (ISCM) and is Composer Advocate at New Music USA where he has been the Editor of its web magazine, NewMusicBox.org, since its founding in 1999.

9. The Piano

FRANK J. OTERI: I want to talk a little bit about the piano. You started out as a composer/pianist. Years ago I was at a dinner with La Monte Young who talked about being in classes with you and what a great pianist you were. Talk about wanting to be a fly on the wall, to have been in this composition class with you, La Monte Young, Terry Riley, and Pauline Oliveros all together in the same room.

DAVID DEL TREDICI: That’s right, it was Seymour Shifrin‘s composition class in 1959. I had just begun to compose the summer before, and Seymour let me in. I was very good friends with La Monte—this total weirdo! Before hippies existed, he was this total in-flower hippy. He was so strange. My mother used to say, “can’t you find a more normal friend than this person?” He used to walk around in a cape. I was such a straight arrow. I don’t know why we became friends. I did play an early piano piece of his. I remember being in his apartment and smelling this strange smell for the first time in my life. It was pot [laughs].

FRANK J. OTERI: His memory of you to this day is as a pianist. He said, “David is such a great pianist.” And he’s sitting there looking at me and asked, “What ever happened to him?” I told him you’ve won a Pulitzer Prize. You’ve had this piece done by this orchestra. And he said, “Really?”

DAVID DEL TREDICI: Yeah, La Monte…[laughs]. He sounds like my old piano teacher who kept wanting me to return to the piano.

FRANK J. OTERI: But you still play.

DAVID DEL TREDICI: Yes.

FRANK J. OTERI: I saw you at Joe’s Pub last fall. It was wonderful.

DAVID DEL TREDICI: Oh, you were there for that.

FRANK J. OTERI: Of course.

DAVID DEL TREDICI: Yeah, I play. It seems to stay, but my ego is not in playing. I don’t care about playing. I only play my own stuff. I also play Bob Helps‘s music because he was a dear friend.

FRANK J. OTERI: But you never use the piano in the orchestra.

DAVID DEL TREDICI: I never have. I don’t know why. I use it in small ensembles. I have a lot of pieces for like eleven instruments with piano, which is the smallest orchestral sound group I can find.

FRANK J. OTERI: And never anything like a concerto.

DAVID DEL TREDICI: No. I’ve never written a concerto, which would be a natural. I don’t know. It doesn’t interest me. There are so many good concertos. I’d rather write a piece for which there is no tradition. I love that idea. Like all of my Alice pieces, there is no tradition for doing this. I felt out there. I like being out there.

FRANK J. OTERI: The move toward tonality, and away from serialism, kind of paralleled your stepping away from being an active performer.

DAVID DEL TREDICI: Well, no. There is no connection. When I began to get interested in composing, atonality was simply in the air. As a kid I had played Schoenberg, from the age of 15. My piano teacher played at the Composers’ Forum. I always knew this music. It was in my ear and part of my experience. So that was the way that I composed. You are what you eat. Actually, when I returned to tonality a number of years later, I realized that my great interest in being tonal was hooking back to when I was a pianist and playing all this Romantic music. I always had a lot of skill in counterpoint classes. I always could do it. I always could write it and I didn’t know why, but I didn’t count it. It just seemed like something you do. When I got to the Alice pieces, I allowed myself to count that I could write tonally. That this was actually real composing was an epiphany. The skills that I had learned just by playing Schumann, Chopin, and Brahms, without knowing I was learning it, I brought it into my active compositional life. In a sense, I had hooked into the piano in a composing sort of way.

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