Gay Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici will have his work ‘Final Alice’ played by the National Symphony Orchestra, under the baton of Leonard Slatkin. (Photo by Paula Court)
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GREG MARZULLO
Friday, May 09, 2008
People rarely associate classical music with being sexy. Even with the cello being nicknamed “the lover’s instrument,” there’s a certain stuffy atmosphere to the genre — one that Pulitzer Prize-winning, gay composer David Del Tredici likes to shake up.
“There’s so much prudery in classical music,” says Del Tredici. “It annoys me.”
The composer, whose mega-work “Final Alice,” will be played in its entirety for the first time in more than 30 years by the National Symphony Orchestra, has been pushing the boundaries of the classical music establishment for decades.
A piece with narration, orchestra and singing, “Final Alice” uses the writings of Lewis Carroll as a context for the piece, wherein Del Tredici focuses on the relationship of the author (real name: Charles Lutwidge Dogdson) with a little girl acquaintance, Alice Pleasance Liddell.
Much of the seeming nonsense verse of the “Alice in Wonderland” stories are actually parodies of popular Victorian songs, and Del Tredici interwove the original songs and Carroll’s versions in the 1976 composition.
“Some of the models for the trial scene were simple songs which spoke of the love of a man for a girl named Alice,” says Del Tredici. “In many ways, they’re hiding the real truth. That made me really interested in the love story of Alice and Carroll.”
Exploring — what scholars debate as — the forbidden love Carroll held for Alice, Del Tredici chose to match the metaphor of underground love in his music — most notably by using tonality. The classical music world at the time was obsessed with atonality, and Del Tredici’s groundbreaking work helped to usher in an era of Neo Romanticism in the genre.
DEL TREDICI CONTINUES to dive into verboten territory, including setting a number of erotically charged gay literary works to music, the most recent examples being “Queer Hosannas” and “A Field Manual,” both performed for the first time this month.
“I realized there is no gay body of music, and the way to make music gay was to set explicitly gay poetry,” he says. “I like it to be explicitly erotic and even pornographic and very gay.”
The “Queer Hosannas” consist of works by three different poets, and “A Field Manual” is a setting of five different poems by gay poet Edward Field, whom Del Tredici knows well.
“We live in the same building,” Del Tredici says, adding that the poetry for “Field Manual” is “very out, very naughty.”
Sexual expression is a theme that runs throughout much of the composer’s canon and day-to-day life. He met his partner of eight years, Ray Warman, at a workshop produced by the Body Electric, an organization that offers workshops on eroticism all over North America.
“It’s the only group that dares to use sexual energy for healing,” Del Tredici says. “It had the effect on me somehow of making me lose creative self-consciousness. I’ve written much quicker and more fluently. The idea of Eros and creativity being connected is true.”
Del Tredici also says that gay sexuality has a profound influence on a composer’s work.
“I think gay composers in particular are attuned to being expressive. Look at the distinguished list of gay American composers — [Aaron] Copeland, [Samuel] Barber, [Gian Carlo] Menotti, [Leonard] Bernstein. I think the significant thing is that a gay composer has known alienation very personally — certainly in my generation, it couldn’t be more forbidden.”
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