Composers Datebook

On today's date in 1964, a 27-year old Californian named David Del Tredici got a big break when his setting of " I Hear An Army," a poem by James Joyce, was performed by soprano Phyllis Bryn-Julson at the Tanglewood Festival in Massachusetts. Del Tredici composed other works to poems by Joyce, which were equally well received. More commissions followed — as did a Guggenheim Fellowship, a summer at the Marlboro Festival as its resident composer, and a teaching job at Harvard University. As successful as Del Tredici's Joyce settings were, he is best known for a remarkable series of works inspired by another writer, Lewis Carroll — the 19th century British creator of the "Alice in Wonderland" books. Beginning in 1968, with a choral work titled "Potpourri," Del Tredici created in short order "An Alice Symphony" and over a dozen other Lewis Carroll-inspired pieces. In 1980, one of these, "In Memory of a Summer Day," won the Pulitzer Prize for Music. "Poetry turns me on," says Del Tredici, "and certain poets force me to write music for them… When I read a poem, I know before I'm through that I'll set it… It's the energy of the words, rather than the sense of the words. It's the mood that's important."