David Del Tredici, Who Set ‘Alice’ to Music, Dies at 86
nytimes.comDavid Del Tredici, a Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer who began as an experimentalist but became best known for a midcareer shift toward a style that came to be called the New Romanticism, which yielded a series of rich-hued, tuneful pieces based on Lewis Carroll’s “Alice” stories, died on Saturday at his home in Manhattan.
He was 86. The pianist Marc Peloquin, a longtime friend and collaborator and the executor of Mr. Del Tredici’s estate, said the cause was Parkinson’s disease.
Flamboyant and gregarious, Mr. Del Tredici cultivated a reputation as a beloved scamp who did what he wanted. But he also had a gift for explaining his musical goals and how he had settled upon them.
And he was frank about his personal life and his demons — alcoholism, for one. If the composer George Antheil had not already laid claim to the phrase “Bad Boy of Music,” Mr.
