At SummerFest, Pulitzer Prize winner will premiere work in memory of teens who committed suicide

Much of Del Tredici’s overtly gay music has been settings of texts, whether a song cycle called “Gay Life” or a 10-minute piece for baritone and piano he wrote in response to the brutal murder of Matthew Shepard in 1998.

But something particularly touched him about the relatively recent suicides. They brought back memories of his own childhood, he said, when he was bullied and teased and made to feel “defective.”

He’s a composer, so his response to those memories and the suicides was a large-scale, purely instrumental piece. The score has repeated references to five, whether a five-voice fugue or a section in 5/8 time, and it employs a range of compositional devices, particularly the contrapuntal techniques that have been evident in all his music, including several decades of work obsessed with “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland.”

“This new work is a big piece,” he said. “It’s a lifetime piece, really, probably a half-hour without stop. So I have to have a universe of things going on.”

On a program that also includes the world premieres of Steven Stucky’s Sonata for Violin and Piano and John Harbison’s “Crossroads,” and a rare performance of Bartok’s Sonata for Two Pianos and Percussion (with percussionists Markus Rhoten and Steven Schick), Del Tredici is unsure of what kind of impact the piece will have. But he’s certain of the point he wants to make.

“I want it to be positive that I’m a gay composer,” he said. “And for people coming after me, young gay composers, and there are always so many, I hope they would see that there’s a body of work celebrating being gay.

“That’s very different from Bach, Beethoven, Brahms and all of that.

“Nobody touches on this subject.”

Nobody but Del Tredici. Twitter: @sdutchute


