David Walter Del Tredici (born March 16, 1937) is an American composer. He has won a Pulitzer Prize for Music and is a former Guggenheim and Woodrow Wilson fellow. Del Tredici is considered a pioneer of the Neo-Romantic movement. He has also been described by the Los Angeles Times as "one of our most flamboyant outsider composers". Early life and education Del Tredici started his musical life as an aspiring pianist at the age of twelve, and has said that if he had not been a pianist, he would have become a florist. He attended the University of California, Berkeley, where he studied piano and played primarily Romantic works. At Berkeley, he attended the Aspen Music Festival and School. The pianist he was going to study with was "mean" to him, however, so Del Tredici tried his hand at composing music instead. He composed Opus 1, his first composition, and was invited to perform it for Darius Milhaud. After Milhaud complimented him on the piece, Del Tredici went back to Berkeley to concentrate on composition rather than performance. During his early development as a composer, he found influence in his piano teachers Bernhard Abramovitch and Robert Helps, whom he found more creative and supportive of trusting "your instincts" than were his composition professors. After studying at the University of California, Berkeley, he attended Princeton University. There he studied composition with Roger Sessions, Earl Kim, and Seymour Shifrin. At Princeton he was initially influenced by serialism, but abandoned that school of composition within a year of starting it. He left Princeton to live in New York City for two years before returning to the university. Career In 1964, Del Tredici met Aaron Copland at Tanglewood; they would be friends for the remainder of Copland's life, and his musical style remains an influence on Del Tredici. Del Tredici taught at Harvard University, where he worked alongside Leon Kirchner, and was a part of the modernism movement. He has stated that "anything bad appeals to any young composer", including himself. Much of Del Tredici's work has been inspired by literature, including author and poet James Joyce. As a fellow lapsed Catholic, Del Tredici was attracted to Joyce's struggles with his own Catholic past and "tortured life", which found voice in Del Tredici's "dissonant and nearly atonal" style. He also found inspiration in Martin Gardner's The Annotated Alice and its commentary on the works