David Del Tredici’s musical involvement with “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” began in 1968 with the composition of Pop-Pourri, a “Cantata of the Sacred and Profane” which set ‘Turtle Soup’ from “Alice’s Adventures…” and ‘Jabberwocky’ from “Through the Looking Glass…” alongside the Litany of the Blessed Virgin and a Lutheran chorale (in a harmonization by Bach). Since that time, all of Del Tredici’s works have concentrated exclusively on Lewis Carroll’s Wonderland books.

Over the years, Del Tredici has approached this subject in two distinct ways. The four major Alice compositions which followed Pop-Pourri (An Alice Symphony, 1969; Adventures Underground, 1971; Vintage Alice, 1972; and Final Alice, 1976) deal directly with chapters of “Alice’s Adventures….” While Child Alice, the full-evening concert work composed from 1977 to 1981, reflects on the creations of the books themselves.

The Alice pieces from 1969 to 1976 present various portions of the Wonderland story through song and narration, but the extra dimension of individuality in these works comes through Del Tredici’s extended use of additional literary material. Martin Gardner’s book, “The Annotated Alice,” which contains earlier drafts and versions of Carroll’s text and various “parallel” sources (original Victoria poems which Carroll parodied), revealed to the composer an unexpected range of possibilities and resources for developing his compositions.

Del Tredici has already shown his fondness for surprising juxtapositions of seemingly unrelated material in Pop-Pourri; with Gardner’s book, he had a wealth of highly contrasting material, all of which related directly to the Wonderland world. (Without Gardner’s book, it is doubtful that Del Tredici’s Alice series would have grown to its present size.) In the earliest Alice pieces, the composer might simply alternate a Victorian original poem with Carroll’s parody. As the series progressed, the designs grew in complexity and originality until Final Alice, where a sequence of arias, which gradually peels away the layers of parody until a Victorian original is revealed, appears in the midst of a high-powered melodrama on the last two chapters of “Alice’s Adventures….”

The confrontation of texts and sources in the works from An Alice Symphony to Final Alice was given complementary expression in sound through the opposition of full orchestra and a concertante group of :folk” instruments. Del Tredici felt that these instruments (Saxophones, banjo, mandolin, and accordion) were “wildly unsymphonic” in character, and yet particularly suited to the childlike world of Alice.

The musical style of the Alice pieces written from 1969 to 1976 moves gradually from the sometimes spikily atonal world of An Alice Symphony, with its echoes of Del Tredici’s James Joyce compositions (about which Paul Hume wrote in the Washington Post, “This is music written after Webern, yet more inventive, treasonable though that may sound.”), to the tonal dominance of the simple triad in the “Acrostic Song” in Final Alice. Triadic writing had made its appearance in Del Tredici’s Alice pieces as early as “The Lobster Quadrille” from An Alice Symphony, and is another element which the composer found especially appropriate to the childlike aspect of the Wonderland world. However, the ever-increasing prominence of tonality in Del Tredici’s music surprised even the composer himself. It may well have been Del Tredici’s success in the simple and unembellished tonal writing of the “Acrostic Song” that encouraged him to devote the next five years of his compositional life to the writing of his neo-tonal romantic Postmodernist monument, Child Alice.

Child Alice, a full-evening concert work for soprano and orchestra (which may be divided into as many as four separate pieces for individual performance), shows a response to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” very different from that found in the works through Final Alice. The text of Child Alice is not taken from any actual Wonderland stories, but is made up of the preface poem to “Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland” and the preface poem to “Through the Looking Glass and What Alice Found There.” Each poem is given two contrasting musical settings, the first from the child’s point of view (the child in this case being Alice Pleasance Liddell, who was the first to hear the Wonderland stories as they were being made up by Carroll), and the second from an adult perspective (more particularly, that of Lewis Carroll, and his feelings, real or imagined, toward the real-life Alice who inspired him). In addition to the double settings of the two preface poems, Child Alice presents, as large-scale interludes, orchestral visions of tales that may have been improvised by Carroll but were never preserved in writing.

The pulling back of Del Tredici’s focus from the individual events of the Wonderland stories to the emotional ramifications of the historical (and partly conjectural) story of Lewis Carroll and Alice Pleasance Liddell would seem to be a natural consequence of the composer’s thorough and intensive involvement in his subject. A fascination and preoccupation with the author and the circumstances of the creation of the Wonderland books, which was first encountered as a subtext in Final Alice, is the substance and major concern of Child Alice.

In spite of the obvious differences between Child Alice and the Alice pieces which preceded it, Del Tredici’s musical preoccupations have remained unchanged. Child Alice may be a monument of neo-tonal romanticism (a kind of musical expression that in fact lends itself well to the creation of monuments), but it would not have been at all the same if it had been written by a composer who had not fully absorbed the metrical modulations and the rhythmic subtleties of Elliott Carter, and the pitch manipulations of the Second Viennese School as transmuted through Princeton.

Child Alice is music that is simultaneously of its time and not of its time. However, Del Tredici has not embarked on an aesthetic crusade; his chief aim is to communicate his emotional response to the subject at hand simply and directly to his audience, and to invoke in them a complementary response. He is an extrovert composer, and that extroversion always results in music of extraordinary vividness, whether applied to humor (as in Vintage Alice), to high Romantic sentiment (as in All in the Golden Afternoon), or to other expressive ends as the Alice series moves toward completion.