6 min.

1960
The Old Spaghetti Factory, San Francisco
David Del Tredici, piano

dedicated to Stephanie Shehatovitch / Earl Kim / Jules Langert / Robert Helps

1. Adagio
2. Poco alllegretto
3. Allegro minacciando (...Diabolique)
4. Largo

The Fantasy Pieces (1959-60) were written at age twenty-two, while I was a graduate student at Princeton University. They began in response to composer-professor Earl Kim's suggestion that I try writing some twelve-tone music. Each of the pieces does, in fact start with a tone row. However, my ear—quite differently inclined—led me down another, more tonal, path that finally ended far from dodecaphony, on an unresolved dominant seventh chord.

The four pieces are highly virtuosic and were written at a time when my piano-playing career was in full flower. The first two are delicate and kaleidoscopic, the third (...Diabolique) is demonic, and the last (and longest) is, by contrast almost Wagnerian in its tonal outpourings.

The pianist Alan Marks describes Fantasy Pieces as follows: "... a set of four brief impressions that are in every sense fantastic: intensely focused emotional expressions of wildness, dreaminess, nervousness or spaciousness. What is important in each piece is the gesture— the specific notes seeming to exist secondarily to the impulse of the moment. These impulses rarely occur in strict rhythm; a hesitation will precipitate a sudden rush which may be sustained or bum out in an instant. This ebb and flow of the rhythm gives the music its improvisatory flavor. As brief as each movement is—as in Webern's music—it is highly expressionistic and structurally bound by only two or three ideas.

The pieces are dedicated to four composer/performer friends (in order): Stephanie Shehatovitch, Earl Kim, Jules Langert, and Robert Helps.

"Del Tredici's four "Fantasy Pieces" (1960) are early works written in the 12-tone manner before he went through a critical change to a largely tonal idiom. Regardless of the different manner, the quality, the voice of the composer and his romantic outlook, the formal integrity all sound like Del Tredici. The moods are intense, the pieces concentrated, almost aphoristic, but the character of each is strong, expressionist in ways that are reminiscent of Schoenberg, as the program noted. The third Fantasy has a driving motoric force, is angry and assertive. The fourth is the finest, and already, in 1960, reveals Del Tredici's nostalgic referential manner. Wagner could be heard in the first piece, suggestions of Brahms and others in Del Tredici's pianistic experience in the fourth, with Wagner and Tchaikovsky coloring the fantasy."