After an initial flirtation with modernist styles, composer David Del Tredici adopted a tonal idiom and became recognized as a pioneer of the neo-Romantic movement. Among his major orchestral works are a series inspired by Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland, stimulated by Martin Gardner's book The Annotated Alice. His first Alice-related work was An Alice Symphony (1969). At first, he combined serialism with traditional tonality, but gradually, he minimized the presence of serialist procedures and finally dispensed with them altogether. Del Tredici began teaching at the City University of New York in 1984 and remained on the faculty there into the 2010s. He remained active as a composer into old age, penning an Ode to Music in 2015. By that time, well over 50 of his works had been recorded. Del Tredici died on November 18, 2023.