Politics & Power Quote by David Del Tredici

Del Tredici isn’t just waving a flag; he’s trying to relocate the cultural “center of gravity” of serious music. The line “we are where the energy is” borrows the language of markets and movements, not conservatories. It frames composition less as a lineage descending from Europe and more as a live wire: restless, loud, contemporary. That matters coming from a composer whose own career challenged mid-century orthodoxies (serialism’s high modernist rulebook) by embracing theatricality, lyricism, and queer-coded extravagance when those were treated as suspect in academic circles.

The brag is strategic. “Best” is a provocation meant to puncture the inherited inferiority complex of American classical music, long measured against Germanic monuments. Del Tredici stacks his evidence in four adjectives that function like a manifesto: “diverse” signals America’s plural sources (jazz, minimalism, film, immigrant traditions); “iconoclastic” and “maverick” romanticize rule-breaking as a national style; “skillful” is the clincher, anticipating the familiar rebuttal that experimentation is just undisciplined noise.

The subtext is also institutional. By the late 20th century, the U.S. had the universities, commissions, orchestras, and recording infrastructure that could make “energy” visible and bankable. Yet the claim carries a faint defensive edge: if you have to insist you’re the best, you’re still arguing with a gatekeeper in your head. Del Tredici’s sentence reads like self-authorization on behalf of a scene that’s done asking Europe for permission.