Documentary screening honors life of beloved composer

Lehigh’s Zoellner Arts Center held a free screening of “Secret Music,”  a documentary honoring the late Pulitzer Prize-winning composer David Del Tredici, on Sept. 7.

The film was directed by Daniel Beliavsky, a professor at Yeshiva University, who aimed to explore Del Tredici’s involvement and impact on the queer community through his music and mentorship. 

Darin Lewis, a music professor at Lehigh, organized the event. He said he did so because he studied under Del Tredici.

“The documentary captured him exactly as I experienced him,” Lewis said. “I was happy to see that I remember him just the way I saw him.”

The documentary showed how the composer communicated both the joys and the sorrows of his sexuality through his music.

“It’s very important to me to create a body of work that says this, because once it’s there, it’s there,” Del Tredici said in an interview included in the documentary. “Nobody can take it away.”

Kailey Clifford, ‘26, who attended the screening, said she found peace in these sentiments.

“I think that every individual person at some point creates something that can be considered art through their life experiences,” Clifford said. “The point of art is empathy.”

Del Tredici reminisced on his youth during the film, saying he was always considered “weird” because rather than recess or sports, he said he enjoyed creating flower arrangements.

Del Tredici said he struggled to reconcile his queerness with his Catholic upbringing when he was young, and felt more comfortable with himself once he let go of his Catholic guilt.

Old home video footage of Del Tredici captured him playing the piano with other gay men, some in drag and others dressed promiscuously. 

“I turned gay into music,” Del Tredici said in the film.

However, Beliavsky said even Del Tredici could not initially pinpoint what it meant for music to be gay.

“He didn’t have an immediate answer because it was so intrinsic to who he was,” Beliavsky said during the Q&A. “It took him about five years to formulate an answer.”

In the documentary, Del Tredici compared his queerness and talent to an oyster: It can only make a pearl under stress. 

He considered oppression to be necessary to his career.

Still, Del Tredici hoped fewer queer composers would face the challenges he did. He believed in an increasingly progressive society in which more queer composers could thrive.

“The ability to consume art is empathy,” Clifford said. “Accepting his work into the classical canon is empathy, and it opens doors for everyone.”

Many of Del Tredici’s works involve sexual deviance, but during the talk-back, Beliavsky argued there was more to him.

Beliavsky said Del Trecidic wasn’t quite what he seemed, and he was a complex individual. 

“He wasn’t just this force of nature, all sex,” Beliavsky said. “If he were an anarchist in this way, he wouldn’t have been able to create anything.” 

The documentary also emphasized Del Tredici’s natural kindness as a teacher.