David Del Tredici came to prominence as one of the originators of “neo-Romanticism.” He describes Steps as “...a thriller, the musical equivalent of one of those page turners you can’t put down, something which grabs you from the first minute and won’t let you go. Steps is a monster-violent, powerful, inexorable.” Haddocks’ Eyes is another in Del Tredici’s series of works based on Lewis Carroll. It is “ ...funny, brusque and breathless-a kind of perpetual mobile machine ever in danger of flying apart. Only at the penultimate line, ‘That summer evening long ago,' does the music mellow. Indeed... this line becomes a crucial motif, bearing the listener again and again to the rapturous bittersweet depths of Carrollian sentiment for child friends now grown, gone.... I’ve been told that there is something childlike in my character. If that is true, then perhaps the compositions here can be said to represent two distinct sides of that child-something charming, something monstrous.”