Dominick Argento

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Dominick Argento, 2016

Dominick Argento (born October 27, 1927 in York , Pennsylvania , † February 20, 2019 in Minneapolis , Minnesota ) was an American composer and university professor .

Life

Dominick Argento, son of Sicilian immigrants, was attracted to the music of George Gershwin early on . During World War II he did military service as a cryptographer in North Africa. This was followed by a bachelor's and master's degree at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore with Nicolas Nabokov , Henry Cowell and Hugo Weisgall , which was followed by a doctorate at the Eastman School of Music in Rochester (until 1957). There Argento was tutored by Alan Hovhaness , Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson . As a Fulbright scholar , he was able to complete studies in Italy with Luigi Dallapiccola in 1954 .

After completing his studies, Argento became musical director of Hilltop Opera in Baltimore and taught music theory and composition at the Eastman School. Two Guggenheim scholarships enabled him to make further stays in Italy in 1957/58 and 1964/65. From 1958 until his retirement in 1997, Argento was a lecturer at the Department of Music at the University of Minnesota . In 1979 he became a member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters .

plant

The compositional oeuvre of Dominick Argento includes, in addition to some instrumental works, mainly vocal compositions. These include a number of operas that have been successful in the USA (almost all of them also taken up by European theaters), including The Boor (1957), Postcard from Morocco (1971), The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe (1976), and Miss Havisham's Wedding Night (1981 ), Casanova's Homecoming (1984), The Aspern Papers (1988) and The Dream of Valentino (1994). From the 1970s onwards he also wrote several song cycles, with the cycle From the Diary of Virginia Woolf composed for Janet Baker in 1975 winning the Pulitzer Prize of Music . In 2004 the Casa Guidi cycle was awarded a Grammy for “Best Contemporary Classical Composition”.

In Dominick Argento's music, tonality , atonality and twelve-tone techniques are freely combined in a predominantly tonal context .

Individual evidence

  1. ↑ Joshua Rosenblum: Dominick Argento, 91, Celebrated American Composer of Lyric Operas and Songs, has Died. In: Opera News. February 21, 2019 .;
  2. ↑ Short biography at Boosey & Hawkes

literature

Web links

personal data
SURNAME Argento, Dominick
BRIEF DESCRIPTION American composer and university professor
DATE OF BIRTH October 27, 1927
PLACE OF BIRTH York, Pennsylvania
DATE OF DEATH 20th February 2019
Place of death Minneapolis , Minnesota