Dominick Argento

Dominick Argento is an American composer, best known as a leading composer of lyric opera and choral music. Among his most prominent pieces are the operas Postcard from Morocco, Miss Havisham’s Fire, and The Masque of Angels, and the song cycles Six Elizabethan Songs and From the Diary of Virginia Woolf, the latter of which earned him the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975. In a predominantly tonal context, his music freely combines tonality, atonality and a lyrical use of twelve-tone writing, though none of Argento’s music approaches the experimental avant garde fashions of the post World War II era. He is particularly well-known for sensitive settings of complex, sophisticated texts.

As a student in the 1950s, Argento divided his time between America and Italy, and his music is greatly influenced both by his teachers in the United States and his personal affection for Italy, particularly the city of Florence, where he spends part of every year and where many of his works were written. He has been a professor (and, more recently, a professor emeritus) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis, and he frequently remarks that he finds that city to be tremendously supportive of his work and that he thinks his musical development would have been impeded had he stayed in the high-pressure world of East Coast music.He was one of the founders of the Center Opera Company (now the Minnesota Opera), and indeed Newsweek once referred to the Twin Cities as “Argento’s town.”

Argento has written fourteen operas as well as major song cycles, orchestral works, and many choral pieces for small and large forces, many of which were commissioned for and premiered by Minnesota-based artists. He has referred to his wife, the soprano Carolyn Bailey, as his muse, and she was a frequent performer of his works. She died on February 2, 2006.
Argento, the son of Sicilian immigrants, grew up in York, Pennsylvania. Ironically, although he would go on to become an acclaimed composer, he found his music classes in elementary school to be “fifty minute sessions of excruciating boredom.”Upon graduating from high school, he was drafted into the Army and spent some time as a cryptographer; he then began studying piano performance at the Peabody Conservatory on the G.I. Bill.He quickly decided to switch to composition.

He earned bachelors (1951) and masters (1953) degrees from Peabody, where his teachers included Nicholas Nabokov, Henry Cowell, and Hugo Weisgall. While there, he was briefly the music director of Weisgall’s Hilltop Musical Company, which Weisgall founded as a sort of answer to Benjamin Britten’s festival at Aldeburgh—a venue for local composers (particularly Weisgall himself) to present new work. This experience gave Argento broad exposure to and experience in the world of new opera.Hilltop’s stage director was writer John Olon-Scrymgeour, with whom Argento would later collaborate on many operas. During this time period he also spent a year in Florence on a Fulbright Fellowship, and has called the experience “life-altering;” while there, he studied briefly with Luigi Dallapiccola. Argento went on to receive his Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Alan Hovhaness, Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson. Following completion of this degree, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and spent another year in Florence, thus inaugurating a tradition of spending long periods of time in that city.

Argento moved to Minneapolis in 1958 with his new wife Carolyn to begin teaching theory and composition at the University of Minnesota. Within a few years he received commissions from virtually every major performing group there. He has remarked that this constant feeling of strong community interest in his work made him feel particularly at home in Minnesota, despite the fact that he resisted moving there at first and hoped for several years that a position on the East Coast would beckon. Argento became involved in writing music for productions at the then-new Guthrie Theatre, and in 1963, he and Scrymgeour founded the Center Opera Company to be in residence there. Argento composed the short opera The Masque of Angels for the occasion, and the work—with its complex harmonic language and an emphasis on expansive choral writing that prefigures his later role as a prominent choral composer—firmly established his local prominence, as well as providing a role for his wife.

By 1971, when his daring surreal opera Postcard from Morocco opened at Center Opera, his national reputation was secure, in part thanks to a glowing review by the principal music critic of the New York Times. He eventually received commissions from New York City Opera, the newly-formed Minnesota Opera, Washington Opera, and the Baltimore and St. Louis Symphonies, among others. He also developed close professional relationships with several prominent singers, notably Frederica Von Stade, Janet Baker, and Håkan Hagegård, and some of his best-known song cycles were tailored to their talents.

In the mid-1970s he also began writing small choral works for the choir of a Congregational Church in Minneapolis, which his friend directed. From this modest beginning, he began to receive larger and larger commissions for choral works, eventually penning major pieces for the Dale Warland Singers, The Buffalo Philharmonic Orchestra and Buffalo Schola Cantorum, and most recently the Harvard and Yale Glee Clubs.

In addition to his Pulitzer Prize, the recording by Frederica Von Stade and the Minnesota Orchestra of his song cycle Casa Guidi won the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Argento’s book Catalogue Raisonné as Memoir, an autobiographical discussion of his works, was published in 2004.

Argento is now retired from teaching but he retains the title of Professor Emeritus at the University of Minnesota. He still lives in Minneapolis, and his musical output has remained steady.

Performances:

Dominick Argento's latest work, Cenotaph, was commisioned for this convention and will be premiered during the convention's major work concert.

Gold Track Major Work concert - Thursday, March 5, 8:30pm

Public Concert - Friday, March 6, 8:00pm - Tickets available through Canterbury Choral Society

Scarlet Track Major Work Concert - Saturday, March 7, 8:30