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Dominick Argento (born October 27, 1927) is an American composer known for his lyric operatic and choral music. Among his best known pieces are the operas ''Postcard from Morocco'', ''Miss Havisham's Fire'', ''The Masque of Angels'', and ''The Aspern Papers.'' He also is known for the song cycles ''Six Elizabethan Songs'' and ''From the Diary of Virginia Woolf''; the latter 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.〔Saya, Virginia. "Dominick Argento," ''Grove Music Online'', ed. L. Macy. (Accessed 15 December 2006).〕 As a student in the 1950s, Argento divided his time between the United States and Italy, and his music is greatly influenced both by his instructors in the United States and his personal affection for Italy, particularly the city of Florence. Many of Argento's works were written in Florence, where he spends a portion of every year.〔Waleson, Heidi. "An Introduction to Argento's Music." Boosey & Hawkes online (accessed 15 December 2006). (Article )〕 He has been a professor (and, more recently, a professor emeritus) at the University of Minnesota in Minneapolis. He frequently remarks that he finds residents of 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.〔〔Argento, Dominick. ''Catalogue Raisonné as Memoir.'' Minneapolis: U of M Press, 2004. ISBN 0-8166-4505-1.〕 He was one of the founders of the Center Opera Company (now the Minnesota Opera). ''Newsweek'' magazine 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 these 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. ==Early life and education== Argento, the son of Sicilian immigrants, grew up in York, Pennsylvania. He found his music classes in elementary school to be "fifty minute sessions of excruciating boredom" but would develop as an acclaimed composer.〔 Upon graduating from high school, he was drafted into the Army and spent some time as a cryptographer. Following the war and using funding from the G.I. Bill, he began studying piano performance at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore.〔 He quickly decided to switch to composition. He earned bachelor's (1951) and master's (1953) degrees from Peabody, where his teachers included Nicolas Nabokov, Henry Cowell, and Hugo Weisgall. While there, he was briefly the music director of Weisgall's Hilltop Musical Company, which the composer founded as a sort of answer to Benjamin Britten's festival at Aldeburgh—a venue for local composers (particularly Weisgall) 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 scholarship of the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission. He has called the experience "life-altering;" while there, he studied briefly with Luigi Dallapiccola. Argento continued graduate studies and received his Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with composers Alan Hovhaness, Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson.〔("Dominick Argento: Minnesota Romantic" ), Minnesota Public Radio, 2002〕 Following completion of this degree, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study/work for another year in Florence. He established a tradition of spending long periods of time in that city. 抄文引用元・出典: フリー百科事典『 ウィキペディア（Wikipedia）』 ■ウィキペディアで「Dominick Argento」の詳細全文を読む スポンサード リンク
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