Dominick Argento (born 27 October 1927, York, Pennsylvania) is an American composer, best known as a leading composer of lyric opera.

Argento is the son of Italian immigrants. He earned bachelor's and master's degrees from the Peabody Conservatory, where his teachers included Nicholas Nabokov, Henry Cowell, and Hugo Weisgall. Argento received his Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Alan Hovhaness, Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson. He also briefly studied in Italy with Luigi Dallapiccola.

Argento has written fourteen operas, major song cycles, orchestral works, and many choral pieces. 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 was a professor of music for more than 40 years at the University of Minnesota, teaching composition, history of opera and orchestration. Besides an international reputation, his music has been an especially integral part of artistic life in Minneapolis/St. Paul since the 1960s. For most of his adult life, Argento spent summers in Florence, Italy, where he composed a great deal of his music. His wife Carolyn Bailey was a soprano who performed many of his early works. Argento was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1975 for his song cycle "From the Diary of Virginia Woolf". The recording by Frederica Von Stade and the Minnesota Orchestra of his song cycle for mezzo-soprano and orchestra, "Casa Guidi", settings of letters of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, won the 2004 Grammy Award for Best Contemporary Classical Composition. Argento's book Catalogue Raisonne as Memoir, an autobiographical discussion of his works, was published in 2004.

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Minn Opera is wrapping up their revival of Dominick Argento's "Casanova's Homecoming"--fun, funny, gorgeous. MPRadio: http://is.gd/51gdV
susan_marie (Susan Marie Swanson) Sun, 22 Nov 2009 21:05:32 -0000
Minn Opera is wrapping up their revival of Dominick Argento's "Casanova's Homecoming"--fun, funny, gorgeous. MPRadio: http://is.gd/51gdV
More WordPress today, and going to the opera to see Dominick Argento's Casanova's Homecoming then dinner with Dom and family.
BizCoachChuck (Chuck Phillips) Sun, 22 Nov 2009 15:23:27 -0000
More WordPress today, and going to the opera to see Dominick Argento's Casanova's Homecoming then dinner with Dom and family.

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