Around the Music Festival

American composer Domimick Argento died in Minneapolis on February 20. He was 91 years old. He has produced many operas and other vocal works for English, such as “Postcards from Morocco”, “Miss Havisham’s Fire”, “The Masque of Angels” and so on.

In 1957, famous “Six Elizabethan Songs” was composed. The vocal collection “From the Diary of Virginia Woolf” won the Pulitzer Prize in 1975. In addition, “Casa Guidi”, performed by the Minnesota Orchestra with Frederica von Stade, won a Grammy Award in 2004 for Best Classical Contemporary Composition.

Argento born in 1927 in York, Pennsylvania. He earned bachelor’s (1951) and master’s (1953) degrees from the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. He moved to Minneapolis in 1958, and has developed a vigorous composition activity based there. He also served as a professor at the University of Minnesota School of Music from 1958 to 1997.

Photo：Pulitzer Prize　/　Joel Larson