Dominick Argento - Early Life and Education

Early Life and Education

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 bachelor's (1951) and master's (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.