Dominick Argento

Dominick Argento (b. October 27, 1927, York, Pennsylvania) 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, as well as 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. He is particularly well known for sensitive settings of complex, sophisticated texts.