Modern Music and After: Directions Since 1945
by Paul Griffiths
Period: Late 20th Century
Born: Saturday, May 16, 1931 in Plainfield, New Jersey (USA)
As of November 2003 this composer is still living.
To report updated information, please see the Contact Info page.
Nation of Origin: United States
Major Works:
Chamber music: Notturno
Other Information:
Donald Martino, born in Plainfield, New Jersey, May 16, 1931, began music lessons at age nine--learning to play the clarinet, saxophone, and oboe--and started composing at 15. He attended Syracuse and Princeton universities. A member of the American Academy of Arts and Letters and the American Academy of Arts and Sciences, his many awards include two Fulbright scholarships, three Guggenheim awards, grants from the Massachusetts Arts Council and the National Endowment for the Arts, the 1974 Pulitzer Prize in music for his chamber work Notturno, First Prize in the 1985 Kennedy Center Friedheim Competition for his String Quartet (1983), and most recently, the Boston Symphony's Mark M. Horblit Award. Mr. Martino has taught at The Third Street Music School Settlement in New York, Princeton University, Yale University, The New England Conservatory of Music, where he was chairman of the composition department from 1969 to 1979, Brandeis University, where he was Irving Fine Professor of Music, and Harvard University, where he is the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor of Music, Emeritus. He has been active as guest lecturer and has been Composer-in-Residence at Tanglewood, The Composer's Conference, The Yale Summer School of Music and Art, The Pontino Festival (Italy), May in Miami, The Atlantic Center for the Arts, The Warebrook Festival, The Ernest Bloch Festival, The Festival Internacional de Musica de Morelia (Mexico) and Distinguished Visiting Professor at the University of Utah, Duke University, Vanderbilt University and the University of Wisconsin. Commisions for new works have come from, among others, the Paderewski Fund; the Fromm, Naumburg, Koussevitzky, and Coolidge Foundations; the Chicago, Boston, and San Francisco Symphonies; and a number of musical societies and organizations. According to the New Grove, "Martino's music has been characterized as expansive, dense, lucid, dramatic, romantic, all of which are applicable. But it is his ability...to conjure up for the listener a world of palpable presences and conceptions...that seems most remarkable.".
Publishers: Dantalian, Inc., 11 Pembroke Street, Newton, MA 02458-2122, Tel./Fax (617) 244-7230, email dantinfo@dantalian.com; McGinnis & Marx, 236 West 26th St., New York, N.Y. 10001 Tel. (212) 675- 1630
Biographical References.- Who's Who in America; Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians; Contemporary Composers (St. John Press, 1992); Perspectives of New Music (29: 2, 1991); Groves Dictionary of Music and AmeriGrove; American Composers (Ewen, 1982)
General Bibliography:
Kennedy, Michael, The Oxford Dictionary of Music, Oxford University Press, 2nd Edition, 1997, ISBN: 0198691629
Lampert, Vera; Kemp, Ian; and White, Eric Walter, The New Grove Modern Masters (The New Grove Series), W. W. Norton & Company, November 1997, ISBN: 0393315924
Sadie, Stanley and Tyrrell, John; Editors, The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, Groves Dictionaries, Inc., January 2001, ISBN: 1561592390
Slonimsky, Nicolas and Kuhn, Laura; Editors, Baker's Biographical Dictionary of Musicians, Gale Group, December 2000, ISBN: 0028655257
Slonimsky, Nicolas, Music Since 1900, Schirmer Books, July 1994, ISBN: 0028724186
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