The Boston Globe reports that Donald Martino, Pulizter Prize-winning composer, passed away on Thursday, December 8 while on a cruise with his wife in the Caribbean.
Martino taught at the Third Street Settlement in New York, Princeton, Yale, NEC, and Harvard. After serving as Irving Fine Professor of Music at Brandeis University from 1980 to 1983, he joined the faculty of Harvard in 1983; he retired as Walter Bigelow Rosen Professor Emeritus in 1992. He founded his own publishing company, Dantalian, Inc., to publish his music.
I am not intimately familiar with Martino's work - the one piece I know is Eternitie, from his Seven Pious Pieces on texts by Robert Herrick. I sang it with the Back Bay Chorale several years ago. It was beautiful, and I loved it, and I am sorry the composer is gone.
At least he had a good run. His many awards include two Fulbright scholarships; three Guggenheim awards; grants from the Massachusetts Arts Council, the National Institute of Arts and Letters, and the National Endowment for the Arts; the Brandeis Creative Arts Citation in Music; 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.
Nothing to sneeze at. RIP, Donald.
Information from dantalian.com and Grove Music Online.
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