Dominick Argento (born October 27, 1927) is an American composer known for his lyric operatic and choral music. Among his best known pieces are the operas Postcard from Morocco, Miss Havisham's Fire, The Masque of Angels, and The Aspern Papers. He also is known for 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.
Argento, the son of Sicilian immigrants, grew up in York, Pennsylvania. He found his music classes in elementary school to be "fifty minute sessions of excruciating boredom" but would develop as an acclaimed composer. Upon graduating from high school, he was drafted into the Army and spent some time as a cryptographer. Following the war and using funding from the G.I. Bill, he began studying piano performance at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore. He quickly decided to switch to composition. He earned bachelor's (1951) and master's (1953) degrees from Peabody, where his teachers included Nicolas Nabokov, Henry Cowell, and Hugo Weisgall. While there, he was briefly the music director of Weisgall's Hilltop Musical Company, which the composer founded as a sort of answer to Benjamin Britten's festival at Aldeburgh--a venue for local composers (particularly Weisgall) 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 scholarship of the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission. He has called the experience "life-altering;" while there, he studied briefly with Luigi Dallapiccola. Argento continued graduate studies and received his Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with composers Alan Hovhaness, Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson. Following completion of this degree, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study/work for another year in Florence. He established a tradition of spending long periods of time in that city.

Q: Where did he grow up?
A: Argento, the son of Sicilian immigrants, grew up in York, Pennsylvania.
Did he go to college?
He earned bachelor's (1951) and master's (1953) degrees from Peabody, He earned bachelor's (1951) and master's (1953) degrees from Peabody, Peabody, Upon graduating from high school, He earned bachelor's
He earned bachelor's