Press Release
For Immediate Release:
December 12, 2005
Donald Martino, Head of NEC’s Composition Department 1969-1981, Dead of a Heart Attack
Pulitizer Prize-winning Notturno Composed While Martino at NEC
Paradiso Choruses Given World Premiere in 1975 by NEC Choruses, 12 Soloists and Orchestra
Donald Martino, Pulitizer Prize-winning composer who headed New England Conservatory’s Composition Department from 1969 to 1981, died December 8 of a heart attack. His death came while cruising the Caribbean to Antigua, a vacation trip in which Martino continued to work happily on a new Concertino for Violin and 14 Instruments commissioned by the Tanglewood Music Center. He was 74 years old.
Born in Plainfield, New Jersey, on May 16, 1931, Martino began music lessons at nine--learning to play the clarinet, saxophone, and oboe. He started composing at 15. A graduate of Syracuse University, he studied composition with Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt at Princeton and with Luigi Dallapiccola while on a Fulbright Scholarship in Florence. Although he cringed when labeled a “serial” or “12-tone” composer, Martino was an unabashed modernist who favored an atonal harmonic system and the rigorously determined compositional procedures of the serialists. Yet his music was often leavened with jazzy flavors that carried over from his experience playing in dance bands and by vivid internal dramatic conflicts. There were also demonstrations of wit and irony such as that in Das magische Kabarett des Doktor Schoenberg (Dr. Schoenberg’s Magic Cabaret), a chamber music movement in which he envisioned Arnold Schoenberg, Anton Webern, Alban Berg, “and maybe Egon Wellesz,” forced to play in a cabaret quartet for eternity –“the pit band in Hell.” Martino’s 12-tone settings of 16 pop tunes showed how that infernal soundtrack might have played out.
Martino, like many composers of his generation, held numerous university and conservatory positions, including such prestigious appointments as the Irving Fine Professorship at Brandeis University and the Walter Bigelow Rosen Professorship at Harvard. At NEC, he was appointed by President Gunther Schuller to head the composition faculty and during his tenure here he wrote Notturno, the now classic chamber work for flutes, clarinets, violin/viola, cello, piano, and percussion. That piece won the 1974 Pulitzer Prize and has since been recorded numerous times.
Also while at NEC, Martino composed the Paradiso Choruses, an enormous oratorio inspired by Dante’s Divine Comedy that was commissioned by the Paderewski Fund for Lorna Cooke deVaron on the occasion of her 25th anniversary directing the choruses at NEC.
“I thought Notturno was a very beautiful piece and believed Don was the logical person to commission to write a small work for chorus,” deVaron recalled on Monday. “But the piece kept getting bigger and bigger.” Having composed a particularly thorny Christmas piece for the NEC chamber chorus some years before the Paradiso Choruses, Martino in setting Dante “went back to what Dallapiccola taught him and wrote in a more Italianate vein,” deVaron said. “He realized that he couldn’t write the same kind of music for singers as he could for orchestra.”
Given its world premiere in 1975 in NEC’s Jordan Hall, Paradiso Choruses spilled off the stage, into the balconies and onto specially built daises. In its review of the piece, the Boston Globe called the Paradiso Choruses, "some kind of masterpiece” and asked: “How…can a work of this capaciousness, of its evident complexity and equally evident simplicity, of its variety and inevitability, of its immediate necessariness, not have been there all along, like some new planet, just somehow now swimming into ken?"
Even after Martino had gone on to other schools and an active retirement devoted to composition, NEC continued to honor a composer who had been such an important influence on so many students and colleagues. In November 2003, for example, the Conservatory presented "A Tribute to Donald Martino," with a concert including Fantasies and Impromptus for piano, From the Other Side, and Notturno. Before the concert and after intermission the composer spoke to the audience.
More recently, Martino was represented on a Boston Connections program by the Boston Modern Orchestra Project, NEC’s affiliate orchestra for new music. In January 2005, BMOP performed his Concertino for Clarinet (2003) with Ian Greitzer as soloist. The Globe’s senior music critic Richard Dyer wrote: "The old master on the program was Donald Martino and he obliged with what sounded like a masterpiece, a Concertino for his own instrument, the clarinet, with a substantial orchestra but no percussion. Martino's language is his own, but the work bows to tradition in its three-movement form and cadenzas, and of course the writing for the soloist, though demanding, is completely idiomatic. Martino has long since 'proved' anything he needed to; this is a work of easy, playful, reflective and radiant accomplishment, with a personal glow around it that recalls another late work by a master, the Oboe Concerto by Richard Strauss."
For more information, call the NEC Concert Line at (617) 585-1122 or visit NEC on the web at www.newenglandconservatory.edu/
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