Salvatore Martirano
The
Salvatore Martirano Memorial Composition Award is an international
composers' competition held annually in memory of Mr. Martirano who was a
faculty member at the University of Illinois from 1963 to 1995. Since its
inception in 1996, the competition has attracted over 2,000 entries from
over 30 countries. The first place prize consists of $1000.00 and a
performance of the winning composition by the University of Illinois New
Music Ensemble at the Krannert Center for the Performing Arts. Zack
Browning who is an Associate Professor of Music at the University of
Illinois directs the competition.
Postmark deadline: March 12, 2012
See details at: http://camil.music.illinois.edu/CompTheory/Awards/Martirano.html
Salvatore Giovanni Martirano, internationally acclaimed
American composer and Professor Emeritus at the University of Illinois
was born on January 12th, 1927, in Yonkers, NY, a son of Alexander and
Mary Mazzullo Martirano. He died at the age of 68 on Friday, November
17th, 1995.
Professor Martirano studied composition with Herbert Elwell at
Oberlin College (1947-51), Bernard Rodgers at The Eastman School of Music
(1952), and with Luigi Dallapiccola at the Cherubini Conservatory in
Florence, Italy (1952-4). From 1956 to 1959 he was in Rome as a Fellow of
the American Academy, and in 1960 he received a Guggenheim Fellowship and
an award from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. At this time he
had works commissioned by the Koussevitzky and Fromm Foundations. He was
professor of composition at the University of Illinois from 1963 till his
retirement in 1995. During the Illinois years he also accepted
residencies at The Sydney Conservatorium of Music in Sydney in 1979,
IRCAM in Paris in 1982, and The California Institute of the Arts in
1993.
His
compositions have been performed by the New York Philharmonic, Chicago
Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, Vienna Philharmonic Orchestra, and
the Cleveland Orchestra, and by radio orchestras and choral ensembles
throughout the United States, Europe and Asia. His chamber and solo works
have been performed world-wide.
Professor Martirano spent much of the 1970's developing the Sal
Mar Construction, an electronic composing/performing system that Science
Digest called "the world's first composing machine." He toured the world
with his creation and with its successor, the yahaSalmaMac.
