Marc Migó, recipient of the Dominick Argento Fellowship for Composition.

The American composer Dominick Argento passed away on 20 February 2019. The author of fourteen operas and numerous choral works, he was married to soprano Carolyn Bailey, who frequently performed his works, and who had died years earlier, on February 2006.

Thanks to an endowment provided by Argento, the National Opera Association (NOA) has created the Dominick and Carolyn Bailey Argento Fellowships, two new scholarship programmes, named after the composer and his wife, to support graduate study in opera composition and vocal performance, each endowed with $50,000 per year for one composer (the Dominick Argento Fellowship) and one singer (the Carolyn Bailey Argento Fellowship). Each will support up to two years of study for students pursuing a master’s degree and three years for those pursuing a doctorate at an accredited US institution.

Born in York, Pennsylvania, but of Italian family origin, the scholarships have no residency or nationality requirements and the winners of the first edition were announced on 4 February at the NOA National Conference in St. Augustine, Florida. The first winners of the Dominick Argento Fellowship for Opera Composition were the young Catalan composer Marc Migó Cortés (Barcelona, 1993), to pursue a Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Composition at Juilliard, and the American composer Mikeila McQueston, to pursue a Master’s degree in Composition at the University of Tennessee. Marc Migó is currently working, as he explains by e-mail, “on a commission from Ensemble Verità for this summer, with original baroque instruments, and on a Catalan requiem (commissioned by El Cor Canta), with text by Juana Dolores, to be premiered next year”.

Carolyn Bailey Argento Vocal Performance Fellowships were awarded to Caitlin Aloia to pursue an Artist Diploma in the field of Opera Performance at Rice University, and to Hayden Smith to complete a Master’s degree in Vocal Performance at Rice University.

© Photograph downloaded from Marc Migó’s website.