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 1,000 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.
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.