My favorite story about my uncle Dominick was about him winning the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1975.

Dominick Argento was an opera composer, a strange profession for a man who seemed, at least to me, semi-normal, which, I admit, is relative. That year, he had composed a song cycle based on the diary of Virginia Woolf, a woman, who it should be noted, had some issues.

A novelist of great talent, she suffered from depression much of her life and at age 59, killed herself by stuffing rocks in the pockets of her overcoat and walking into the River Ouse. As you can imagine, her diaries opened a window to a mind that, at once, was troubled and beautiful.

Dominick’s music captured that, the beauty of her work, her poetic grace, and the madness that tortured her soul and, eventually, led her to her demise. It is strange and beautiful music, combining classic romantic themes with modern avant-garde weirdness, like much of his work, able to convey the complexity of being a human being.

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Anyway, his work won him the Pulitzer, and the first call he made upon hearing the news was to his mother, my grandmother, Nicolina. My grandmother always worried about Memo, as she called him, a childhood nickname. Her eldest had been in the Army, and upon leaving the service, where he served as a cryptographer after graduating from York High, in York, Pa., he studied music at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore on the G.I. Bill.

He eventually earned a doctorate in music composition from the prestigious Eastman School of Music at Rochester University. After he earned his degree, he and his wife, Carolyn Bailey, a soprano he met at Peabody, moved to Minneapolis, where he taught music theory and composition at the University of Minnesota, eventually becoming a tenured professor, all while still composing operas and other pieces.

My grandmother, an old Sicilian woman who had been widowed at an early age when my grandfather – Mike, I’m named for him – died unexpectedly, always felt bad for Dominick. He had gone to school for so many years only to wind up being what she thought of as a glorified school teacher, and she believed that school teachers could barely make a living.

Dominick told my grandmother, “Mom, I won the Pulitzer Prize.”

My grandmother said, “That’s nice. How much do you get for that?”

Dominick went into a lengthy discourse about what the Pulitzer was and what it meant for his career and for his university and his legacy as a composer. It was a big deal, he told her.

And my grandmother said, “So it’s not much.”

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My uncle Dominick told me that story some years back, and it has remained, over the decades, my favorite Uncle Dominick story. That, and the time when I went to the University of Maryland, where the school of music had hosted him as an artist in residence and had staged one of his operas, the wonderful “Miss Havisham’s Fire,” based on the character from Dickens’ “Great Expectations.”

One of the first things he said when I arrived was, “Let’s see if the bar’s open.” Spoken like a true musician. And the story when he threw a dart that embedded in my father’s back and gave my dad a nickel not to tell their mom about it.

I’m recalling all of this because, on Wednesday, my uncle Dominick died at age 91. He had a long run and left an amazing legacy, one that is revered in the world of classical music, one of the giants in that slice of American culture, but to me, and my siblings and the rest of my family, he was always just Uncle Dominick, my dad’s older brother.

His works have been performed all over the world. He has had his work performed by the Metropolitan Opera in New York. His work has been performed in Italy, the nation that gave opera to the rest of the planet. He has been honored at the Kennedy Center as an American artist who has contributed to the rich tapestry of this country’s cultural heritage.

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His work has earned critical acclaim. His opera “The Voyage of Edgar Allan Poe,” about the troubled writer’s last days, was described by the Washington Post as “the great American opera.” He was considered America’s preeminent composer of lyric opera.

But some of my best memories of my Uncle Dominick were sitting on the couch at my parents’ house with him and my dad and watching the Minnesota Vikings on TV. He was a big Vikings fan, and I'd listen to this world-class composer complain about how the Vikings don’t have a clue about finding a quarterback who could get the ball downfield to receiver Randy Moss and that the team’s defense has been crap since Alan Page retired. (The former defensive tackle, who went on to be the first African-American to serve on Minnesota’s Supreme Court, was acquainted with my uncle, my dad told me once.)

It was always strange when I'd read something about Uncle Dominick. The pieces were always cloaked in the kind of breathless prose that made it seem like the writer wanted the reader to know that he was a Great Artist.

Well, he was.

But he was also grounded in his roots.

His father came to this country from Sicily when he was a teenager, alone, broke, not a dime in his pocket. He made his way to York, where he got a job at the former American Chain and Cable. He was a barrel-chested man, strong, and he worked like a team of mules.

He made enough money to send for my grandmother and eventually, own a couple of businesses in town – the former Duke Hotel and Starlight Lounge and the College Café. (As a kid, I used to play the shuffleboard machine at the bar.) Dominick learned to play the accordion as a kid and would entertain the barflies, playing for tips.

Dominick never forgot his roots. He never forgot that he grew up a city kid on the corner of Pine and College. And he approached his work like a blue-collar guy, building operas instead of, say, chain or motorcycles.

I remember talking to him about it, his creative process. He always said if you sit there and wait for inspiration, you’re never going to get anything done. You sit down and you do the work, he said. He approached composing like a contractor approaches building a house. You lay the foundation, you put up the walls and throw a roof on the sucker and then you can add the other stuff that makes it different.

He once described the process of revising his work as akin to changing the plumbing in a house. You mess with one part, he said, and next thing you know, you have to rebuild the whole thing.

He may have drawn inspiration for his work from literature – something that came from spending hours and hours in York’s Martin Library reading when he was a kid – but his approach to his art was always workmanlike. In fact, at York High, he was enrolled in the industrial curriculum because, as he said, he liked working with his hands and making things.

He created art that will outlive him and will be a part of the canon of American classical music of the 20th Century, a part of this country’s cultural history.

Not that he cared. Asked once in an interview whether he thought his music would last, he replied, “I don’t worry about it.”

That was my Uncle Dominick.

Reach Mike Argento at 171-771-2046 or at mike@ydr.com.

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