Salvatore Martirano

Salvatore Giovanni Martirano (January 12, 1927 – November 17, 1995) was an American composer of contemporary classical music. Born in Yonkers, New York, he taught for many years at the University of Illinois. He also worked in electronic music and invented electronic musical instruments.

Martirano received his undergraduate degree in 1951 from Oberlin College, where he studied composition with Herbert Elwell. A year later he completed his master's degree in composition at the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Bernard Rogers. Martirano worked in Italy from 1956 to 1959, when he was a resident fellow at the American Academy.

Between 1959 and 1964, Martirano received commissions, awards, and fellowships from the Guggenheim, Ford, Koussevitzky, and Fromm Foundations, as well as from the American Academy of Arts and Letters and Brandeis University.

In 1963, Martirano joined the Theory and Composition Department at the University of Illinois in Urbana. He served on the faculty until his retirement and death in 1995. Martirano was the second person to live in the 1955 "Garvey House" in Urbana after Garvey, for whom it was designed by notable architect Bruce Goff.

Many of Martirano's early works incorporate twelve-tone compositional techniques as well as jazz, vernacular, and multimedia idioms. His best-known composition, "L's GA" (Lincoln's Gettysburg Address), was widely performed in the late 1960s and early 1970s. It became associated with the anti-Vietnam War movement.

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