Norman Dello Joio was born in the family of musicians. His father as well as godfather was both skilled organists all set to train the boy on instruments. Dello developed fine skills at the age of 14 and earned for himself the Star of the Sea Church title in New York. It was here that the young man earned a lasting impression through the constant exposure to traditional Catholic liturgical music.
Dello attended the Hallow’s institute from the year 1926 to 1930 and completed in College of the city of New York in 1934. It was after this that he sought more serious training in music at the Institute of Musical Art in 1936 and at the Juilliard School from 1939 to 1941. But the vital shaping of his compositional outlook were brought by the brief studies with Hindemith in the year 1941 at the Tangle wood and Yale University.
He held many faculty appointments including positions at Sarah Lawrence College, the Boston University and the Mannes College of Music throughout his long career. He also received many scholarly honors like a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for his string orchestra work Meditations on Ecclesiastes along with the two Guggenheim fellowships. He shaped his compositional identity according to the influences compelling him in the most... show more

Norman Dello Joio was born in the family of musicians. His father as well as godfather was both skilled organists all set to train the boy on instruments. Dello developed fine skills at the age of 14 and earned for himself the Star of the Sea Church title in New York. It was here that the young man earned a lasting impression through the constant exposure to traditional Catholic liturgical music.
Dello attended the Hallow’s institute from the year 1926 to 1930 and completed in College of the city of New York in 1934. It was after this that he sought more serious training in music at the Institute of Musical Art in 1936 and at the Juilliard School from 1939 to 1941. But the vital shaping of his compositional outlook were brought by the brief studies with Hindemith in the year 1941 at the Tangle wood and Yale University.
He held many faculty appointments including positions at Sarah Lawrence College, the Boston University and the Mannes College of Music throughout his long career. He also received many scholarly honors like a Pulitzer Prize in 1957 for his string orchestra work Meditations on Ecclesiastes along with the two Guggenheim fellowships. He shaped his compositional identity according to the influences compelling him in the most natural way and was encouraged in a great deal by Hindemith. He had developed a musical language that synthesized the worlds of liturgical music, jazz and Italian opera effectively. He might have been charged many a times as being overly theatrical in his musical gestures yet his music never resorts to overindulgence or garishness like that of many of the great and accessible composers.
His great works like the Meditations or the second version of the opera, the Triumph of St. Joan, 1959 will always occupy a place in the repertoire. Initially a professional musician, Norman Dello will always be a prominent figure as a great composer from the American landscape at the turn of the next century. His critical successes are the result of his delicate understanding of musical craft as well as an honest, accessible musical language. He earned the gratitude of countless audiences, though at times he has been rejected by the musical establishment as they thought of him to be too accessible to be taken as a serious composer.
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