FYI Donald Martino, 74, Creator of Atonal Musical Works, Dies By ANTHONY TOMMASINI Published: December 12, 2005 Donald Martino, the Pulitzer Prize-winning American composer widely respected for atonal works that combine intellectual rigor with expressive freedom, died on Thursday aboard a cruise ship in the Caribbean en route to Antigua. He was 74. The cause was cardiac arrest following complications of diabetes, said Lora Martino, his wife of 36 years, who was vacationing with him. Mr. Martino lived in Newton, Mass. A student of Roger Sessions and Milton Babbitt, he was an unapologetic Modernist steeped in 12-tone techniques. His works, typically, were dense and formidably complex. A skilled craftsman and comprehensive musician, he believed in challenging listeners. In moments of frustration, he attributed the difficulties his music had in winning mainstream acceptance to concert promoters who cultivated a "potty-trained audience," as he put it in an interview for his 60th birthday. Yet many of his works had arresting qualities that even nonspecialist audiences often found alluring: rhapsodic freedom, Romantic expressivity, vividly dramatic mood shifts, fetching instrumental colorings and, despite the busyness of his pieces, remarkably lucid textures. His 1981 "Fantasies and Impromptus," for example, a 30-minute work for piano in nine movements, is exhilarating in its improvisatory fervor, moving from ruminative passages in a bittersweet atonal harmonic language to fits of impetuosity. Called a "landmark of American piano music" by the critic Andrew Porter in The New Yorker, it is like a 20th-century descendant of Schumann's fantastical "Kreisleriana." Similarly, there is "Notturno," a 20-minute chamber work awarded the 1974 Pulitzer Prize. In this viscerally dramatic score, moments of swirling chaos give way to pensive musings; rhythmically kinetic outbursts alternate with intricate webs of counterpoint. The critic Michael Steinberg, writing in The Boston Globe, called the work "nocturnal theater of the soul." Mr. Martino seemed dismayed by the labels used to describe his music. "If anyone writes program notes and says I am a Serial or a 12-tone composer, I am infuriated," he told an interviewer for The New York Times in 1997. "I don't want to prejudice people with that." For all the cerebral integrity of Mr. Martino's works, there was often an improvisatory energy in his music, stemming from his early days of playing jazz. Born on May 16, 1931, in Plainfield, N.J., he began studying music at 9, first learning the clarinet, saxophone and oboe. By 15 he was composing actively. He attended Syracuse University and completed a Master of Fine Arts degree at Princeton in 1954. For the next two years he studied on a Fulbright fellowship in Italy with the Modernist master Luigi Dallapiccola. Mr. Martino's teaching career began at the Third Street Music School Settlement in New York in the late 1950's. After successful teaching stints at Princeton, Yale, the New England Conservatory in Boston (as chairman of the composition department) and Brandeis, he joined the faculty at Harvard in 1983. He retired 10 years later at 62 so he could devote himself to composition. In 1978 he founded Dantalian Inc., a publishing house, thus placing himself in the vanguard of American composers who have embraced self-publishing as a means to disseminate their music. Ms. Martino was his partner in this endeavor. "I ran the business, he wrote the music," she said on Saturday. Mr. Martino produced a large and varied catalog, including symphonic works, concertos, vocal music and pieces for jazz ensemble. In addition to his wife, his survivors include their son, Christopher, of Boston, and Donald Martino's daughter from an earlier marriage, Anna Maria Martino of Branford, Conn. Mr. Martino was to be honored with a concert at Harvard on Feb. 5 by the Lumen Contemporary Music Ensemble celebrating a year of 75th birthdays for Mr. Martino and a composer colleague, Martin Boykan. Lora Martino said that her husband had taken his laptop and electric keyboard on the cruise so that he could work on a commission from the Tanglewood Festival. "As I did my thing, walking and swimming and exploring," she said, "he spent a good part of the vacation writing music very happily." Karl