included Nicolas Nabokov, Henry Cowell, and Hugo Weisgall. While there, he was briefly the music director of the Hilltop Musical Company, which Weisgall founded as a sort of answer to Benjamin Britten's festival at Aldeburgh—a venue for local composers (particularly Weisgall) to present new work. Argento gained broad exposure to and experience in the world of new opera. Hilltop's stage director was the writer John Olon-Scrymgeour, with whom Argento later collaborated on many operas. During this period, he also spent a year in Florence on a scholarship of the U.S.-Italy Fulbright Commission. He has called the experience "life-altering;" while there, he studied briefly with Luigi Dallapiccola. Argento continued graduate studies and received his Ph.D. from the Eastman School of Music, where he studied with Alan Hovhaness, Bernard Rogers and Howard Hanson. Following completion of this degree, he received a Guggenheim Fellowship to study/work for another year in Florence. He established a tradition of spending long periods of time in that city. Minnesota years Argento moved to Minneapolis in 1958 with his new wife, soprano Carolyn Bailey, to begin teaching theory and composition at the University of Minnesota. Within a few years, he received commissions from virtually every major performing group there. He has remarked that this constant feeling of strong community interest in his work made him feel particularly at home in Minnesota, although he had at first resisted moving there. For several years, he hoped to find a position on his native East Coast. Argento became involved in writing music for productions at the then-new Guthrie Theater. In 1963, he and Scrymgeour founded the Center Opera Company, which later became the Minnesota Opera, to be in residence at the Guthrie. Argento composed the short opera The Masque of Angels for the occasion as the first Performing Arts commission of the Walker Art Center. This work—with its complex harmonic language and an emphasis on expansive choral writing that prefigures his later role as a prominent choral composer—firmly established his local prominence, as well as providing a role for his wife. By 1971, when his daring, surreal opera Postcard from Morocco opened at Center Opera, Argento's national reputation was secure, in part thanks to a glowing review by the principal music critic of The New York Times. He eventually received commissions from New York City Opera, the newly formed Minnesota Opera, Washington Opera, and the Baltimore and St. Louis symphonies, among