[5] He began commuting regularly to Cambridge to study with her,[3] and became part of her coterie of Boston composers, which included Harold Shapero, Irving Fine, Paul Desmarais, and Daniel Pinkham.
Serving as an infantryman for three years, he fought his way up the Italian peninsula, in the process earning a Bronze Star[3][4] and starting his lifelong love affair with Italy.
degree in May 1948 and was awarded a Paine Traveling Fellowship from Harvard, which he used to spend the next two years (1948–1950) in Paris honing his composing and performing skills, once again studying under Nadia Boulanger.
[1][3][7][4] There, he formed close musical friendships with composers Ned Rorem, Noël Lee, Leo Preger and Georges Auric.
[5] In the summer of 1950 on a Fulbright scholarship, he returned to Italy to study harpsichord at Conservatorio San Pietro a Majella[3] under Ruggero Gerlin, a longtime associate of Wanda Landowska,[7][4] Under Gerlin's tutelage, he learned to perform the partitas and the two books of the Well-Tempered Clavier of J. S. Bach, the Ordres of François Couperin, and various sonatas of Domenico Scarlatti.
His main work from this period is his first opera, Ethan Frome, a setting of Edith Wharton's novel of the same name with a libretto by John Clinton Hunt.
[3][8] Although he taught part-time at the Peabody Conservatory in Baltimore[3] from 1953 through 1956,[9] he chose to stay at St. John's for the duration of his teaching career.
Other performers who gave premieres of his music under his supervision include harpsichordist Ralph Kirkpatrick, violinist Robert Gerle, and the Kronos Quartet.
As recounted in See Naples, his first marriage was in 1952 to Candida Curcio,[3][7] a theater actress whom he met in Italy;[12] they had a son, Timothy,[3] an architect.
[citation needed] Later in 1975, he married the Mozart scholar and future president of the American Musicological Society Wye Allanbrook née Jamison (March 15, 1943 – July 15, 2010);[3][13] their son, John, is a musician[1][3] who has conducted recordings of several major Allanbrook works for Mapleshade Records.