Piston, Walter (Hamor)

(b Rockland, ME, 20 Jan 1894; d Belmont, MA, 12 Nov 1976). American composer and teacher. His family was largely of English origin, though his paternal grandfather, Antonio Pistone, an Italian seaman, arrived in Maine from Genoa. In 1905 the family moved from Rockland, Maine, to Boston, where Piston, after concentrating on engineering in high school, studied art at the Massachusetts Normal Art School (1912–16). It was there that he met his future wife, the painter Kathryn Nason. Largely self-taught as a musician, he earned money playing the piano and violin in dance bands. From 1917 to 1921 he also played the violin in orchestras and chamber ensembles under the direction of Georges Longy. When the USA entered World War I, he quickly learnt to play the saxophone so that he could join the Navy Band. During his service in the Navy, he learnt to play other band instruments as well.

Piston entered Harvard in 1919 as a special music student; he enrolled formally in 1920 and graduated with honours in 1924. His teachers included A.T. Davison and Edward Burlingame Hill, among others. From 1921 to 1924 he conducted the Pierian Sodality, Harvard’s student orchestra. He pursued further studies with Dukas, Boulanger and Enescu at the Ecole Normale de Musique (1924–6), where he played the viola in the school orchestra. His two earliest extant works, Three Pieces for the flute, clarinet and bassoon (1925) and the Piano Sonata (1926), reveal the influences of Boulanger and Dukas, respectively. The lean counterpoint of the former reveals a neo-classical elegance related to the styles of Stravinsky and Hindemith, while the romantic grandeur of the latter suggests an affinity with Brahms and Franck. In subsequent scores, such as the Flute Sonata (1930), Piston merged these two aesthetics, forging a conservative modernist style of his own.

Upon his return to Boston in 1926, Piston joined the music department at Harvard, a position he held until his retirement in 1960. He did most of his composing during the summer months, which he spent on a dairy farm in Woodstock, Vermont. His occasional attempts at descriptive music, such as Tunbridge Fair for symphonic band (1950) and Three New England Sketches for orchestra (1959), took rural New England as their subject. Even in his more abstract works, his syncopated rhythms, austere textures and clipped forms bespoke a special attachment to that part of the country. ‘Is the Dust Bowl more American than, say, a corner in the Boston Athenaeum?’ he asked. ‘Would not a Vermont village furnish as American a background for a composition as the Great Plains?’

Finding an early advocate in Koussevitzky, Piston’s first works for orchestra were commissioned by the Boston SO (although Koussevitzky handed over the baton to the composer for their premières). Piston eventually wrote 11 works for that ensemble, as well as fulfilling commissions from the major orchestras of New York, Philadelphia, Cleveland, Dallas, Louisville, Minneapolis and Cincinnati, among others. Copland also helped to bring him to national attention by featuring his music at Yaddo and the New School for Social Research, and by declaring him in 1936 ‘one of the most expert craftsmen American music can boast’. He also earned the admiration of numerous other composers, including Igor Stravinsky, Ernst Krenek, Roger Sessions, Howard Hanson, Virgil Thomson and Elliott Carter, for whom in 1946 Piston offered ‘hope that the qualities of integrity and reason are still with us’.

Piston’s mastery took many forms, including a meticulous hand that allowed his publisher, AMP, to publish his scores in facsimile. (He penned all but one of the illustrations to his Orchestration text as well.) Intimately familiar with instruments and possessing a phenomenal ear, he worked primarily at a desk, scoring his music as he composed it, rather than beginning with a piano reduction. His masterful orchestrations emphasize clarity and brilliance as opposed to novelty and effect. Along with a compelling sense of form, he also displayed a dazzling handling of canon, invertible counterpoint, melodic retrograde and inversion, and other contrapuntal techniques. The traditional forms of sonata, rondo, variation, fugue and passacaglia acquired a distinctive lucidity and compression in his hands. One can readily discern in his music an engineer’s concern for formal precision, a painter’s care for colouristic detail and a violist’s attention to inner voices. ‘Melody and tonality are extended to allow for all sorts of new sounds and new rhythms’, observed William Austin of the Fourth Symphony, ‘but melody and tonality organize the whole in essentially the same way they do in Mozart’s world, as they rarely do in ours.’ While some thought the reserved quality of his music a limitation, his admirers extolled not only his impressive technical skills, but the ‘longing tenderness’ of his slow movements and the ‘sparkling gaiety’ of his scherzos.

Having absorbed Schoenberg’s 12-note method as early as the Flute Sonata (1930) and having composed a strict (albeit tonal) 12-note work as early as the Chromatic Study on the Name of Bach for the organ (1940), Piston initially established a reputation as a composer’s composer. Some of his more accessible efforts in the late 1930s and early 40s, notably Carnival Song for chorus (1938), the ballet suite from The Incredible Flutist (1938) and the Second Symphony (1943), however, found favour among the concert-going public. The Symphony no.4 (1950) and the Symphony no.6 (1955) became particular favourites. As he made more extensive use of the 12-note method in the 1950s and especially the 1960s, his music became more chromatic and dense. These late works were also more adventurous formally, featuring complex one-movement designs, rather than his more traditional three- and four-movement forms.

A relatively slow worker, Piston joked that it took him an hour to decide upon a note and another hour to decide to erase it. He produced about one work a year, the eight symphonies and five string quartets representing the heart of his achievement. During his last two decades he produced a series of concertos (although not necessarily titled as such) for the viola (1957), two pianos (1959), the violin (1960), the harp (1963), the cello (1966), the clarinet (1967), the flute (1971) and string quartet (1976). He often composed with the capabilities and traits of particular players, ensembles and even halls in mind, and these works are no exception. Some of them were written for such celebrated virtuosi as Accardo, Zabaleta and Rostropovich; others were undertaken for distinguished members of the Boston SO, such as the flautist Doriot Anthony Dwyer and other friends. All attest to his great knowledge of instrumental technique.

As a teacher, Piston was the acclaimed author of a series of texts: Principles of Harmonic Analysis (Boston, 1933), Harmony (New York, 1941), Counterpoint (New York, 1947) and Orchestration (New York, 1955). Translated into numerous languages, the latter three were among the most esteemed and widely used books of their kind. The harmony texts in particular initiated a modern era of music theory, in which theoretical principles derived ‘from the observation of musical practice’, as David Thompson has noted. These texts also shed new light on the relationship between harmonic root movement and rhythmic structure, and between orchestration and form. In his occasional critical essays, Piston wrote thoughtfully on subjects such as the music of Roy Harris and the limitations of the 12-note method. Elliott Carter, Leroy Anderson, Arthur Berger, Gail Kubik, Irving Fine, Gordon Binkerd, Ellis Kohs, Leonard Bernstein, Robert Middleton, Robert Moevs, Harold Shapero, Allen Sapp, Daniel Pinkham, Noël Lee, Billy Jim Layton, Claudio Spies, Samuel Adler, Frederic Rzewski and John Harbison, who numbered among his students at Harvard, benefited not only from, in Bernstein’s words, his ‘non-pedantic approach to such academic subjects as fugue’, but from close familiarity with his finely crafted music. Although he encouraged them to find their own way, many of these composers show his stylistic influence, especially in matters of contrapuntal finesse and textural clarity.

Piston’s achievements were recognized by Pulitzer prizes for the symphonies nos.3 and 7, a Naumburg Award for the Symphony no.4 and New York Music Critics’ Circle awards for the Symphony no.2, the Viola Concerto and the Fifth String Quartet. He was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters in 1938, the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1940, and the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 1955. He also received a Guggenheim Fellowship, the Coolidge Medal and numerous honorary doctorates. In addition, the French government bestowed upon him the decoration Officier of the Ordre des Arts et des Lettres.

WORKS

orchestral

choral

chamber

keyboard

WRITINGS

for list of articles see Pollack (1981)

Principles of Harmonic Analysis (Boston, 1933)

Harmony (New York, 1941, 5/1987 with M. DeVoto)

Counterpoint (New York, 1947)

Orchestration (New York, 1955)

BIBLIOGRAPHY

T. Chanler: ‘New York, 1934’, MM, xi (1933–4), 142–7

A. Berger: ‘Walter Piston’, Trend (1935), Jan–Feb, 210–22

I. Citkowitz: ‘Walter Piston: Classicist’, MM, xiii/Jan–Feb (1935–6), 3–11

R.L. Finney: ‘Piston’s Violin Sonata’, MM, xvii (1939–40), 210–13

W.W. Austin: ‘Piston’s Fourth Symphony: an Analysis’, MR, xvi (1955), 120–37

A. Copland: ‘Sessions and Piston’, Our New Music (New York, 1941, 2/1968), 176–86

E. Carter: ‘Walter Piston’, MQ, xxxii (1946), 354–75

O. Daniel and others: Walter Piston (New York, 1964)

C. Taylor: ‘Walter Piston: for his Seventieth Birthday’, PNM, iii/1 (1964–5), 102–14

P. Westergaard: ‘Conversation with Walter Piston’, PNM, vii/1 (1968–9), 3–17

W.D. Curtis: ‘Walter Piston (1894–1976): a Discography’, Journal of the Association for Recorded Sound Collections, xiii/2 (1981), 76–95

H. Pollack: Walter Piston (Ann Arbor, 1981) [incl. work-list, further bibliography, discography]

H. Pollack: Harvard Composers: Walter Piston and his Students, from Elliott Carter to Frederic Rzewski (Metuchen, NJ, 1992) [incl. list of writings]

HOWARD POLLACK