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Walter Piston
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Walter Hamor Piston Jr. (January 20, 1894 – November 12, 1976) was an American composer and music theorist.
on was born in Rockland, Maine. His father's father, a sailor named Antonio Pistone, changed his name to Anthony Piston when he came to America from Genoa, Italy. In 1905, Walter Piston Sr. and his family moved to Boston. Walter Jr. trained as an engineer at the Mechanical Arts High School in Boston, but he was artistically inclined and upon graduating from there in 1912, proceeded to the Massachusetts Normal Arts School, majoring in painting, also studying architectural drawing and American history.
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Encyclopedia
Walter Hamor Piston Jr. (January 20, 1894 – November 12, 1976) was an American composer and music theorist.
Life
Piston was born in Rockland, Maine. His father's father, a sailor named Antonio Pistone, changed his name to Anthony Piston when he came to America from Genoa, Italy. In 1905, Walter Piston Sr. and his family moved to Boston. Walter Jr. trained as an engineer at the Mechanical Arts High School in Boston, but he was artistically inclined and upon graduating from there in 1912, proceeded to the Massachusetts Normal Arts School, majoring in painting, also studying architectural drawing and American history. There he met Annabel Nason, and married her at a Unitarian church.
With his brother Edward, Walter Piston Jr. took piano lessons from Harris Shaw (who was Virgil Thomson's organ teacher). During the 1910s Walter Piston made a living playing piano and violin in dance bands, and later on in the decade played violin in orchestras led by Georges Longy. With help from Shaw, Walter Piston was admitted to Harvard in 1920, where he studied counterpoint with Archibald Davison, canon and fugue with Clifford Heilman, advanced harmony with Edward Ballantine, composition and music history with Edward Burlingame Hill. Piston often worked as an assistant to the various music professors there, and conducted the student orchestra.
At about that time Piston joined the Navy Band and learned to play more instruments. According to one story, he wanted to join the U.S. Navy as an officer, but was deemed more useful as a musician. The composer himself stated, however, that, when "it became obvious that everybody had to go into the service, I wanted to go in as a musician".
Upon graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, Piston was awarded a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship, consisting of $1500 yearly for two to three years of travel abroad. He chose to go to Paris, living there from 1924 to 1926, but he also visited Italy. At the Ecole Nationale de Musique in Paris, Piston studied composition and counterpoint with Nadia Boulanger, composition with Paul Dukas and violin with George Enescu. His Three Pieces for Flute, Clarinet and Bassoon of 1925 was his first published score.
He moved to Belmont, Massachusetts after returning from Europe, and taught at Harvard from 1926 until retiring in 1960. His students include Samuel Adler, Leroy Anderson, Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Gordon Binkerd, Elliott Carter, John Davison, Irving Fine, John Harbison, Ellis B. Kohs, Gail Kubik, Billy Jim Layton, Noël Lee, Robert Middleton, Robert Moevs, Conlon Nancarrow, William P. Perry, Daniel Pinkham, Frederic Rzewski, Allen Sapp, Harold Shapero, and Claudio Spies.
In 1936, the Columbia Broadcasting System commissioned six American composers (Aaron Copland, Louis Gruenberg, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, William Grant Still and Piston) to write works for CBS radio stations to broadcast. Piston considered radio better suited to smaller orchestras and he wrote a Concertino for Piano and Chamber Orchestra. The following year Piston wrote his Symphony No. 1, and conducted its premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on April 8, 1938.
At the invitation of Arthur Fiedler, Piston wrote his most famous ballet, The Incredible Flutist, for Hans Wiener and the Boston Pops Orchestra.
Piston studied the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg and wrote works using aspects of it as early as the Sonata for Flute and Piano (1930) and the First Symphony (1937). His first fully twelve-tone work was the Chromatic Study on the Name of Bach for organ (1940), which nonetheless retains a vague feeling of key. Although he employed twelve-tone elements sporadically throughout his career, these become much more pervasive in the Eighth Symphony (1965) and many of the works following it: the Variations for Cello and Orchestra (1966), Clarinet Concerto (1967), Ricercare for Orchestra, Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra (1970), and Flute Concerto (1971).
During World War II, Piston was an air raid warden in Belmont, and he wrote patriotic fanfares and other such works.
In 1943, the Alice M. Ditson fund of Columbia University commissioned Piston's Symphony No. 2, which was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra on March 5, 1944 and was awarded a prize by the New York Music Critics' Circle. His next symphony, the Third, earned a Pulitzer Prize, as did his Symphony No. 7. His Viola Concerto and String Quartet No. 5 also later received Critics' Circle awards.
Piston wrote four books on the technical aspects of music theory which are considered to be classics in their respective fields: Principles of Harmonic Analysis, Counterpoint, Orchestration and Harmony. The last of these went through four editions in the author's lifetime, was translated into several languages, and (with changes and additions by Mark DeVoto) is still widely used by teachers and students of harmony. In it, Piston introduced, for the first time, the concept of the secondary dominant, as well as his unique theory of classifying nonharmonic tones (nonchord tones).
Piston's handwriting was so neat that almost all his orchestral scores were published as facsimiles of his original scores, and he also wrote the musical examples in the textbooks he authored.
In his final years, Piston was debilitated by diabetes, and his vision and hearing suffered. His wife died in 1976, and he died later that same year, of a heart attack, in Belmont, Massachusetts. He was cremated, and his ashes were dispersed at Mount Auburn Cemetery.
Works
Ballet
Orchestral
- Symphonies
- Symphony No. 1 (1937)
- Symphony No. 2 (1943)
- Symphony No. 3 (1948) (commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation)
- Symphony No. 4 (1950)
- Symphony No. 5 (1954)
- Symphony No. 6 (1955)
- Symphony No. 7 (1960)
- Symphony No. 8 (1965)
- Suite for Orchestra (1929)
- Concerto for Orchestra (1934)
- Suite from The Incredible Flutist
- Sinfonietta (1941)
- Suite No. 2 for Orchestra (1948)
- Serenata for Orchestra (1957)
- Three New England Sketches (1960)
- Ricercare for Orchestra (1967)
Band
- Tunbridge Fair, for symphonic band (1950) (Commissioned by the American Bandmasters Association)
Concertante
- Piano
- Piano Concertino (1937)
- Concerto for Two Pianos and Orchestra (1958)
- Violin
- Violin Concerto No. 1 (1939)
- Violin Concerto No. 2 (1960)
- Fantasia for Violin and Orchestra (1970)
- Prelude and Allegro for Organ and Strings (1943)
- Fantasy for English Horn, Harp, and Strings (1954)
- Viola Concerto (1957)
- Capriccio for Harp and Strings (1963)
- Variations for Cello and Orchestra (1966)
- Concerto for Clarinet and Orchestra (1967)
- Concerto for Flute and Orchestra (1971)
- Concerto for String Quartet, Wind Instruments and Percussion (1976)
Chamber/Instrumental
- String quartets
- String Quartet No. 1 (1933)
- String Quartet No. 2 (1935)
- String Quartet No. 3 (1947)
- String Quartet No. 4 (1951)
- String Quartet No. 5 (1962)
- Three Pieces for Flute, Clarinet and Bassoon (1926)
- Flute Sonata (1930)
- Suite for Oboe and Piano (1931)
- Piano Trio No. 1 (1935)
- Violin Sonata (1939)
- Sonatina for Violin and Harpsichord (1945)
- Interlude for Viola and Piano (1942)
- Flute Quintet (1942)
- Partita for Violin, Viola and Organ (1944)
- Divertimento, for nine instruments (1946)
- Duet for Viola and Cello (1949)
- Piano Quintet (1949)
- Wind Quintet (1956)
- Piano Quartet (1964)
- String Sextet (1964)
- Piano Trio No. 2 (1966)
- Duo for Cello and Piano (1972)
Piano
- Piano Sonata (1926)
- Passacaglia (1943)
- Improvisation (1945)
Organ
- Chromatic Study on the Name of BACH (1940)
- Psalm and Prayer of David (1959)
Books
- Principles of Harmonic Analysis. Boston: E. C. Schirmer, 1933.
- Harmony. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1941. Reprint edition (as U.S. War Dept. Education Manual EM 601), Madison, Wisc.: Published for the United States Armed Forces Institute by W. Norton & Co., 1944. Revised ed, New York: W. W. Norton & Co., 1948. Third ed., 1962. Fourth ed., revised and expanded by Mark DeVoto, 1978. ISBN 0-393-09034-5. 5th edition, revised and expanded by Mark DeVoto ISBN 0-393-95480-3. British editions, London: Victor Gollancz, 1949, rev. ed. 1950 (reprinted 1973), 1959, 3rd ed. 1970, 4th ed. 1982. Spanish translation, as Armonía, rev. y ampliada por Mark DeVoto. Barcelona: Idea Books, 2001. ISBN 8482362240 Chinese version of the 2nd edition, as ??? [He sheng xue], trans. Chenbao Feng and Dunxing Shen. ?? : ??????? : ??????????? [Beijing: Ren min yin yue chu ban she : Xin hua shu dian Beijing fa xing suo fa xing], 1956. Revised, ?? : ??????? [Beijing: Ren min yin yue chu ban she], 1978.
- Counterpoint. New York: W. W. Norton & Company, Inc., 1947.
- Orchestration. New York: Norton, 1955. Russian translation, as '???????????', translation and notes by Constantine Ivanov. Moscow: Soviet Composer, 1990, ISBN 5-85285-014-4.
Sources
External links
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