Walter Piston

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Walter Hamor Piston Jr. (January 20, 1894 – November 12, 1976) was an American composer, music theorist, and a professor of music at Harvard University.

Life

Piston was born in Rockland, Maine, to Walter Hamor Piston, a bookkeeper, and Leona Stover. He was the second of four children. Although his family was mostly of English origins, Antonio Pistone, a sailor who changed his name to Anthony Piston when he arrived in Maine from Genoa, Italy, was a sailor named Antonio Pistone. Walter Piston Sr., the composer's father, migrated with his family to Boston, Massachusetts, in 1905.

Walter Jr. was first trained as an engineer at Boston's Mechanical Arts High School, but he was more interested in art. He began studying at the Massachusetts Normal Art School in 1912, where he completed a four-year program in fine art in 1916.

Piston made a living playing piano and violin in dance bands and later played violin in orchestras conducted by Georges Longy. He joined the US Navy as a band musician after quickly learning to play saxophone; later, he said, "It's become clear that everybody had to go into the service, I wanted to go into the service as a musician." He learned to play most wind instruments while playing in a service band. "They were just lying around," he later said, "and no one was concerned if you picked them up and found out what they could do."

Piston was admitted to Harvard College in 1920, where he studied counterpoint with Archibald Davison, canon, and fugue with Clifford Heilman, advanced harmony with Edward Ballantine, and music history with Edward Burlingame Hill. He served as an assistant for several music professors as well as conducted the student orchestra.

Kathryn Nason (1892–1976), a fellow student at the Normal Art School, was married in 1920 by Piston. The marriage lasted until his death in February 1976, just a few months before his own.

Piston received a John Knowles Paine Travel Fellowship after a graduating summa cum laude from Harvard. He chose Paris because he lived there from 1924 to 1926. He studied composition and counterpoint with Nadia Boulanger, composition with Paul Dukas, and violin with George Enescu at the Ecole Nationale de Musique in Paris. He was his first published score in Three Pieces for Flute, Clarinet, and Bassoon.

He attended Harvard from 1926 to his retirement in 1960. Samuel Adler, Leroy Anderson, Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Elliott Carter, John Davison, John Davison, John Joneson, John Davison, John Harbison, Jeffrey Rzewski, Daniel Kohn, John Davison, John Gray, Frederick Brown, Mohammed Kohn, Robert Lee, No. m. Connor, Daniel Brownham, Robert Moevs, George Washington, John Ferguson, Elliott Moore, John Harbison, Bernard Moevs, Richard Moore, John Harmo See also: N to Q#Walter Piston, a list of music students by teacher.

The Columbia Broadcasting System recruited six American composers (Aaron Copland, Louis Gruenberg, Howard Hanson, Roy Harris, William Grant Still and Piston) to write works for broadcast on CBS radio in 1936. Piston composed his Symphony No. 1 in New York. On April 8, 1938, the Boston Symphony Orchestra performed its first and conducted its premiere.

The Incredible Flutist, Piston's only dance work, was written for the Boston Pops Orchestra, which premiered it on May 30, 1938, with Arthur Fiedler conducting. Hans Weiner and his company were the dancers on stage. Piston arranged a concert suite that contained "a selection of the best parts of the ballet" shortly after. On November 22, 1940, Fritz Reiner and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra premiered this version. The suite was performed by Leonard Slatkin and the St. Louis Symphony Orchestra on a 1991 RCA Victor CD recording that also featured Piston's Three New England Sketches and Symphony No. 3. 6.

Piston investigated Arnold Schoenberg's twelve-tone technique and wrote papers about it as early as the Sonata for Flute and Piano (1930) and the First Symphony (1937). The Chromatic Study on Bach's Name (1940), his first fully twelve tone work, yet has a vague sense of key. Although he used twelve-tone elements intermittently throughout his career, they've become much more prevalent in the Eighth Symphony (1965) and several of its sequels: Ricercare for Orchestra, Fantasy for Violin and Orchestra (1970), and Flute Concerto (1971).

The Alice M. Ditson fund of Columbia University acquired Piston's Symphony No. 13 in 1943. The National Symphony Orchestra premiered on March 5, 1944, and the New York Music Critics' Circle honoured it with a prize. His upcoming symphony, the Third, received a Pulitzer Prize, as did his Symphony No. 7. The Viola Concerto and String Quartet No. 1 are among his Viola Concertos and String Quartet No. 1. Five other people were also named in Critics' Circle awards later this year.

In 1974, Piston was given the Edward MacDowell Medal for his outstanding contribution to the arts by the MacDowell Colony.

Piston's four books on musical theory are considered to be classics in their respective fields: Principles of Harmonic Analysis, Counterpoint, Orchestration, and Harmony were among their subjects. For the first time in theoretical literature, several key new approaches that Piston had developed in his approach to music theory, notably the notion of harmonic rhythm and the secondary dominant. This book was translated into several languages over the author's lifetime, and (with tweaks and additions by Mark DeVoto) it was still being used as a standard harmony text as recently as 2009.

On November 12, 1976, he died at his Belmont, Massachusetts home.

In the Boston Public Library's Piston Room, his library and desk are on display.

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