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From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
Walter Hamor Piston Jr., (January 20, 1894 - November 12, 1976), was an American composer of classical music, music theorist and professor of music at Harvard University whose students included Leroy Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, and Elliott Carter.
Piston was born in Rockland, Maine. His paternal grandfather, a sailor named Antonio Pistone, changed his name to Anthony Piston when he came to America from Genoa, Italy. In 1905, the composer\'s father Walter Piston Sr. moved with his family to Boston.
Walter Jr. first trained as an engineer at the Mechanical Arts High School in Boston, but he was artistically inclined. Upon graduating in 1912, he proceeded to the Massachusetts Normal Arts School, where he completed a course of study in draftsmanship in 1916.[1]
During the 1910s, Piston made a living playing piano and violin in dance bands and later playing violin in orchestras led by Georges Longy. During World War I, Piston joined the U.S. Navy as a band musician, after rapidly teaching himself to play the saxophone; he later stated that, when \"it became obvious that everybody had to go into the service, I wanted to go in as a musician\". Playing in a service band, Piston taught himself to play most of the wind instruments. \"They were just lying around\" he later observed, \"and no one minded if you picked them up and found out what they could do\".
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, and 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.
In 1920, Piston married artist Kathryn Nason (1892–1976), who had been a fellow student at the Normal Arts School. They remained married until her death in February 1976, a few months before his own.
Upon graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, Piston was awarded a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship. He chose to go to Paris, living there from 1924 to 1926.[8] 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 taught at Harvard from 1926 until retiring in 1960.
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. The following year Piston wrote his Symphony No. 1, and conducted its premiere with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on April 8, 1938.
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).
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) was still regarded as recently as 2009 as a standard harmony text.
He died at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts on November 12, 1976.
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