Arts and Letters

For the past fifty years Walter Piston devoted himself, with a consistency of purpose and conviction rare in our rapidly changing times, to one of the central problems of music, that of purely instrumental composition. From his earliest available work, Three Pieces for Flute, Clarinet, and Bassoon of 1926, in which he reveals himself already skilled and imaginative in the contemporary idiom, his major concern has been the creation of valid and imaginative concert music in the larger forms. It is hard to think of another composer of importance as prolific as he was who wrote so few theatrical and vocal works. For those remembered primarily for their instrumental music usually have a considerable list of less abstract and more literary works—operas, ballets, choral or vocal music, or incidental scores for the theatre or the films—to their credit also. But Piston was satisfied with his single short choral piece and his one ballet and focused his energies on a considerable series of pieces with such soberly appropriate titles as "Symphony," "Sonata for Violin and Piano," "Prelude and Fugue," and the like.

Through the years when the "avant-garde" moderns were busy exploring fantastic new sounds and sequences, often under the inspiration of literary and theatrical ideas, through the early thirties when a new wave of nationalism and populism startled many into thinking that the concert hall with its museum atmosphere was finished as a place for living new music, through a time when music became more conservative and then after the Second War resumed and carried further the avant-gardism of the earlier period, Piston went his own way. He stood firmly on his own chosen ground, building up a style that is a synthesis of most of the important characteristics of contemporary music and assimilating into his own manner the various changes as they came along. As a result of this tireless concentration combined with rich native musical gifts, his works have a uniform excellence that seems destined to give them an important position in the musical repertory.

On surveying the course of his life, one is impressed by this quality of integration and direction. Once his particular field was decided on, the rest of his career was organized to suit. The rather speculative enterprise of uniting the different styles of contemporary music into one common style and using this in an ordered and beautiful way needs the peacefulness and sense of long-term continuity nowadays more frequently found in a university than elsewhere. Besides, as is well known, composing large works for the concert hall is one of the most unremunerative fields of music in this country, though highly honored, particularly by those of his generation.

It required, therefore, a fairly steady source of outside income at least during its maturing states if not afterwards, as well as a considerable amount of uninterrupted time. Few positions outside the academic world offer these advantages, and a university provides a place where long-range consideration of questions of broad scope are the rule rather than the exception. All these considerations must have determined Piston on an academic career. Before he decided, he tried out several alternatives, until he became more aware of his own capabilities as a musician. Once having decided, he took up a modest and quiet life as a composer on Belmont Hill, overlooking Cambridge and Harvard, the scene of his teaching career.

His paternal grandfather, the one Italian member of his other-wise typically "Down East" family, died when Piston was born in Rockland, Maine, in 1894. Life in a small community being what it is, the Italian heritage had already been considerably erased. "Pistone" was changed to "Piston," and the composer's father, though half-Italian, only knew how to count up to five in the foreign language. Like most Americans, the composer had little or no music at home, although several years after his family moved to Boston in 1905, the father bought young Walter a violin and his brother a piano. Up to this time, his innate musical abilities had had no chance to develop. But while he was teaching himself to play on both the piano and the violin, music began to assert its ascendancy. Engineering, which he was studying in a vocational high school, soon lost its interest. When Piston first played a march among the violins of the school orchestra, he immediately fell in love with music, but could not make up his mind to pursue it professionally until he had more training.

From this time until he was twenty-six, he tried different plans. First he made up his mind to be an artist, giving up the draftsman's position with the Boston Elevated Company he had taken on graduation from high school in 1912. Then he wavered several years between being a painter or a musician. During this time he studied the violin with various teachers and earned his living playing in cafés, restaurants, and dance halls. In this way he acquired the intimate feeling for popular music that flavors many of his compositions. At twenty-two, still undecided, he went to the Massachusetts Normal Art School, where tuition was free. Here he came in contact with French art through his teachers and began to look towards Paris, where he later went to study.

This inclination towards French culture, which still slightly tinged his compositions up to about 1945, was reinforced by many impressions during Piston's student years. Rabaud and then Monteux succeeded Karl Muck as conductors of the Boston Symphony in 1918 and a great deal more new French music began to be heard. Boston had always been cosmopolitan in its relation to European cultures and France had frequently been favored. Puvis de Chavannes had crossed the Atlantic to paint his frescoes in the Boston Public Library. Edward Burlingame Hill had studied in Paris, and Henry F. Gilbert had made a pilgrimage to France on a cattle boat to hear Charpentier's opera Louise. There was, in fact, considerable precedent for a musician living in Boston to be attracted to the French tradition, and Piston's own personal qualities, his love of proportion and restraint as manifest in his compositions as in his elegantly penned manuscripts, predisposed him to regard this tradition with respect.

When the United States declared war in 1917 he volunteered for service in a Navy band; counting on his unusual ability to master an instrument, he claimed he could play the saxophone. Called up, he rushed off to buy an instrument and to borrow a manual from the public library; and in a short time he knew enough to be able to hold his own in a band stationed at the Massachusetts Institute of Technology throughout the First War. He was already aware that the saxophone can be learned more quickly than any other of the band instruments. But this is only a trivial indication of a penetrating knowledge of musical instruments gained before and after this time. Indeed, his understanding of the different schools of playing, the different makes of instruments, and all the most practical matters of performance surprised and delighted his fellow students both at Harvard and later in Paris. His knowledge of the registers of the instruments and their qualities and the type of writing idiomatic for each is evident on every page of every score. He liked to give each orchestral player something interesting to do in the course of a work, no matter how subordinate the part. The pleasure he took in such matters was always stimulating to his orchestration classes, and this care and understanding was a token of the thoroughness and realistic grasp with which he approached every aspect of his art, from the type of pen to use in copying to the construction of a symphonic movement.

After the war, he resumed the study of the violin, hoping eventually to take a place in the string section of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. But the prospect of being a professional performer did not attract him as much as the possibility of entering upon an academic career—a possibility opened up by his studies in counterpoint with Dr. Davison of the Harvard Music Department. Davison recognized his unusual abilities and was anxious to enroll him as a regular student.

Thus, in the fall of 1920, at the age of twenty-six, already married to the painter Kathryn Nason, Piston became a freshman at Harvard. To support the newly formed ménage, he continued fiddling for a living and also helped as an assistant in music classes at the college.

About this time, the placid routine of college music teaching began to be disturbed by the strangeness of the new music. Few had the vision of Hill, who kept his annual course in modern French music up to date with the latest scores from Paris. Almost no theory teacher had yet thought of renovating his courses to keep pace with contemporary music, which Piston was later to do. Students were beginning to bring in compositions that seemed to flout every idea that teachers believed in. No one had ever before doubted the pedagogical usefulness of the Beethoven sonatas. Yet one pupil raised a protest on being asked to analyze one, saying that he could not even bear to play it over. One of Piston's fellow students, Virgil Thomson, arranged a performance of Erik Satie's Socrate that was talked about for many years after. But Piston was not among the dissidents. He applied himself to his studies so assiduously that he graduated summa cum laude.

It was not only through the ructions of classroom revolutionaries that Harvard was feeling the impact of the First World War. Several different trends expressed themselves in books by a few of the professors and give a deeper insight into the temper of the time. Internationalism was stressed as an antidote to the narrow isolationism keeping us out of the League of Nations. Ideas sprouted up here that opened the way for new developments in music in this country parallel to those taking place abroad. It was a short step to an international style in music, a common, exportable language interesting to musicians all over the Western world and subordinating the national and personal. And this language was to serve the purposes of serious art that does not rest on local color and that aims at universal validity. Such ideas were given particular consideration at this time, although they were not new. Edgar Allan Poe, for instance, had made such statements as: "The world at large" is "the only proper stage" for both reader and writer. It is because Piston's music moves on this stage with such mastery that it was so universally admired and respected.

Rejection of Romantic gestures and extravagant emotional attitudes, promulgated at Harvard by the tirades of Irving Babbitt as well as in many other places in America and Europe, characterized this period as it had the thought of T. S. Eliot and Van Wyck Brooks. This point of view was absorbed by Piston along with other characteristics of the modern movement, but only in certain respects. He was not affected by the various types of return to the primitive and childlike, or by the modern methods of pastiche which ape the mannerisms of other styles, past and present. Only occasionally does he follow rhythmic and melodic patterns derived from older music, such as that of Bach in the first movement of the Concerto for Orchestra, although this is purely modern in feeling and is not a comment on the older style but a direct expression of a character somewhat akin to that of a Brandenburg Concerto. Piston's use of classical forms closely related to those of Bach, Mozart, and Beethoven, as well as his sense of order and propriety, characterize his reaction to this trend.

It is important to realize the power of "anti-Romanticism" in the post-war period both here and abroad. It seemed to many the valid answer to a need to sweep away the grandiose illusions and the vaporous hopes fostered by the Romantics and a way of finding a stronger basis in reality for human conduct. Once more, as before the nineteenth century, artists wanted to be considered artisans, skilled craftsmen, the opposite of romantically inspired, erratic geniuses, and many of the newer composers, among them Piston, took pains to foster this impression in their outward actions. In their music, they did not wish to exaggerate human feelings to titanic proportions but sought the well-formed and the logically thought out.

Leaving the intellectually active atmosphere of Harvard, Piston, on graduating, went to Paris on a Paine Fellowship, intending to complete a thorough technical and professional training at the Conservatoire. When he was refused admission because he was thirty years old, he turned to Nadia Boulanger as one of the few outstanding teachers of the time sympathetic to contemporary music. By now he was completely won over to new music, and, following all the performances of recent works, studying scores, he was able to master many of its techniques. His first works were played in Paris, and when in 1926 he returned to Harvard, where he taught ever since, he brought with him the Three Pieces for Flute, Clarinet, and Bassoon, which Paul Dukas had called "Stravinskistes." These impressed many forward-looking musicians at once. Starting as an instructor, he rose to an associate professorship and the chairmanship of the music department. Afterwards, he relinquished the latter office because it interfered with his composing. He became a full professor in 1944. Working at his composition modestly and seriously, he gradually gained prominence in the quiet way that characterized all of his actions, so that Slonimsky in 1945 was justified in saying: "In the constellation of modern American composers, Walter Piston has now reached the stardom of the first magnitude. He has not exploded into stellar prominence like a surprising nova, but took his place inconspicuously, without passing through the inevitable stage of musical exhibitionism or futuristic eccentricity."

So far, I have indicated the quality of Piston's native musical gifts, his love of métier, his openness to new developments, and his continuous devotion to the high principles of purely instrumental music. His early predilection for French culture, fortified by various trends in Boston and Harvard, led him to study in France, and several ideas that were stressed in the post-war period, such as internationalism and anti-Romanticism, helped to crystallize his relationship to musical tradition. The nature of this relationship so important a part of his musical personality becomes apparent when we consider his point of view as a teacher.

The impact on music schools of the contemporary, and of the older periods brought to light by musicologists, demanded a complete revision of courses in music theory. Aims had to be redefined and new means of presentation to be devised. As a progressive new theory teacher, Piston tackled this problem and went to its core, attacking it in much the same analytic way that he applied to the study of contemporary scores. The standardized academic routine, which taught harmony and counterpoint according to outmoded and unimaginative textbooks, insensitive to the beauties of the great composers' use of these materials, seemed more sterile than ever as students came to know music of different periods and cultures. A thorough analysis of the use of harmony and counterpoint by the great composers, particularly of the thorough-bass period, seemed indicated as a point from which to branch out. His books on harmony, counterpoint, and orchestration which formed many generations of American musicians were constantly being updated and at his death he was working on revision of his harmony book that would deal with the twentieth century.

His own compositions have been praised as exhibiting a new academicism; they have also been condemned for the same reason. If the academic method consists in drawing up a system of rules that solve every problem of musical composition including that of expression, Piston's music as well as his teaching followed a very different direction. His opposition to facile, routine solutions was obvious even in the detail of his music. For in it, frequently repeated figures, static harmonies, and extended parallel motions are the exception rather than the rule. The broad application of general principles that give ample chance for freedom attracted him most. As one critic put it: "His insistence on the purity and definitiveness of musical pattern links Piston to that current of contemporary thought which has attempted to re-absorb classical principles into the music of today."

In class, Piston was affable, tolerant, and reserved. Though quiet he was far from the dry professor, because he cast over his subject a penetrating wit or a thoughtful seriousness that came from a deep concern with the subject at hand. His sly humor was always good natured and so aptly expressed that his words lingered in the memory long after they were said. Having an uncommon respect for the art of music, he was fond of quoting the familiar maxim "Life is short and art long," and pointing out how it is the composer's business to keep learning. He was not ashamed of admitting how much he found out from hearing his own works played. Usually willing to talk about his music to someone seriously interested, he was not inclined to talk about himself. When he did, it was with a dignified modesty that sometimes baffled those accustomed to the usual ways of musicians. These traits seldom failed to command the respect and liking of his students, especially those who shared his concern for the art.

In the whole field of contemporary music, Walter Piston occupied an important position. His works were commissioned by all the important orchestras of the United States. Although living in the time of the "lost generation," he found himself in his devotion to music. His unique contribution is to have done this particular work with outstanding excellence in a country where few have ever made a name for themselves as thoroughly craftsman-like artists. In literature several names come to mind but in music there is hardly one to be found before our time.

To have helped establish a deep understanding of the value of craftsmanship and taste here and to have given such persuasive exemplification of these in his works is highly important for our future. For, not having as ingrained a respect and love for high artistic ideals as Europeans have had, we have often slipped into the trivial, chaotic, and transitory. Piston's work helps us to keep our mind on the durable and the most satisfying aspects of the art of music and by making them live gives us hope that the qualities of integrity and reason are still with us.

But this sounds like philosophy and Piston once said something about Stravinsky's Symphonie des psaumes that could well be applied to his own work:

Many were the philosophical speculations as to the intent and content of this music after its performance. But the musician must be satisfied that what one gets from any work depends on what one brings to it. In the Symphonie des psaumes he will sense unmistakably those elements he seeks in real music.