Remembering Walter Piston: The Quiet Teacher Behind American Music

There are names in American music that fill a hall before a single note is played, and then there are names that work in the next room, quietly, for decades, until you realise that half the music you love passed through their hands. Walter Piston belonged to the second kind. He was not a showman. He did not chase the spotlight, and the spotlight, for the most part, did not chase him. Yet for thirty-four years he sat at the centre of Harvard University, teaching composition and theory to young musicians who would go on to reshape the sound of the United States — and all the while he was writing music of his own: eight symphonies, a ballet that still makes audiences smile, and four books that are still teaching composers how harmony works, long after his death.

This is the story of a man who began life as the grandson of an Italian sailor in a small Maine town, trained first as an engineer, paid his rent playing dance music, learned the saxophone because a war required it, and ended his days as one of the most respected — and most quietly influential — figures in American classical music. Like all great teachers, his finest work is not only the work that carries his name. It is the work that carries the names of his students.

A Sailor’s Grandson in Rockland

Walter Hamor Piston Jr. was born on January 20, 1894, in Rockland, Maine, at 15 Ocean Street. His father, Walter Hamor Piston, was a bookkeeper. His mother was Leona Stover. Walter Jr. was the second of four children, growing up in an orderly household a long way from the concert halls where his name would one day be known.

His paternal grandfather was a sailor named Antonio Pistone, who had come from Genoa, Italy, and who changed his name to Anthony Piston when he settled in Maine. A man crosses the sea, takes a new name, and two generations later his grandson is writing symphonies for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. Rockland itself was a working harbour town, and the boy who grew up there would carry something of its steadiness with him for the rest of his life — a practical, unshowy way of going about difficult things.

In 1905, when Walter was eleven, his father moved the family to Boston, Massachusetts — a city of schools and orchestras and libraries. He arrived not as a prodigy, but as a schoolboy with an engineer’s mind and an artist’s eye.

The Engineer Who Drew, the Painter Who Played

Young Walter first trained as an engineer. He attended the Mechanical Arts High School in Boston, a school built for practical minds, for boys who liked to know how things were put together. It was a sensible choice, and it suited the careful, methodical side of his character. But he was artistically inclined, and engineering alone could not hold him. After graduating in 1912, he enrolled in the Massachusetts Normal Art School, where he completed a four-year programme in fine art in 1916.

The future composer of eight symphonies began his adult education by learning to draw. He studied line and form and colour, the discipline of looking closely and putting down only what was needed. Anyone who has listened to Piston’s music — its clean lines, its balanced structures, its refusal to waste a note — can hear something of that training in it.

While he was studying, he was also earning his living by playing. During the 1910s, Piston made a living playing piano and violin in dance bands, and later playing violin in orchestras led by Georges Longy. Dance-band work teaches a musician things no classroom can: to listen, to keep time, to play what the room needs, night after night.

In 1920, Piston married the artist Kathryn Nason, who had been a fellow student at the Normal Art School. She was born in 1892, two years before him, and theirs would be a marriage of two artists — a composer and a painter — lasting until her death in February 1976, a few months before his own. Fifty-six years is a long time to share a life. He was not restless. He chose things — a wife, a university, a way of writing music — and he stayed with them.

The Navy Band Room

Then came the war. When the United States entered the First World War, Piston joined the U.S. Navy as a band musician. He stated his reason plainly afterwards: when, as he put it, “it became obvious that everybody had to go into the service, I wanted to go in as a musician.” It was a practical decision, and it turned out to be one of the most useful accidents of his life.

He had to learn the saxophone first, and he taught himself, rapidly, because the band needed a saxophone player and there was no time to wait for lessons. Then, once he was inside the band room, he began teaching 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.” It is a small, vivid picture — a young sailor picking up one instrument after another — and it explains a great deal about the composer he would become. His later books on orchestration are famous for their practical knowledge of instruments, and that knowledge did not come only from books. It came from holding the instruments in his own hands.

The war gave him something else, too: a working knowledge of the wind band, and of how music functions when it is made by ordinary people in uniform rather than by stars on a stage. His music always kept a foot in the practical world, in what players can actually do.

Harvard, at Last — and Then Paris

Piston was admitted to Harvard College in 1920. He was twenty-six, older than most of his classmates, with a war behind him and years of dance-band work and art school behind that. He was a man who knew what he wanted, and he threw himself into his studies with the same methodical energy he had brought to everything else.

At Harvard 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. He often worked as an assistant for various music professors there, and he conducted the student orchestra. It was a thorough, old-fashioned education, built on the foundations — counterpoint, fugue, harmony — that would later become the subject of his own famous textbooks.

He graduated summa cum laude, the highest honour Harvard gives, and was awarded a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship. He chose to go to Paris, living there from 1924 to 1926. Paris in the 1920s was the centre of the musical world for young Americans, and Piston went to the very heart of it. At the École Normale de Musique in Paris, he studied composition and counterpoint with Nadia Boulanger, composition with Paul Dukas, and violin with George Enescu.

Boulanger was the legendary teacher of the age, the woman to whom a generation of American composers — Aaron Copland among them — went to learn their craft. Dukas was a composer of great refinement, and Enescu a violinist of extraordinary gifts. To study with all three was an education few musicians have ever been given. His Three Pieces for Flute, Clarinet, and Bassoon, written in 1925, was his first published score — a modest, beautifully made chamber work, the kind of piece that shows a composer has learned to write clearly before he tries to write grandly.

A photograph taken in 1945 catches something of that Paris circle. It shows Aaron Copland, Nadia Boulanger, and Walter Piston together at the Old France restaurant in Boston — teacher and two of her American pupils, now colleagues, sharing a table in the city Piston had made his home.

In 1926, Piston came home, and began to teach at Harvard himself. He would stay for thirty-four years, until his retirement in 1960. He had arrived at Harvard as a student in 1920, a late starter with a saxophone in his past. He would leave it, forty years later, as one of the most influential teachers American music has ever known.

Thirty-Four Years in One Classroom

To teach at one university for thirty-four years is, in itself, a kind of statement. Piston did not move from post to post, collecting titles. He stayed, teaching theory and composition at Harvard from 1926 until 1960, and in that long, steady stretch his classroom became a place through which the future of American music passed, one student at a time.

His students read like a history of American music. Leonard Bernstein, the conductor and composer who would become one of the most famous musicians in the world. Elliott Carter, whose long career would carry American composition deep into the twentieth century. Leroy Anderson, whose light, perfectly crafted orchestral pieces became part of the American soundscape. And dozens more: Samuel Adler, Arthur Berger, Irving Fine, John Harbison, Frederic Rzewski, Harold Shapero, and many others whose names fill the pages of any history of American composition.

What is striking about that list is not only how long it is, but how different the names on it are. Bernstein and Carter could hardly have been more different as composers, and yet both sat in Piston’s classroom. He did not make his students into copies of himself. He taught them the craft — harmony, counterpoint, orchestration, form — so thoroughly that they were free to go and be themselves. A teacher who imposes his own style produces followers. A teacher who teaches the foundations produces originals. Piston produced originals.

He taught when American music was still finding its voice, still deciding whether it would imitate Europe or speak in its own accent. His students answered that question in a dozen different ways, each resting, in part, on the solid ground Piston had given them. He believed American composers deserved the finest training in the world, and he spent his life providing it, in one room in Cambridge, Massachusetts, year after year.

Eight Symphonies

While he was teaching, Piston was also composing — steadily, seriously, and in the largest forms. He wrote eight symphonies, and they form the core of his orchestral output. A symphony is a composer’s most demanding test: it asks for structure, for development, for the ability to hold a large argument together, and Piston, the engineer and the draughtsman and the teacher of counterpoint, was built for exactly that test.

His Symphony No. 1 came out of a remarkable commission. 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 broadcast on CBS radio. Radio was bringing orchestral music into American homes, and the networks wanted new American music to play. Piston wrote his Symphony No. 1 and conducted its premiere himself with the Boston Symphony Orchestra on April 8, 1938. He was forty-four, standing in front of one of the great orchestras of the world, conducting his own first symphony. The dance-band violinist from Boston had come a long way.

His Symphony No. 2 followed in 1943, commissioned by the Alice M. Ditson Fund of Columbia University. It was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra on March 5, 1944, and it was awarded a prize by the New York Music Critics’ Circle.

Then came the Third. His Symphony No. 3, written in 1946–47 and commissioned by the Koussevitzky Foundation, earned the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1948. But he was not finished. His Symphony No. 7, written in 1960, the year he retired from Harvard, and commissioned by the Philadelphia Orchestra, won the Pulitzer Prize again in 1961. Only four composers have ever won the Pulitzer Prize for Music twice, and Walter Piston is one of them — for his Third Symphony in 1948 and his Seventh in 1961. The quiet teacher from Harvard was, by the judgement of his peers and his country, one of the finest composers of his generation.

The other symphonies fill out the picture. The Fourth, written in 1950, was composed for the 100th anniversary of the University of Minnesota. The Fifth followed in 1954. The Sixth, written in 1955, was composed for the 75th anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The Eighth, written in 1965, came five years after his retirement, proof that leaving the classroom had not meant leaving music behind. Together, the eight symphonies span nearly thirty years, from 1937 to 1965.

Piston was not a composer who stood still. He studied the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg, and he wrote works using aspects of it as early as his Sonata for Flute and Piano in 1930 and his First Symphony in 1937. His first fully twelve-tone work was the Chromatic Study on the Name of Bach for organ, written in 1940, which nonetheless retains a vague feeling of key — Piston, even when experimenting, could not quite let go of the tonal centre. Twelve-tone elements became much more pervasive in the Eighth Symphony of 1965 and in the works that followed it, including the Variations for Cello and Orchestra of 1966, the Clarinet Concerto of 1967, and the Flute Concerto of 1971. He was, to the end, willing to learn something new, even in his seventies.

And the symphonies were only part of it. Piston wrote two violin concertos, in 1939 and 1960, a Viola Concerto in 1957, five string quartets, and a great deal of chamber music. His Viola Concerto and his String Quartet No. 5 also later received awards from the New York Music Critics’ Circle.

The Flutist Who Would Not Behave

If the symphonies are Piston’s most serious achievement, his best-loved work may be something lighter and more delightful. His only dance work, the ballet The Incredible Flutist, was written for the Boston Pops Orchestra, which premiered it with Arthur Fiedler conducting on May 30, 1938. The dancers were Hans Weiner and his company.

The Boston Pops was the perfect home for it. The Pops was the Boston Symphony’s lighter, more popular sibling, the orchestra that played for the people, and Fiedler was its beloved conductor. The Incredible Flutist is a ballet with a sense of humour, a piece that knows how to make an audience smile, and it became one of Piston’s best-loved works.

Soon after the premiere, Piston arranged a concert suite from the ballet, including a selection of the best parts. This version was premiered by Fritz Reiner and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra on November 22, 1940, and it is the suite, above all, that has kept the work alive. The suite is Piston’s most popular work, the piece orchestras still play when they want to show an audience that American music can be witty and graceful as well as serious.

There is something fitting about his most popular work being written for the Pops. Piston never believed music had to choose between the classroom and the concert hall, between the serious and the delightful. He had played dance music himself, in the 1910s, for people who were dancing, not sitting in silence. The Incredible Flutist is the sound of a serious composer allowing himself — and his audience — to enjoy that pleasure.

Four Books That Taught America How to Hear

But if you ask what Piston’s deepest legacy is, the answer may not be a symphony or a ballet at all. It may be on paper, in four books on music theory that became classics, and that are still used to teach composers today.

He wrote four books on the technical aspects of music theory. The first, Principles of Harmonic Analysis, was published in 1933. Then came Harmony, first published in 1941, the book that would become his most famous. Counterpoint followed in 1947, and Orchestration in 1955. Together, the four books cover the whole foundation of composition: how chords work, how melodies move against one another, and how instruments sound together.

Harmony, above all, changed the way harmony is taught. It introduced, for the first time in theoretical literature, several important new concepts that Piston had developed, notably the concept of harmonic rhythm — the idea that chords have a rhythm of their own, a pace at which they change — and the secondary dominant, a chord that acts as a dominant to a chord other than the tonic. These are ideas every student of harmony now learns, and they entered the language of music theory through Piston’s book. The term “secondary dominant” is still used today, in classrooms and in jazz as well as in classical music.

The book 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. A book first published in 1941, in the middle of a world war, was still a standard text nearly seventy years later. Generations of composers learned harmony from Piston before they ever met him, and many never met him at all. They learned from his pages, from the musical examples he wrote out in his own neat hand — his handwriting was so clear that almost all his orchestral scores were published as facsimiles of his originals — and from the patient way he explained how music works.

That is a legacy no symphony can match. A symphony is performed, applauded, and filed away. A textbook is opened, studied, and passed on, year after year, from teacher to student to teacher again. Piston’s books are still doing that work. Every time a young composer learns what a secondary dominant is, or feels the pull of harmonic rhythm, they are learning from a man who died in 1976 and who has never really left the classroom.

Honours, and a Quiet Farewell

The honours came, as they tend to do for a man who does not chase them, steadily and late. He had already won the Pulitzer Prize twice, and the New York Music Critics’ Circle had recognised his work more than once. In 1974, he was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for his outstanding contribution to the arts by the MacDowell Colony, one of the highest honours in American arts, and a fitting recognition for a man who had spent half a century composing, teaching, and writing the books that taught others to compose.

He was eighty when he received it, and he had only two more years to live. His wife of fifty-six years, the artist Kathryn Nason, died in February 1976. Piston followed her a few months later, dying at his home in Belmont, Massachusetts, on November 12, 1976, aged eighty-two. It was a quiet ending, at home, a few months after the loss of the woman he had married in 1920, when they were both young artists in Boston. What he left behind was simpler and more lasting: the music, the books, and the students.

His library and desk are permanently exhibited in the Piston Room, at the Boston Public Library — a fitting resting place for a teacher’s tools, in a public library, where anyone can see them. It is not a grand monument. It is a room with a desk and books, the things a working musician actually uses.

The Teacher in the Music

So why should we remember Walter Piston? Not because his name is famous. It is not, and that is part of the point. We should remember him because his influence is everywhere, even where his name is not: in the music of Leonard Bernstein, of Elliott Carter, of Leroy Anderson, in the harmony textbook on a student’s desk, and in the symphony a young musician hears and thinks, quietly, I could learn to do that.

Piston’s life is a reminder that influence does not always arrive with noise. Sometimes it arrives with a saxophone picked up in a Navy band room, with a fellowship to Paris, with thirty-four years of showing up to the same classroom and teaching the foundations so well that your students are free to become themselves. He was the grandson of a sailor from Genoa, the son of a bookkeeper from Maine, an engineer who learned to draw, a painter who learned to play, a sailor who learned the wind instruments, a student who became a teacher, and a teacher who became, without ever making a fuss about it, one of the central figures in American music.

The next time you hear a Bernstein concert, open a book on harmony, or listen to a light ballet suite from the Boston Pops, think of the quiet man in the next room. His name was Walter Piston. He taught America how to hear — and then he let his students do the talking.