Underrated Classical Musicians: Walter Piston

 

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=J9zhjOnhMFY

Some books are so wonderful that they make you cry. One book which made me cry was Walter Piston's book on harmony....

I could write a whole memoir about harmony class at American University under a professor I termed 'Professor Beckmesser', but instead, I'll just leave Walter Piston's Fourth Symphony. Even if it's not as memorable as other nor'easter's like Ives or Copland at his best, what an engaging and magnificently made piece of music this is. Piston, like Hindemith, may or may not have been a truly great artist burning with something essential to say, but he certainly knew how to write good music, and the result is compulsively listenable. It sounds like Copland, and yet sounds utterly unlike him. Piston was an Italian-American (Pistone) born in Maine and raised in Boston. He trained to be both an engineer and an artist before he settled upon music (is it too much to interpolate that you can hear the influence of both trainings in his writing?), where he later became chair of the music department at Harvard and taught 25% of the American composers we've ever heard of. The second movement is certainly a kind of masterpiece: it sounds like Dave Brubeck transcribed his Unsquare Dance for orchestra - though the Piston pre-dates Brubeck by nearly ten years. The fourth movement, while clearly having some influence from Vaughan-Williams's 4th Symphony (RVW at his most barnburning), it also clearly shows where our contemporary former New Englander, John Adams, got some of his orchestration tricks (think of Short Ride in a Fast Machine), but this is a lot more rhythmically complex....

Is Piston a great composer? Probably not, and not only is it not great, but Piston was the epitome of the American musical establishment which shut out composers of less technique but great vision out of the pantheon: Cowell, Ives, Gershwin, Nancarrow, Revueltas, Antheill, Partch, Seeger, Harrison, Ruggles, Ornstein, McPhee... that's the real American canon of visionaries during that period - Copland and Gould can stay tho....

But not everything needs to be great enough to shit gold. Just like we go to the movies, catch a good movie and come home satisfied even if we forget the experience, there are at least a thousand or two composers in music history who knew how to write really, really good music. If it isn't great? Well, we can't always engorge at the trough of greatness. Sometimes we need a break and just to be entertained. If that's what Walter Piston does, then he deserves to still be championed just as all those other really good mid-century academic composers do. I'd rather listen to Cowell or Nancarrow, but Piston, that lettered academic in extremis, is the perfect composer to listen to while shutting off your brain.