WALTER PISTON AT 70

By Louis Chapin

To some extent, Walter Piston, who stepped down four years ago from the Walter W. Naumburg music chair at Harvard University, lives and talks the way a retired professor is supposed to. But no one should be misled either by his comfortably sequestered house on a Belmont, Massachusetts, hillside or by his benign, sometimes retrospective way of speech. As man and composer, Piston has not retired.

After finding my way to him on a wet, yellow-leaved day this fall, I was first told, aptly enough, what he felt like as an ex-teacher. “Of course, I’m living the life of Riley. It’s been quite an experience to get rid of my teaching. I used to refer to ‘teaching in my spare time’—a remark President Pusey no doubt appreciated.

“But I must say that the facts belied the slogan. I didn’t realize how much I was carrying, how much I was solving students’ problems first. I’m certainly freer for composing now.

“Yet teaching is in my nature. It’s good for one composer to know what’s going on with the others; you have to, when you’re teaching about them. And you learn plenty from your students.”

It soon became clear, listening below the surface of Piston’s soft-spoken equanimity that “students’ problems” still push to the front of his thinking.

“It’s a sad thing that young composers aren’t willing to go through traditional theoretic training. It gives you technique, and an insight into the past. Hindemith has worked this way, too, though I used to fight him about it. I said you can’t teach pupils how to write music—only how it’s been written. The study of technique, you see, is not the same as the practice of composition. They simply go along parallel lines.

“There are lots of instances when students with insecure knowledge will make what they think is an astounding discovery. It’s like sticking a pin in them to explain that if they’d gone through the mill they would have discovered it long ago.

“It’s very valuable to be able to size up your own music; that takes knowledge.”

Piston’s own historical poise, facing ahead with an appreciative ear to the past, raises for him certain questions regarding serial technique. “The 12-tone school isn’t interested in harmony, and the fact is that they’ve got harmony they don’t want, and they’ve got musical meaning they don’t want. When you combine two notes, you’re writing harmony; it either develops what I call ‘harmonic rhythm’ and means something, or it doesn’t.

“I don’t mind if they write static music on purpose. But it’s too bad when they’re stuck with it. If young composers would recognize the existence of meaning, it would help them to deal with it—for or against.”

The whole area of musical meaning has become steadily more absorbing to Piston. “Music grows like a spoken language, and we’ve never had such a mass of it, so much playing of it, as we have today. The young composer doesn’t want to say anything that he thinks has been said before, and I don’t blame him. But it’s an ironical thought that the presence in our culture of strong musical meaning may be an obstacle to progress.

“For myself, I find musical meaning in a lot more advanced writing than I once did. Perhaps,” with a pause, “I know a little more than I used to.

“Take some of Boulez’s music, for instance. I’m beginning to see relations between these sounds and the sounds we’re accustomed to hear in music. Of course, that’s no sign that these relations are what he wanted. There are always two parties to communication, and the hearer contributes as much as the composer.”

Piston is obviously unconcerned with dictating meaning to a listener. “My only recent venture into program music was a suite for orchestra, ‘Three New England Sketches,’ commissioned by the Worcester Music Festival. The opening movement was called ‘Seaside.’ After the first performance, a critic came up and said, ‘Mr. Piston, I hope you don’t mind if I smell clams in your first movement.’ I said, ‘I don’t mind at all—they’re your clams.’ And they were.

“Not only meaning, but the whole question of why to write music, is up in the· air these days. This question will have to be answered before there’ll be what might be considered a solution of present-day problems in art.’’ Piston himself is at present working on a wind-and-string sextet for the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation and a piano quintet for the Harvard Musical Association.

“Every work I do, I always begin all over again. ‘This has never been done,’ I think. Then I step back, and it’s the same old Piston. But the string quartet [No. 5] I wrote last year for the Berlin Festival is different.”

The impression Walter Piston gives today is of a gently seasoned yet wholly alive human being, whose sense of the meaning of music goes far deeper than the syntax of techniques without ever ignoring them. He could tell with clear delight of a youth-concert audience which that morning had applauded a symphony movement of his with whistles and catcalls and then, a moment later, think out loud about the working of music for world understanding:

“When I met a visiting group of Russian composers at the airport, it was just like meeting old friends. I’ve always believed in the emotional meaning of music. There’s no way of measuring how far it can reach.”