ABSTRACT
Walter Piston was of Italian descent; his grandfather Antonio Pistone, a Genoese sea captain, sailed to Maine in his own schooner. After graduating from Harvard in 1924, Piston travelled to Paris on a John Knowles Paine Fellowship where he became a pupil of Nadia Boulanger. Piston’s basic harmonic language is tonal although some of the earlier works have dodecaphonic implications and the music of his last decade, including the eighth Symphony, makes use of increased dissonance with, at times, chords of all 12 semitones. A more lyrical second subjectintroduced by the oboe and taken up on the strings restores Piston’s customary bonhomie, but a restless mood permeates most of the movement, dispelled only in the rousing coda. The eloquent cello solo that opens the slow movement possesses the late-romantic warmth of Samuel Barber where a deceptive tranquillity masks a troubled soul, although in Piston’s case, the angst is in the music not the man.
