Word: piston
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
Koussevitsky has chosen a varied program, including both modern and classic works. Mozart's perennial favorite, the Serenade for Strings, Dine Kleine Nachtmusik, will be played, along with representative selections from three modern composers, Piston, Prokofieff, and Ravel...
...Aaron Copland, David Diamond, Roy Harris, Walter Piston, Roger Sessions, Randall Thompson...
When the Boston Symphony had finished playing Piston's Third Symphony, Conductor Serge Koussevitzky led Piston by the hand onstage for two curtain calls. Koussevitzky, who always has something glowing to say about anything he introduces, told a reporter that the music could have been written only by a "finished master." Next day a Boston critic referred to it as "the best since Copland's Third" Since Boston has had no premieres of U.S. symphonies since Aaron Copland's, that was faint praise indeed...
Actually, Piston's Third was less strident and mechanized than most of the music he has written in the past 20 years. Hostile critics have found his music as bony and bare as a blackboard counterpoint exercise in his Harvard classroom. But the Third had three movements of lyrical tranquillity before bursting into a noisy finale. The finale, said Piston, was written in Vermont while a well-driller was digging an artesian well outside his window. "I had to write the music loud enough to overcome the noise outside," said Piston...
...generally lackluster field of serious U.S. composers, Piston rates high. He rates even higher as a teacher. Originally he intended to be a painter, and earned his way through a Boston art school playing the piano, the violin or the saxophone in restaurant bands. Not until he got out of the Navy after World War I, at 26, did he decide to compose instead. The saxophone paid his way" through Harvard's music school, too. Now the head of Harvard's music department, he insists that his students know the rules before they break them...