Sinfonietta
performed Feb 20, 2005

Walter Piston (1894-1976) was born in Maine and taught himself to play the violin and the piano as a child, and spent the next decade performing in theater orchestras, dance bands, hotels and restaurants while studying to become an architect. Piston loved to create and explore musical sonority, and his skill as an architect probably inspired his appreciation of classical forms.

Piston's neo-Classical approach, however, makes him no less American a composer than Copland or Ives. Piston said, "Ours is a big country and we are a people possessing a multitude of different origins. If … composers will increasingly strive to perfect themselves in the art of music and will follow only paths of expression that would seem to take them the true way, the matter of a national school will take care of itself."

Piston had a wide array of influences. His exposure to plentiful syncopated dance and theater music, the exuberant American nationalism of the 1920s, the European traditions and academia inspired in him by famed French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger, and Piston's own years on the Harvard music faculty (where his pupils included Leonard Bernstein and Elliott Carter) all served to shape Piston into an edgy American neo-Classicist whose music would assume an important role in the American repertoire. Undoubtedly, Piston's greatest success was achieving such fame and notoriety without resorting to avante garde antics and while embracing an accessible tonal language and traditional forms.

Piston's Sinfonietta was written in 1941 for conductor Bernard Zighera, and was first performed in Boston on March 10, 1941. Piston juxtaposes a variety of nervous, contrapuntal forces in the first movement, reminiscent of Hindemith, while the second movement forms around a haunting, lyrical melody for oboe and winds. Piston foregoes the drama for a playful and vigorous third movement with challenging, driving rhythm.

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