Two Composers on American Music at Mid-Century: Walter Piston in Conversation with Wilfrid Mellers, 1962

This interview took place two years after Walter Piston retired from Harvard, where he had taught theory and composition for more than thirty years; Wilfrid Mellers, twenty years younger than Piston, was probably putting finishing touches on his big book about American music, Music in a New Found Land, that would be published in 1964. What comes through most clearly in the dialogue are Mellers's effort to identify musical aspects that characterize the American composer as different from the European, and Piston's polite insistence that such characteristics are unimportant if they exist at all, that the American heritage in concert music is profoundly European notwithstanding the influence of indigenous popular music. Mellers, confessing unfamiliarity with American music "since the Copland generation," paints American characteristics with a broad and sometimes indistinct brush; Piston, speaking of individual composers and works, is as specific and articulate as he is in his well-written theory texts.

The late 1950s coincided with the first substantial appearance in the American university of the post–World War II European avant-garde. Piston stopped teaching in 1960, skeptical as ever of the significance of the fashionable trends in European music so cherished by the young Americans. I can remember him saying casually, "These composers tell us 'We're going to write music like you never heard before,' and then they write music that sounds like water running into the bathtub." But when he speaks in the interview of "being, I suppose, in my third period," he probably means his own tendency toward denser chromaticism and increasing atonality that are typical in his late works, such as the Ricercare for orchestra (1967) and the Variations for cello and orchestra (1966). These are no less marked by a richly melodic counterpoint that was so typical of his much more diatonic works like the symphonies and chamber music of the 1940s and 1950s, including the New England Sketches (1959)—Piston might have called these part of his "second period." If there is a "first period" in Piston's Parisian works, composed during or just after his studies with Boulanger, then the Three Pieces for flute, clarinet and bassoon fit this category, but these are notable for their chromatic and dissonant harmony, rather close to the Stravinsky of the "Soldier's March" and Symphonies of Wind Instruments or Hindemith's works of the same time.

Walter Piston spent his entire career in the musical environment of Boston and shared in its advantages. No less than eight of his orchestral works were given their first performance by the Boston Symphony Orchestra during the Koussevitzky and Munch years, and Piston conducted several of these premieres himself. When Erich Leinsdorf and then William Steinberg followed Munch, Piston was essentially forgotten by the BSO, and his music was in eclipse nationally by the time of his death in 1976. It has made a considerable comeback since, as performers and audiences alike recognize its individuality of style and its impeccable classical craftsmanship.

mellers:

Well, Mr. Piston, I'm very pleased and privileged to be here because I've been interested in American music for some twenty years and your music in particular. And I thought perhaps I could start it off by saying something about what the general picture of American music looks like to an outsider, to a European. The basic difference is a simple and obvious one, of course: it is that the European composer is unavoidably aware of the centuries of the past behind him. And I as an English composer in particular have been preoccupied with the sixteenth and seventeenth century and I use elements from the music of the sixteenth and seventeenth century in my own music and I naturally imagine that they are relevant to what I'm doing as a twentieth-century composer. But the American composer, of course, cannot do that, for he has virtually no past at all. And we have to see him, I think, as an artist who is therefore concerned with order and trying to create order out of chaos as...