Competition for a Well-Digger

A veteran of his own premieres, Composer Walter Piston sat halfway back in Boston's Symphony Hall. Said he to a friend: "I'll run like a deer to get backstage, and then come out as if I were very reluctant about it. ... This sort of thing makes me wonder if it's worth the trouble to write a symphony."

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.

In the 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. He has the reputation of being averse to melody, and is a little sensitive about it. Once someone praised a rare tuneful passage in one of his string quartets. Said Piston, who doesn't consider himself exactly tuneless: "That's what I call, 'Don't throw me out in the snow, Father.' "

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