Piston's Vice

Composer Walter Piston was once asked, "Why don't you write more modern music?" "Well," he explained, "every time I start a new piece, I say it's going to be new for me. I work very hard then, and when I get it done, I look at it, and it's the same old Piston."

After 41 years of composing precise, graceful works, it is a wonder that the old Piston, now 73, has not worn down. "At my age," he admits, "ideas do recur, but when they do, you simply have to throw them out."

Now retired after teaching composition at Harvard for 34 years, Piston has certainly not stopped playing with new ideas. Last week in Manhattan's Carnegie Hall, Mstislav Rostropovich and the London Symphony Orchestra performed his Variations for Cello and Orchestra, a work that Rostropovich asked him to compose two years ago to enlarge the meager repertory of the cello. "He paid me the compliment--unusual for a virtuoso--of asking me to compose for the instrument and not for the player," says Piston.

He had never written for solo cello before, and Piston displayed his own virtuosity by splashing forth a 23-minute polyphonic conversation organized as five variations on a theme. Brass and strings quarreled to the punctuation of tambourines and drums, then drifted in and out of harmony--while with his soaring silkiness, Rostropovich traced wide melodic angles ranging from sad loveliness to brittle dissonance. "I hope it is better than anything else I've written," said Piston. Then he set off to try to do even better on two new commissions. "You can't stop," he explained. "Music is a vice that takes hold of you."

This file is automatically generated by a robot program, so reader's discretion is required.