5 by Walter Piston is a chamber-music work composed in 1962.
Piston's fifth string quartet was commissioned for the 1962 Berlin Festival by the Kroll Quartet, who gave the first performance on October 8, 1962.
The first movement is a binary sonata form with novel textures, tonal relations, and dynamic twists.
The second movement is in variation form, with a theme presented initially as if it were a four-voice fugue, and subsequent formal ambiguities.
The finale is a seven-part rondo (A–B–A–C–A–B–A), though the basic design is obscured by a number of formal devices, which led one analyst[2] to believe it is a fugue with three subjects.