Walter Piston

[2] Walter Jr first trained as an engineer at the Mechanical Arts High School in Boston, but was artistically inclined.

[3] On graduating summa cum laude from Harvard, Piston was awarded a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship.

[2] His students include Samuel Adler, Leroy Anderson, Arthur Berger, Leonard Bernstein, Gordon Binkerd, Elliott Carter, John Davison, Irving Fine, John Harbison, Karl Kohn, Ellis B. Kohs, Gail Kubik, Billy Jim Layton, Noël Lee, Robert Middleton, Robert Moevs, Daniel Pinkham, Mildred Barnes Royse, Frederic Rzewski, Allen Sapp, Harold Shapero, and Claudio Spies,[2] as well as Frank D'Accone,[10] Ann Ronell,[11] Robert Strassburg,[12] Yehudi Wyner,[13] and William P.

[15] Piston's only dance work, The Incredible Flutist, was written for the Boston Pops Orchestra, which premiered it with Arthur Fiedler conducting on May 30, 1938.

[16] Piston studied the twelve-tone technique of Arnold Schoenberg and wrote works using aspects of it as early as the Sonata for Flute and Piano (1930) and the First Symphony (1937).

His first fully twelve-tone work was the Chromatic Study on the Name of Bach for organ (1940), which nonetheless retains a vague feeling of key.

2, which was premiered by the National Symphony Orchestra on March 5, 1944 and was awarded a prize by the New York Music Critics' Circle.

[19] Piston wrote four books on the technical aspects of music theory which are considered to be classics in their respective fields: Principles of Harmonic Analysis, Counterpoint, Orchestration, and Harmony.

[20] This work went through four editions in the author's lifetime, was translated into several languages, and (with changes and additions by Mark DeVoto) was still regarded as recently as 2009 as a standard harmony text.