String Quartet No. 5 by Walter Piston

Walter Piston

Walter Hamor Piston Jr., , was an American composer of classical music, music theorist and professor of music at Harvard University whose students included Leroy Anderson, Leonard Bernstein, and Elliott Carter....

 is a chamber-music

Chamber music

Chamber music is a form of classical music, written for a small group of instruments which traditionally could be accommodated in a palace chamber. Most broadly, it includes any art music that is performed by a small number of performers with one performer to a part...

 work composed in 1962

1962 in music

-Events:*January 1 – The Beatles and Brian Poole and the Tremeloes both audition at Decca Records, a company which has the option of signing one group only...

.

History

Piston’s Fifth Quartet was commissioned for the 1962 Berlin Festival by the Kroll Quartet, who gave the first performance on October 8, 1962. It was awarded the New York Music Critics Circle Award in 1964 (Pollack 1982, 138).

Analysis

The quartet is in three movements

Movement (music)

A movement is a self-contained part of a musical composition or musical form. While individual or selected movements from a composition are sometimes performed separately, a performance of the complete work requires all the movements to be performed in succession...

:

• Allegro
• Adagio
• Allegro

Each movement is based on twelve-tone technique

Twelve-tone technique

Twelve-tone technique is a method of musical composition devised by Arnold Schoenberg...

, though the character is cool and refined, as usual with Piston. The first movement is a binary sonata form

Sonata form

Sonata form is a large-scale musical structure used widely since the middle of the 18th century . While it is typically used in the first movement of multi-movement pieces, it is sometimes used in subsequent movements as well—particularly the final movement...

 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

Fugue

In music, a fugue is a compositional technique in two or more voices, built on a subject that is introduced at the beginning in imitation and recurs frequently in the course of the composition....

, and subsequent formal ambiguities. The finale is a seven-part rondo (ABACABA), though the basic design is obscured by a number of formal devices, which led one analyst (Chittum 1974) to believe it is a fugue with three subjects (Pollack 1982, 138).

Discography

• 1974. American String Quartets, Volume II: 1900–1950. Kohon String Quartet. 3-LP set. Vox SVBX 5305 (set); VS 4627–4632. (Peter Mennin: String Quartet No. 2; Aaron Copland: Pieces for String Quartet; Walter Piston: String Quartet No. 5; George Gershwin: Lullaby; Virgil Thomson: String Quartet No. 2; Charles Ives: Scherzo for String Quartet; William Schuman: String Quartet No. 3; Roger Sessions: String Quartet No. 2; Howard Hanson: String Quartet, op. 23.) New York: Vox, 1974.
• 1982. Walter Piston: String Quartet No. 5; Quintet for Flute and String Quartet. Doriot Anthony Dwyer, flute; Portland String Quartet. LP recording, 12 in. Northeastern Records NR 208. Boston, MA: Northeastern Records. Reissued as part of Walter Piston: String Quartet No. 4; String Quartet No. 5; Quintet for Flute and Strings. Doriot Anthony Dwyer, flute; Portland String Quartet. Sounds of New England. CD recording. Northeastern NR 9002-CD. Boston, MA : Northeastern Records, 1988.
• 2010. Walter Piston: String Quartets Nos. 1, 3 and 5. Harlem Quartet. CD Recording. Naxos 8.559630. [Hong Kong
  Hong Kong
  Hong Kong is one of two Special Administrative Regions of the People's Republic of China , the other being Macau. A city-state situated on China's south coast and enclosed by the Pearl River Delta and South China Sea, it is renowned for its expansive skyline and deep natural harbour...
  
  ]: Naxos Records.