String Quartet No. 4 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 1951

1951 in music

-Events:*January 29 – Nilla Pizzi wins the first annual Sanremo Music Festival with "Grazie dei fiori".*February – The first complete performance of Charles Ives's Second Symphony is given in Carnegie Hall by the New York Philharmonic-Symphony Orchestra, conducted by Leonard Bernstein.*March – Alan...

.

History

Piston’s Fourth Quartet was commissioned by the Coolidge Foundation in celebration of the centennial of Mills College

Mills College

Mills College is an independent liberal arts women's college founded in 1852 that offers bachelor's degrees to women and graduate degrees and certificates to women and men. Located in Oakland, California, Mills was the first women's college west of the Rockies. The institution was initially founded...

, and is dedicated to Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge

Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge

Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge aka Liz Coolidge , born Elizabeth Penn Sprague, was an American pianist and patron of music, especially of chamber music....

. It was premiered on May 18, 1952 by the Hungarian Quartet

Hungarian Quartet

The Hungarian String Quartet was a musical ensemble of world renown, particularly famous for its performances of quartets by Beethoven and Bartók...

. It is closely related to Piston’s Fourth Symphony

Symphony No. 4 (Piston)

-History:Piston composed his Fourth Symphony on commission from the University of Minnesota to mark the centennary of the university's foundation in the following year...

 (Pollack 1982, 108).

Analysis

The quartet is in four 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...

:

• Soave ( )
• Adagio (9/8)
• Leggero vivace (2/4)
• Con fuoco (6/8)

The first movement is a sonata-allegro

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...

 in D major, whose harmonies are pandiatonic

Pandiatonic

In music, pandiatonicism refers to the technique of using the diatonic scale without the limitations of functional tonality. Pandiatonic music typically uses the notes of the diatonic scale freely in dissonant combinations without conventional resolutions and/or without standard chord...

 rather than triadic

Triad (music)

In music and music theory, a triad is a three-note chord that can be stacked in thirds. Its members, when actually stacked in thirds, from lowest pitched tone to highest, are called:* the Root...

. The second theme is given in the high register of the viola, with the other instruments softly accompanying sulla tastiera (near the fingerboard). The slow movement features the cello in a pensive cantilena, and a shifting, unstable harmony that settles on E minor only at the end (DeVoto 1984).

The third movement is a fugal

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....

 scherzo

Scherzo

A scherzo is a piece of music, often a movement from a larger piece such as a symphony or a sonata. The scherzo's precise definition has varied over the years, but it often refers to a movement which replaces the minuet as the third movement in a four-movement work, such as a symphony, sonata, or...

 with a fleetness comparable to Mendelssohn

Felix Mendelssohn

Jakob Ludwig Felix Mendelssohn Barthóldy , use the form 'Mendelssohn' and not 'Mendelssohn Bartholdy'. The Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians gives ' Felix Mendelssohn' as the entry, with 'Mendelssohn' used in the body text...

 and a dense chromaticism that recalls Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg

Arnold Schoenberg was an Austrian composer, associated with the expressionist movement in German poetry and art, and leader of the Second Viennese School...

 (Pollack 1982, 109). Its exaggerated staccato and duple meter resemble the scherzos of the Flute Quintet and the Sixth Symphony

Symphony No. 6 (Piston)

-History:Piston composed the symphony to mark the 75th Anniversary of the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He dedicated the score to the memory of Serge Koussevitzky and his wife Natalie. The symphony was first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra under Charles Munch, on November 25,...

, respectively, while the pizzicato A-minor chords at the opening and close recall the scherzo movements of the string quartets by Debussy

String Quartet (Debussy)

Claude Debussy wrote his sole String Quartet in G minor, Op. 10 in 1893.-Background:The previous year Debussy had abandoned the opera Rodrigue et Chimène...

 and Ravel (DeVoto 1984).

The finale is in sonata-allegro form like the opening movement, but with an expressionist tone. The first theme is dramatic, marked by contrasting textures,sharp dissonances, crescendos starting forte, irregular downbeats, and abrupt rests. The second theme is a grotesque march. The urgent character of this movement is similar to Piston's finales from the early 1940s, and this may be because it, too, was written in wartime—the Korean War

Korean War

The Korean War was a conventional war between South Korea, supported by the United Nations, and North Korea, supported by the People's Republic of China , with military material aid from the Soviet Union...

in the present instance (Pollack 1982, 108–11).

Discography

• 1984. Walter Piston: String Quartet No. 3; String Quartet No. 4. Portland String Quartet. Sounds of New England. LP recording. Northeastern Records NR 214. Boston, MA: Northeastern Records. Fourth Quartet 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.