Uploaded October 2025 | Updated September 2026, 2 weeks ago
Performed by Leonard Hokanson.
I - Andantino (𝅘𝅥𝅮 = 72): 0:00
Piston's Passacaglia was composed on 1943, but little is known about the piece. Alongside the 1945 solo piano "Improvisation", these pieces disclose Piston's troubled state during the war years. Premiere date and performer involved are unknown.
Walter Piston, one of the leading U.S. composers of his era, spent over thirty years as a professor at Harvard; in addition to his compositional activities, he wrote a number of texts, still in wide use, on such subjects as harmony and orchestration. Piston was among the first wave of young U.S. composers who flocked to Paris beginning in the 1920s to study with the influential pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Piston's primary instrument was the violin; though he wrote well for the piano, his catalogue for that instrument is rather slim.
In the present work, Piston departs from the Baroque passacaglia tradition of a triple meter and a set of variations that unfolds over a ground bass. Instead, the four-measure subject is in 5/8 meter; further, Piston allows the subject to migrate to different keys. As the contrapuntal texture of the work becomes more complex, the subject tends to be absorbed into this network of polyphony; the subject reemerges with greater clarity when the texture turns more chordal. The Passacaglia ends in a decisive fortissimo statement.
Picture: Fragment of "Winter Fields" (1942) by the U.S. painter Andrew Wyeth.
Source: tinyurl.com/26qvetzr
Unfortunately, the score is not freely available.
Performed by Leonard Hokanson.
I - Andantino (𝅘𝅥𝅮 = 72): 0:00
Piston's Passacaglia was composed on 1943, but little is known about the piece. Alongside the 1945 solo piano "Improvisation", these pieces disclose Piston's troubled state during the war years. Premiere date and performer involved are unknown.
Walter Piston, one of the leading U.S. composers of his era, spent over thirty years as a professor at Harvard; in addition to his compositional activities, he wrote a number of texts, still in wide use, on such subjects as harmony and orchestration. Piston was among the first wave of young U.S. composers who flocked to Paris beginning in the 1920s to study with the influential pedagogue Nadia Boulanger. Piston's primary instrument was the violin; though he wrote well for the piano, his catalogue for that instrument is rather slim.
In the present work, Piston departs from the Baroque passacaglia tradition of a triple meter and a set of variations that unfolds over a ground bass. Instead, the four-measure subject is in 5/8 meter; further, Piston allows the subject to migrate to different keys. As the contrapuntal texture of the work becomes more complex, the subject tends to be absorbed into this network of polyphony; the subject reemerges with greater clarity when the texture turns more chordal. The Passacaglia ends in a decisive fortissimo statement.
Picture: Fragment of "Winter Fields" (1942) by the U.S. painter Andrew Wyeth.
Source: tinyurl.com/26qvetzr
Unfortunately, the score is not freely available.
