Arnold Elston

Arnold Elston (September 30, 1907 – June 6, 1971) was an American composer and educator. Though he studied with Anton Webern, he did not himself use the twelve-tone technique.

Elston was born in New York on September 30, 1907. He became a private pupil of Rubin Goldmark in 1928, and continued to study with him until 1930, in which year he received his A.B. from the College of the City of New York. He went on to take an M.A. from Columbia University in 1932, in which year he also won a Joseph H. Bearns Prize and the Mosenthal Traveling Fellowship. Using the funds from these prizes Elston was able to study with Anton Webern in Vienna. Though the experience was important for Elston, his music was never imitative of Webern in technique or style. He did not employ the twelve-tone technique, but his colleague Andrew Imbrie later observed that the influence of Webern could be heard in his "flexible use of motif as a unifying force, in a certain sprightliness of texture, and in a forward-pushing upbeat quality of phrase". Elston himself was later to write,

I am clearly in the tradition of the Schoenberg school, probably closer to Schoenberg than to Webern or Berg. But I have never espoused the 12-tone technique. The early works of the Viennese school, such as Schoenberg's Five Orchestra Pieces, or Webern's Op. 6, or Op. 10, have always given me more pleasure than Webern's Symphony or Schoenberg's 3rd and 4th String Quartets.

Elston returned to the US in 1935 and began a teaching career, working first at Vassar College and later at the College of the City of New York. In 1939 he studied conducting with Arthur Fiedler. His Harvard doctoral thesis, presented in 1939, was entitled On Musical Dynamics. He then taught at Cambridge Junior College and gave instruction in composition at Longy School of Music, before securing a position at the University of Oregon in 1941.

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