​6 Degrees

​of Separation

Here are some of my teachers, with some of their teachers and some of their students. How does the music of Otto Leuning sound like that of Muzio Clementi?   Does the music of Franz Joseph Haydn somehow foreshadow that of Vincent Persichetti?  Other than Phil Lesh does anyone else on this list have anything at all to do with The Grateful Dead? Some of these connections make a lot of sense, and others are absurd. I hope you find these as interesting as I do.  Composer, David Walther.  My email is hrwr@earthlink.net  ​

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Merton Brown was more of a collaborator and best friend, studied with Wallingford Riegger and Carl Ruggles, and collaborated with the choreographer, José Limón.   
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David Del Tredici was one of my composition teachers at Boston University.  He studied with Roger Sessions, Leon Kirshner, Earl Kim and Seymour Shifrin (who studied with William Schuman, Otto Luening, and Darius Milhaud).  Along with his college room-mate and my mother's significant other, Rolv Yttrehus, Del Tredici studied with Roger Sessions, who students also include:  John Adams, Milton Babbitt, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, John Harbison, Earl Kim, and Leon Kirchner. Sessions studied with Horatio Parker (student: Charles Ives), who studied with George Whitefield Chadwick, who studied with Carl Reinecke. Reinecke's students include: Edvard Grieg, Ferruccio Busoni, Charles Villiers Stanford, Leoš Janáček, Isaac Albéniz, and Max Bruch).  Reinecke studied with Robert Schumann & Felix Mendelssohn. Mendelssohn studied with Muzio Clementi. Chadwick also studied with Salomon Jadassohn.  Jadassohn's students include Albéniz, Busoni, Frederick Delius, and Grieg). 

David Diamond was one of my composition teachers at Juilliard, also studied with Roger Sessions, as well as with Bernard Rogers. Rogers studied with Arthur Farwell, who studied with Engelbert Humperdinck.  Humperdink studied with Johann Gottlob Friedrich Wieck, who taught his daughter, Clara Wieck Schumann and her husband, Robert Schumann.  Humperdinck also studied with Josef Rheinberger and Franz Lachner.  Lachner studied with Simon Sechter, who may be the most prolific composer who ever lived. Schter's students include Franz Schubert and Anton Bruckner.  Rogers also studied with Percy Goetschius (student: Howard Hanson) and Ernest Bloch, who studied with Eugène Ysaÿe.  Ysaÿe studied with Henri Vieuxtemps and Henryk Wieniawski.  Vieuxtemps also studied with Charles Auguste de Bériot who studied with Jean-François Tiby.  Tiby studied with  Giovanni Battista Viotti.

Both Diamond, and his teacher, Rogers, studied with Nadia Boulanger, whose sister, Lili, was one of the greatest child prodigies who ever lived. Nadia Boulanger studied with Louis Vierne (assistant to Charles-Marie Widor. Marcel Dupré studied with Widor). Nadia Boulanger's students include: Aaron Copland, Roger Sessions, John Eliot Gardiner, Virgil Thomson, Gian Carlo Menotti, Marc Blitzstein, Rolv Yttrehus and nearly everyone else, including my father, Dr. Sam Walter, and my teachers:  Joyce MeKeel (see below), Lester Trimble (orchestration at Juilliard), and Robert Moevs (contemporary counterpoint).  Moevs studied with Walter Piston. Boulanger studied with Gabriel Fauré. Fauré studied with Camille Saint-Saëns, who studied with Fromental Halévy. Georges Bizet was a student of Halévy.

Otto Leuning: one of my composition at Juilliard, studied with Ferruccio Busoni. Busoni's students include: Philipp Jarnach, Percy Grainger, and Edgard Varèse. Busoni studied with Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn (see above listings under Del Tredici). 

​Joyce Mekeel was one of my composition teachers at Boston University, studied with Earl Kim who studied with Arnold Schoenberg.  Schoenberg's students include Alban Berg, Anton Webern, John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Leon Kirchner.  Schoenberg also studied with Alexander von Zemlinsky.  Semlinsky studied with Anton Door.  Door studied with Carl Czerny. Czerny studied with Ludwig von Beethoven. Beethoven studied with Franz Joseph Haydn (one lesson!) and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart.  Ms. MeKeel also studied with Sessions, Bloch, and Boulanger (see above under Diamond).

Vincent Persichetti was my main composition teacher at Juilliard.  His students include Einojuhani Rautavaara, Peter Schickele (P.D.Q. Bach), Phillip Glass, and Leonardo Balada.  Persichetti studied conducting with Fritz Reiner. Leonard Bernstein was also a student of Reiner.  Reiner studied piano with Béla Bartók. Bartók studied with István Thomán. (student: Ernő Dohnányi was a student of Thomán. Thomán studied with Franz Liszt. List studied with  Carl Czerny and Johann Mepomuk Hummel. Felix Mendelssohn was a student of Hummel., Liszt also studied with Anton Reicha, as did Hector Berlioz.  Reicha studied with Johann Georg Albrechtsberger who studied with Ludwig von Beethoven. Both Liszt and Reicha also studied with Antonio Salieri.  Salieri studied with his own brother Francesco Salieri, who was a student of Giuseppe Tartini. Persichetti studied piano with Olga Samaroff. William Kapell and Richard Farrell also studied with Samaroff.  Samaroff's husband was Leopold Stokowski.  Stokowski studied with Antoine Francois Marmontel. Georges Bizet, Vincent d'Indy, Edward MacDowell and Claude Debussy were also students of Marmontel.  Marmontel studied with Élie Halfon Halévy.   Samaroff also studied with Pierre Zimmermann who studied with Luigi Cherubini.  Samaroff also studied with Ernst Jedliczka who studied with Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein. Alexander Siloti was also a student of Nikolai Rubinstein.

Kyriena Siloti was one of my piano teachers.  She studied with her father, Alexander Siloti. Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Marc Blitzstein were also students of Alexander Siloti.  Alexander Siloti studied piano with Nikolai Rubinstein and Franz Liszt, and harmony with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky. 

John Thow was one of my composition teachers at Boston Univeristy.  He studied with Ingolf Dahl. Michael Tilson Thomas was also a student of Dahl. Thow also studied with Earl Kim (see above under Del Tredici), and Luciano Berio. Berio's students include Steve Reich and "Grateful Dead" musician: Phil Lesh.