Here are some of my teachers, with some of their teachers and some of their students. This kind of name dropping may not mean anything to anyone. 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.
Merton Brown more of a collaborator and best friend, studied with Wallingford Riegger and Carl Ruggles, and collaborated with José Limón. David Del Tredicione of my composition teachers at Boston University: 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 he studied with Roger Sessions, who students also include: John Adams, Milton Babbitt, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, John Harbison, Earl Kim, Leon Kirchner, and . Sessions studied with Horatio Parker (student: Charles Ives), who studied with George Whitefield Chadwick, who studied with Carl Reinecke (students: Edvard Grieg, Ferruccio Busoni, Charles Villiers Stanford, Leoš Janáček, Isaac Albéniz, and Max Bruch), who studied with Robert Schumann & Felix Mendelssohn,who studied with Muzio Clementi. Chadwick also studied with Salomon Jadassohn (students: Albéniz, Busoni, Frederick Delius, and Grieg).
David Diamond: one of my composition teachers at Juilliard, also studied with Roger Sessions, as well as with Bernard Rogers, who studied with Arthur Farwell, who studied with Engelbert Humperdinck who 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 who studied with Simon Sechter, who may be the most prolific composer who ever lived (students: FranzSchubert and Anton Bruckner). Rogers also studied with Percy Goetschius (student: Howard Hanson) and Ernest Bloch, who studied with Eugène Ysaÿe, who studied with Henri Vieuxtemps and Henryk Wieniawski; Henri Vieuxtemps studied with Charles Auguste de Bériot studied with Jean-François Tiby, who 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; student: Marcel Dupré). 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. Samuel 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, who studied with Camille Saint-Saëns, who studied with Fromental Halévy (student: Georges Bizet).
Otto Leuning: one of my composition teachers at Juilliard, studied with Ferruccio Busoni (students: Philipp Jarnach, Percy Grainger, and Edgard Varèse). Busoni studied with Reinecke and Salomon Jadassohn (as stated above, his students: Albéniz, Busoni, Frederick Delius, and Grieg).
Joyce Mekeel: one of my composition teachers at Boston University, studied with Earl Kim who studied with Arnold Shoenberg (students: Alban Berg, Anton Webern, John Cage, Lou Harrison, and Leon Kirchner) who studied with Alexander von Zemlinsky, who studied with Anton Door, who studied with Carl Czerny, who studied with Ludwig von Beethoven, who studied with Franz Joseph Haydn and Wolfgang Amadeus Mozart. Ms. MeKeel also studied with Sessions, Bloch, and Boulanger (see above).
Vincent Persichetti: my main composition teacher at Juilliard (students: Einojuhani Rautavaara, Peter Schickele (P.D.Q. Bach), Phillip Glass, and Leonardo Balada) studied conducting with Fritz Reiner (student: Leonard Bernstein), who studied piano with Béla Bartók, who studied with István Thomán (student: Ernő Dohnányi); who studied with Franz Liszt; who studied with Johann Nepomuk Hummel (student: Felix Mendelssohn), and Carl Czerny). 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, who studied with his brother Francesco Salieri, who was a student of Giuseppe Tartini. Persichetti studied piano with Olga Samaroff (student: William Kapell and Richard Farrell; husband: Leopold Stokowski); who studied with Antoine Francois Marmontel (students: Georges Bizet, Vincent d'Indy, Edward MacDowell and Claude Debussy), who studied with Élie Halfon Halévy. Samaroff also studied with Pierre Zimmermann who studied with Luigi Cherubini; and Ernst Jedliczka who studied with Anton and Nikolai Rubinstein (student: Alexander Siloti).
Kyriena Siloti: one of my piano teachers, studied with her father, Alexander Siloti (students: Sergei Rachmaninoff, and Marc Blitzstein): studied piano with Nikolai Rubinstein and Franz Liszt, and harmony with Pyotr Ilyich Tchaikovsky.
John Thow: one of my composition teachers at Boston Univeristy, studied with: Ingolf Dahl (student: Michael Tilson Thomas), Earl Kim (see above), and Luciano Berio (students: Steve Reich and Phil Lesh (of The Grateful Dead).