Re: Questions about William Pierce
jrs...@aol.com
Richard Sauer wrote:
> The BSO's William Pierce passed on in 1997, but a google search doesn't
> reveal much about him. Is there anyone here who met him? During the
> Tanglewood broadcasts, where exactly was he?
I don't know anything about him, but he always sounded like the
Aristocrat of Orchestral Announcers. He was perfect for the part. I
miss hearing his voice every Sunday afternoon.
--Jeff
Kevin P. Mostyn
dear person. Completely without airs and a very hard worker. He always got
to Symphony Hall before I did and worked very hard studying and rehearsing
the script. He suffered from dyslexia and was terrified if he had to ad lib.
Working with him and Jordan Whitelaw, the BSO broadcasts producer, was a
somewhat different experience for a young man, as I was then, but they were
both very professional.
For the broadcasts, he was in the announce booth near the radio booth.
Kevin Mostyn
my real e-mail address is my first name at my last name dot com.
*************************************************
Boston Globe
September 23, 1997
WILLIAM PIERCE AT 77; ANNOUNCER FOR BOSTON SYMPHONY AND WGBH
Tom Long, Globe Staff
William Pierce, the patrician voice of the Boston Symphony Orchestra for
more than three decades, died of complications of diabetes Sunday in South
Shore Hospital in Weymouth. He was 77.
Mr. Pierce's measured tone and precise diction were familiar to millions of
radio and TV listeners. He announced Boston Symphony concerts for 38 years
until his retirement in 1991, and was the voice of WGBH radio and TV from
1954 to 1984 In 1974, The New Yorker ran a now-famous cartoon that invoked
his celebrated courtesy and attention to detail. In the drawing, an affluent
couple is seated in front of the radio, and the caption says, "Now Arthur
Fiedler bows and motions to the soloist who bows and now he and Arthur
Fiedler bow to each other and again to the audience and now Arthur Fiedler
motions to the first violinist and all three are bowing to the audience and
each other and Arthur Fiedler asks the orchestra to stand and they and
Arthur Fiedler are bowing to the audience and now the audience stands and is
bowing to the orchestra and the audience is bowing to each other and the
members of the orchestra are bowing to each other and Arthur Fiedler and the
audience and everyone is bowing and I am bowing and all the boys up here in
the control room are bowing to each other and to the orchestra and to the
audience . . ."
Mr. Pierce was born in New Bedford. Radio was his third career. After
graduating from Bowdoin College, he taught at the Westminster School in
Connecticut for several years and worked in his family's trucking business
before auditioning for a job as a newscaster at a New Bedford radio station
on a whim. He got the job.
In the early 1950s, he decided it was "time to get another job, so I pulled
my convertible into Boston and went to the Pink Elephant Employment Agency
on Newbury Street," he said in a story published in the Globe on April 14,
1991. "A lady was sitting there with her poodles and she offered me a cup of
tea; after we had talked a while, she mentioned that she had just had a call
from WGBH, which was looking for an announcer. I was very lucky, but that's
been the story of my life."
The consummate gentleman, he said: "I have a theory about announcing --
you're invited into someone's home when they turn the dial, and you
shouldn't yell at them." He announced more than 3,000 Boston Symphony
broadcasts and arrived two hours early to prepare for each broadcast. He
said the most difficult task he was called upon to do was pronounce the name
of Soviet conductor Gennady Roszhdestvensky
He was a white-haired, ruddy-cheeked man who was proud of his Scottish
ancestry. He often wore a tam set at a rakish angle and sometimes wore a
kilt and plaid cape to work. He was a gourmet cook whose recipes appeared in
many publications, including Yankee magazine.
Mr. Pierce was a passionate collector of antiques for his home in Hingham,
taught broadcasting at Emerson College, and tutored dyslexic children, whose
affliction he shared.
He leaves two sisters, Hannah J. Leviston of Nashua, N.H., and Rachel Coburn
of Sandwich.
Funeral arrangements are private
*******************************************
"Richard Sauer" <chon...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:eaqdnfLx8M_zKg3Y...@comcast.com...
> The BSO's William Pierce passed on in 1997, but a google search doesn't
> reveal much about him. Is there anyone here who met him? During the
> Tanglewood broadcasts, where exactly was he?
>
> Rich
>
jrs...@aol.com
Kevin P. Mostyn wrote:
> I knew him. Worked with him for years. A gentleman of the old school and a
Thanks for the info! It all fits with the way he sounded on the air.
--Jeff
Dontait...@aol.com
On Dec 26, 4:02 pm, "Kevin P. Mostyn" <notmyrealaddr...@nowhere.com>
wrote:
> I knew him. Worked with him for years. A gentleman of the old school and a
> dear person. Completely without airs and a very hard worker. He always got
> to Symphony Hall before I did and worked very hard studying and rehearsing
> the script. He suffered from dyslexia and was terrified if he had to ad lib.
> Working with him and Jordan Whitelaw, the BSO broadcasts producer, was a
> somewhat different experience for a young man, as I was then, but they were
> both very professional.
>
> For the broadcasts, he was in the announce booth near the radio booth.
>
> Kevin Mostyn
[Globe obituary edited]
Many, many thanks, Kevin.
William Pierce was unique and a great announcer. I admired him from
the first time I heard him on WFMT in early 1961. Having done that kind
of live thing myself subsequently at WFMT I must say that only a "pro"
like William Pierce could make it sound as smooth as he did. One has to
have been in the same position to realize how good he was. His example
was always in my mind when I did live broadcasts.
Don Tait
Kevin P. Mostyn
broadcasts was Parker Wheatley. He sounded about what you would expect from
someone with such a name, although his roots were in Indiana.
http://www.wgbhalumni.org/reunion/wheatley.htm
Also see http://www.wgbhalumni.org/reunion/pierce.htm ; there is a picture
of the (mature) Bill Pierce.
When Wheatley did the broadcasts, there was a strict observance of silence.
When the piece ended, there were NO announcements until the very last clap
of applause from the audience had died away. This can be a source of great
frustration to a collector who is trying the validate the provenance of a
recording. Many airchecks of that period have no "outro" announcements, as
the recordist was unwilling to wait that long for the announcements. Bill
Pierece followed this announcing practice for a while, but eventually the
practice changed to a more common one, a "talkover" over faded applause.
As for intermission features, you remember correctly. It was a wonderful
thing; 20 minutes of broadcast audience "buzz." Curiously enough, the very
first broadcast, on October 6, 1951, did have an intermission feature, an
interview with with Aaron Copland .
Later on, there was pressure from the network stations that broadcast the
BSTT tapes; they wanted an intermission feature. Otherwise, they would have
to produce one themselves, and many of them did not have the staff to
produce one locally.
Here's another piece on Pierce.
--
Kevin Mostyn
---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------------
My real e-mail address is my first name at my last name dot com.
******************************************************
. . . AND NOW WILLIAM PIERCE IS BOWING OUT . . .
Boston Globe: April 14, 1991
For 38 years, the patrician voice of William Pierce has announced more
than 3,000 concerts by the Boston Symphony Orchestra to radio audiences
around the world.
This week's season-ending performance of Strauss' "Salome," with Hildegard
Behrens in the title role (see accompanying story), marks Pierce's last
broadcast. White-haired, ruddy-cheeked and hale at 71, Pierce says, in a
voice that sounds like the Boston Symphony, "I think it's time. I hope I did
a dignified, low-key job and kept my nose clean." He was famous for doing
just that. In 1974, The New Yorker ran a famous cartoon that invoked the
celebrated attention to detail and consummate courtesy of the Pierce manner.
In the drawing, an affluent couple is seated in front of the radio, and the
caption runs, "Now Arthur Fiedler bows and motions to the soloist who bows
and now he and Arthur Fielder bow to each other and again to the audience
and now Arthur Fiedler motions to the first violinist and all three are
bowing to the audience and ea ch other and Arthur Fiedler asks the orchestra
to stand and they and Arthur Fiedler are bowing to the audience and now the
audience stands and is bowing to the orchestra and the audience is bowing to
each other and the members of the orchestra are bowing to each other and
Arthur Fiedler and the audience and everyone is bowing and I am bowing and
all the boys up here in the control room are bowing to each other and to the
orchestra and to the audience. . ."
Radio was actually the third career for William Pierce, and he came to it by
accident. Born of New England stock -- his father's family came over on the
Mayflower and his mother's Scottish family settled on Prince Edward Island
in the 18th century -- Pierce went through Bowdoin College in Maine and
started out teaching English in a prep school. The pay was so low that his
father, who was in the trucking business, had to pay him an allowance. After
a year of that, both Pierce and his father had had enough, and Pierce went
into the trucking business himself.
One day in 1945, he was walking down the street in New Bedford and passed by
a radio station; on a whim he stopped in to audition. He had always had a
resonant voice; it had changed from soprano to bass in the course of one
note when he was singing a solo in church. ("I just stopped and turned
around and went back to my place in the choirloft," he recalls. "Nobody said
a word, not even the other boys. I was well trained as a chorister, and it
gave me the breath control I would need later.") Pierce got the job in New
Bedford, and began his career as a newscaster; later he worked at stations
in Worcester and Brockton, and moved from news to a job as a disc jockey.
"That was the thing in those days."
Various circumstances led Pierce to leave broadcasting in the 1950s, but the
decision didn't last long. "It was time to get another job, so I pulled my
convertible into Boston and went to the Pink Elephant Employment Agency on
Newbury Street. A lady was sitting there with her poodles and she offered me
a cup of tea; after we had talked awhile, she mentioned she had just had a
call from WGBH, which was looking for an announcer. I was very lucky -- but
that's been the story of my life."
Pierce made an audition tape for WGBH. "The manager called me in and played
the tape back to me and said, 'Would you hire this man?' I said 'No,' and
headed out the door, and then he called me back. From the beginning I did
editing and booth announcing, concerts at the conservatory and things like
that. Then in 1953 I substituted for a colleague at a Pops broadcast, and
then I took over the Friday-afternoon concerts, and then the rest of them.
In those days, one of the women purchased two subscriptions for Friday
afternoon; one seat for herself and another for her mink. I had no idea I
would ever announce for the Boston Symphony; I wasn't fully prepared for it,
and I'm still not."
Pierce regularly arrives at least two hours before each broadcast and
rehearses his script carefully; he is accurate but not pretentious about his
pronunciation of foreign languages, and says the hardest thing he ever had
to say was the name of the Soviet conductor Gennady Roszhdestvensky. For his
entire BSO career he has worked with the same engineer, Bill Busiek, and
Busiek will again be working across the glass wall at the Pierce's final
broadcast.
Although Pierce commands a reassuring and confidential voice, he remains a
private figure, and the few occasions on which he has appeared in public
have been agonizing to him. "No way am I prepared to give the Sermon on the
Mount. I did do 'The Night Before Christmas' a number of times with John
Williams and the Pops because I admire him so much, but every time I was
nervous and wondered what on earth I thought I was doing."
One of the sources of Pierce's nervousness is that he is dyslexic. "I was
born left-handed and they changed me around, and that may have had something
to do with it. You don't think about whether or not you are doing a good job
while you are doing it, but now that I'm through I will say that I am proud
that I made so few mistakes; for a dyslexic it wasn't easy. Everybody who is
dyslexic has a point where he gets confused, and now I don't have to worry
about that any more." For many years, Pierce regularly tutored dyslexic
children, and he says teaching is still in his blood: "It's like printer's
ink; you never get over it."
Naturally Pierce has a long list of favorite memories, and he jotted a
number of them down. "I got along with my first music director, Mr. Munch,
very well; he was a dear soul. Mr. Leinsdorf and I used to communicate, and
Mr. Steinberg terrified me. The other person who can get on and off the
stage faster than Seiji Ozawa was Doriot Anthony Dwyer, who retired as first
flute last season."
One occasion when Pierce had to vamp was when Rudolf Serkin's piano failed
to enter in the second movement of the Second Brahms Concerto. "The pedal
fell off, and Mr. Munch, shaking with laughter, turned to the audience and
said, 'The piano, it is broke.' That was a real fiesta. At the last concert
of every season Mr. Munch would always conduct Ravel's 'La Valse'; he could
swing with that, and the women would pelt him with violets. He would pick
them up and look in their eyes, and then give the violets to the
concertmaster, Richard Burgin, who was the Great Stone Face. If something
struck me as funny, I always told the radio audience. I remember the pianist
Clara Haskil, a cute little thing who showed up in her party bombazine dress
and kept reaching into the piano -- at the end she pulled out a pipe, which
the harpist Bernard Zighera had left in there. When Stravinsky died, William
Steinberg announced his death, and he had one of the most beautiful speaking
voices I ever heard. I always wondered how the orchestra knew when to start;
I suspect it was when the baton got to the third button on his vest. And
I'll never forget the time Michael Tilson Thomas was talking to the audience
and he got so esoteric that Harry Cabot, the chairman of the board, yelled
for him to shut up."
Pierce's memories reinforce his assertion that his warmest memories are not
so much of the music as of the peope who make the music. "I have met
wonderful people in this job. Only a few of them became close friends, but
all of them have been interesting."
Now Pierce plans to turn to some long-deferred work on his house in Hingham.
"I've lot a lot of things go, and now it's time to pay attention to them. I
don't plan to do a lot of traveling; I've seen Scotland. I have a French
bulldog named Pate, and she's a smart little cookie; my dog and I will find
lots of things to do."
******************************************************
"Richard Sauer" <chon...@comcast.net> wrote in message
news:FrKdnZGE1-7xNgzY...@comcast.com...
> Mr. Mostyn,
>
> Many thanks for posting the Globe's obituary for William Pierce.
> Something else I remember about BSO broadcasts- no intermission features.
> You just heard what people at the concert heard.... Those were the days.
>
> Rich
>
Dontait...@aol.com
On Dec 26, 5:57 pm, "Richard Sauer" <chong...@comcast.net> wrote:
> Great stuff! Mr. Mostyn, what is the longest applause ever given at a BSO
> concert?. I can remember William Pierce saying "Mr. Monteux has been called
> back for a 5th time..." or was it 6th?... Certainly the Tennstedt/BSO
> Tanglewood Mahler 1 from the 70's produced prolonged applause...I think
> Pierce enjoyed that as well..
I hope Kevin responds. He'll know much better than I, since I'm not a
Bostonian. However, I have a tape here (from WFMT) of Munch's last BSO
concert as Music Director. Or in any case it was his farewell in an
executive position because it was the final concert of the 1962
Tanglewood season, after which he left. The Beethoven 9th. A great
performance. After the end the applause and cheers went on and on and
on. I don't remember how many curtain calls Pierce announced. Then he
said that someone had brought out a laurel wreath for Munch made from
laurel collected that day in the woods around Tanglewood. The audience
erupted all over again and cheered and cheered. I was taping it on a
circa 64' tape and had to shift to 3-3/4 ips, then turn the reel over
and go on recording, to get it all. It must be seven or eight minutes.
Don Tait
Kevin P. Mostyn
I didn't respond previously, as I don't know the answer. I remember
distinctly the event described below by Don (and I also have a tape.) I also
remember one broadcast in which the applause went on for so long, that it
was faded out to end the broadcast, a *unique* event. Which concert it was,
I no longer remember. To research this thoroughly, I would have to spot
check each of my recordings of approximately 2,500 BSO broadcasts, a
daunting task.
The odds are that it was a Tanglewood broadcast. The Boston audience is
generally more reserved than the Tanglewood audience (New Yorkers, y'know,
as the elderly, haughty and very very rich lady BSO board member once told
me.)
--
Kevin Mostyn
------------------------------------------------------------
My real e-mail address is my first name at my last name dot com.
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