Death of Mr. Paul Creston, Composer

Died, this day, at his home in Poway, California, Mr. Paul Creston, composer, aged eight and seventy years, of a cancer with which he had contended since the year past.

Mr. Creston, born Giuseppe Guttoveggio to Sicilian immigrant parents in New York City, was obliged by family circumstance to quit his schooling after but two years, his father a house-painter of modest means. Yet he taught himself the art of music upon a piano purchased for the sum of ten dollars, studying by his own lamp the scores of Bach, Beethoven, and Brahms, and for three and thirty years held the organist's post at St. Malachy's Church in New York, from 1934 to 1967.

He rose in time to be reckoned the most performed of American composers in the decade of the 1940s, the author of six symphonies and numerous concertante works, and was twice honored with the Guggenheim Fellowship, besides the Music Critics' Circle Award and the Award of the American Academy of Arts and Letters, both in the year 1943.

He is remembered by those who knew his work as a leading voice of the Neo-Romantic school in American music of his generation.