History

By the time Piston finished his First Symphony he was 43 years old. It was premiered on April 8, 1938 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra

Boston Symphony Orchestra

The Boston Symphony Orchestra is an orchestra based in Boston, Massachusetts. It is one of the five American orchestras commonly referred to as the "Big Five". Founded in 1881, the BSO plays most of its concerts at Boston's Symphony Hall and in the summer performs at the Tanglewood Music Center...

 conducted by the composer (Anon. 1979; Carter 1946, 374).

The work, like most of Piston's symphonies, is in three movements

Movement (music)

A movement is a self-contained part of a musical composition or musical form. While individual or selected movements from a composition are sometimes performed separately, a performance of the complete work requires all the movements to be performed in succession...

:

• Andantino quasi adagio—allegro (4/4)
• Adagio (6/8)
• Allegro con fuoco (2/2)

As with the much later Symphony No. 8

Symphony No. 8 (Piston)

-History:The Boston Symphony Orchestra commissioned the Eighth Symphony and gave its first performance on March 5, 1965, conducted by Erich Leinsdorf, to whom the score is dedicated . Initially, Piston had preferred to write a flute concerto for the Boston Symphony's principal flautist, Doriot...

, twelve-tone technique is incorporated into a broader palette of compositional elements. The first movement begins with a rare example, for Piston, of an ostinato

Ostinato

In music, an ostinato is a motif or phrase, which is persistently repeated in the same musical voice. An ostinato is always a succession of equal sounds, wherein each note always has the same weight or stress. The repeating idea may be a rhythmic pattern, part of a tune, or a complete melody in...

, presented in the pizzicato basses. This ostinato consists of nine of the twelve chromatic notes, and the remaining three are found in the theme played above it. The mood is somber and poignant. Despite the chromatic saturation, this movement (as well as the finale) is in the tonality of C. This slow introduction is followed by a vigorous sonata-allegro movement with a main theme based on the ostinato figure. The ostinato also returns at the end of the movement, and its chromatic nature helps make a transition to the tritone

Tritone

In classical music from Western culture, the tritone |tone]]) is traditionally defined as a musical interval composed of three whole tones. In a chromatic scale, each whole tone can be further divided into two semitones...

-related key of F-sharp for the second movement, whose thematic material is also derived from the ostinato. The finale is in rondo form, with the main theme once again taken from the beginning of that ostinato, only in inversion (Carter 1946, 364–65).