On today's date in 1959, the Detroit Symphony under the eminent French conductor Paul Paray gave the first performance of some music by the eminent American composer Walter Piston.

Piston had studied in Paris with the famous French composition teacher Nadia Boulanger and the great French composer Paul Dukas, so perhaps this was a very astute and stylish paring of composer and conductor.

In any case, to help celebrate the 100th Worcester Festival, Paray and the Detroit orchestra were on hand in Massachusetts for the premiere of Piston's "Three New England Sketches," an orchestral suite whose movements were entitled: "Seaside," "Summer Evening," and "Mountains."

Piston didn't intend for listeners to take these titles too literally: "The programmatic titles serve in a broad sense to tell the source of the inspirations, reminiscences, even dreams that pervaded the otherwise musical thoughts of one New England composer," he noted.

Piston was born in Rockland, Maine, in 1894, taught for many years at Harvard, had a summer vacation home in Vermont, and died in Belmont, Massachusetts in 1976, so he certainly qualified as a bone-fide "New England" composer.

"Is the Dust Bowl more American than, say, a corner in the Boston Athenaeum?" he once asked, arguing: "Would not a Vermont village furnish as American a background for a composition as the Great Plains?"

Even so, the most striking hallmark of Piston's music remains its quite cosmopolitan style and neo-classical form—the lasting influence, perhaps, of his two famous French teachers.