This is a demanding piano solo piece written in a highly chromatic idiom, rarely if at all possessing a sense of tonal center. It takes some close attention by the listener, but its concentration and strength repay such an effort.

This is a work that finds inspiration in the journals of Cesare Pavese. Biscardi, who took his undergraduate degree from the University of Wisconsin in Italian literature, gives the meaning of the title: "craft, business, occupation; whatever is necessary to one's profession or art." The particular use of the word is found in the title of Pavese's collected journals, Il Mestiere Di Vivere, (The Business of Living).

The five-and-a-half-minute work contrasts two sonic qualities of the piano, those inherent, in fact, in the instrument's full formal name, the pianoforte (which means "soft-loud"): The hard-edged, cutting and percussive attack and the soft, tempered, lyrical style of playing. Accordingly, the work is a kind of toccata: In this case not the usual implication of the word to suggest a fast-moving digitally dexterous piece, but going back, again, to an original Italian meaning of the word, which literally is a "touch piece"—the composition systematically explores these two contrasts in touch.

Biscardi wrote it on commission from Tulane University for the 1979 Festival of Piano Music, where it received its premiere by Robert Weirich, who also played its first recording (CRI Records, 1981).

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