Everything about Virgil Thomson totally explained
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For the American author with a similar name, see Virgil Thompson (author)
Virgil Thomson (
November 25,
1896 -
September 30,
1989) was an American
composer and
critic from
Kansas City, Missouri. He was instrumental in the development of the "American Sound" in classical music.
Biography
Thomson displayed an extraordinary intelligence at an early age. As a child, he befriended Alice Smith, granddaughter of
Joseph Smith, founder of the Mormon faith. He attended
Harvard University, and his tours of Europe with the Harvard Glee Club helped nurture his desire to return there. Upon his move there, he eventually studied with
Nadia Boulanger and became a fixture of "Paris in the twenties." His most important friend from this period was
Gertrude Stein, who was an artistic collaborator and mentor to him. Following the publication of his book
The State of Music he established himself in
New York City, as a peer of
Aaron Copland and was also a music critic for the
New York Herald-Tribune from 1940 through 1954. His writings on music, and his reviews of performances in particular, are noted for their wit and their independent judgments. His definition of music was famously "that which musicians do," and his views on music are radical in their insistence on reducing the rarefied aesthetics of music to market activity. He even went so far as to claim that the style a piece was written in could be most effectively understood as a consequence of its income source.
In the 1930s, he worked as a theater and film composer. His most famous works for theater are two operas with libretti by
Gertrude Stein,
Four Saints in Three Acts, especially famous for its use of an all-black cast, and
The Mother of Us All, as well as incidental music for
Orson Welles' depression-era production of
Macbeth set in the Caribbean. He collaborated closely with
"Chick" Austin of Hartford's
Wadsworth Atheneum in these early productions. His first film commission was
The Plow That Broke the Plains, sponsored by the United States Resettlement Administration, which also sponsored the film
The River with music also by Thomson. He won the
Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1949 with his film score for
Louisiana Story. Additionally, Thomson was famous for his revival of the rare technique of composing "musical portraits" of living subjects, often spending hours in a room with them before rushing off to finish the piece on his own. Many subjects report feeling that the pieces did capture something unique about their identities in spite of the fact that nearly all of the portraits were absent any clearly representational content.
Later in life, Thomson became a sort of mentor and father figure to a new generation of American tonal composers such as
Ned Rorem,
Paul Bowles and
Leonard Bernstein, a circle united as much by their shared homosexuality as by their similar compositional sensibilities.
Thomson's score for
The River was used in the 1983 ABC made-for-television movie
The Day After.
Further Information
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