Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) was an American composer and critic from Kansas City. He studied with Nadia Boulanger and lived in Paris from 1925. His opera Four Saints in Three Acts, to a libretto by Gertrude Stein, premiered in 1934. He was music critic of the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954 and won a Pulitzer Prize for his score to the film Louisiana Story. He also wrote many short musical portraits of friends.
At The Tomb Of Charles Ives / Divertimento / Party Pieces / Academic Graffiti (LP)
Cage's mid-1940's "exquisite corpses" pieces in collaboration with Cowell, Harrison and Thompson, plus Ussachevsky's 1981 electronic valve instrument composition and two 1960's compositions by Harrison and Smit, performed by The Brooklyn Philharmonic Symphony Orchestra conducted by Lukas Foss abd released by Gramavision in 1983.
Portraits and other Works
Virgil Thomson's piano music can best be described as pure direct American plainsong. Hymn tunes get transposed, rhythms overturn or collide, often with comic results; cowboy songs turn into fugues. Thomson made use of all materials, from Sunday School ditties he learned as a child in Kansas City, to the tangos he heard in Paris in the Twenties, to the counterpoint of his formal musical education. Thomson's portraits often have the feeling of line drawings by a visual artist. This is because he …
William Sharp, Steven Blier, Virgil Thomson, Paul Bowles, Lee Hoiby, Richard Hundley, John Musto, Eric Klein
Works by Thomson, Bowles, Hoiby, Hundley, Musto and KleinAmerican art song has traveled a long way from the parlors of 19th-century America. The turn of this century brought its adolescent rebellion in the iconoclastic hands of Charles Ives, followed by an impressive, if somewhat retrospective, era heralded by such composers as Bacon, Chanler, Nordoff, and early Thomson. But by mid-century, what should have been a time of full adulthood was instead a curiously fallow period (which Philip L. Miller attributes to composers abandoning melody and Ned Rore…