Virgil Thomson: The State of Music & Other Writings (LOA #277) (Library of America Virgil Thomson Edition)

About this book

A Pulitzer Prizewinning music critic presents an unprecedented collection of the writings of the great composer-critic and father of American classical music Virgil Thomson Following on the critically acclaimed edition of Virgil Thomsons collected newspaper music criticism The Library of America and Pulitzer Prizewinning music critic Tim Page now present Thomsons other literary and critical works a body of writing that constitutes Americas musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939) the book that made Thomsons name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the New York Herald Tribune. This no-holds-barred polemichere presented in its revised edition of 1962discusses the commissions jobs and other opportunities available to the American composer a worker in a world of performance and broadcast institutions that today as much as in Thomsons time are dominated by tin-eared non-musical patrons of the arts who are shocked by the new and suspicious of native talent. Thomsons autobiography Virgil Thomson (1966) is more than just the story of the struggle of one such American composer it is an intellectual aesthetic and personal chronicle of the twentieth century from World War Iera Kansas City to Harvard in the age of straw boaters from Paris in the Twenties and Thirties to Manhattan in the Forties and after. A classic American memoir it is marked by a buoyant wit a true gift for verbal portrait-making and a cast of characters including Aaron Copland Gertrude Stein James Joyce Paul Bowles John Houseman and Orson Welles. American Music Since 1910 (1971) is a series of incisive essays on the lives and works of Ives Ruggles Varse Copland Cage and others who helped define a national musical idiom. Music with Words (1989) Thomsons final book is a distillation of a subject he knew better than perhaps any other American composer: how to set Englishespecially American Englishto music in opera and art song. The volume is rounded out by a judicious selection of Thomsons magazine journalism from 1957 to 1984thirty-seven pieces most of them previously uncollected including many long-form review-essays written for The New York Review of Books. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nations literary heritage by publishing and keeping permanently in print Americas best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date authoritative editions that average 1 000 pages in length feature cloth covers sewn bindings and ribbon markers and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.