10 - Virgil Thomson: Interview with Peter Dickinson, Chelsea Hotel, New York City, May 12, 1981

Summary

Virgil Thomson (1896–1989) was born in Kansas City, Missouri, and died in New York City. His upbringing was centered on the Baptist Church and its musical heritage. He was an organist and, after army training, entered Harvard in 1919. There he began a lifetime's devotion to French music, accompanied the Harvard Glee Club, encountered the music of Erik Satie and the writings of Gertrude Stein—he said they changed his life—and began to compose. He spent a year in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger; then, back at Harvard in 1923, he gave the American premiere of Satie's Socrate. In 1925 he returned to Paris, where he lived until 1940. He met Gertrude Stein in 1926 and immediately started setting her words to music. Their two operas, Four Saints in Three Acts and Mother of Us All, were pioneering examples of the non-narrative musical theater developed later by Philip Glass and others. Thomson said, “[I]t was by the discipline of spontaneity, which I had come into contact with through reading Gertrude Stein, that made my music simple.” I took this parallel further, with the composer's approval: “Thomson comes closer than any other composer to reflecting the literary techniques of Stein in music by means of the same short-circuiting from poetry to music which she herself had experienced earlier from painting to writing.”

During his years in Paris, Thomson began writing documentary film scores, anticipating Copland in this medium, and perfected his own type of musical portraits composed in front of the sitter. On returning to New York he became highly influential as chief music critic of The Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954. In an obituary tribute I wrote: “Virgil Thomson was a composer and writer of originality, courage and wit formed by a unique mixture of American and French influences… . He came from a generation of American composers which had to find its own way without benefit of university patronage. In that kind of free market he thrived and survived—and so will the best of his music.”