Virgil Thomson (November 25, 1896 – September 30, 1989) was an American composer and critic. He played a key role in creating the "American Sound" in classical music. He was known for working in different styles, including modernist, neoromantic, and neoclassicist approaches. His music often showed a balance between human feelings and calmness, with emotions kept under control. However, his late opera Lord Byron was different from his earlier works, as it included stronger emotional moments that reached "real passion."

Biography

Thomson was born in Kansas City, Missouri. As a child, he became friends with Alice Smith, the great-granddaughter of Joseph Smith, who started the Latter-day Saint movement. During his youth, he often played the organ at Grace Church, now called Grace and Holy Trinity Cathedral, because his piano teacher was the church's organist. After World War I, he went to Harvard University with help from a loan given by Dr. Fred M. Smith, president of the Reorganized Church of Jesus Christ of Latter Day Saints and father of Alice Smith. His trips to Europe with the Harvard Glee Club helped him want to return there.

At Harvard, Thomson studied the piano music of Erik Satie. He studied in Paris for a year with a fellowship and lived there from 1925 until 1940. While in Paris, he was influenced by several French composers who were part of "Les Six," including Darius Milhaud, Francis Poulenc, Arthur Honegger, Georges Auric, and Germaine Tailleferre. He later studied with Nadia Boulanger and became well-known in "Paris in the twenties."

In 1925, Thomson became close friends with painter Maurice Grosser, who became his life partner and frequent collaborator. Later, he and Grosser lived at the Hotel Chelsea, where he hosted a social gathering that attracted many important people in music, art, and theater, including Leonard Bernstein and Tennessee Williams. He also supported younger composers and writers like Theodor Adorno, Ned Rorem, Lou Harrison, John Cage, Frank O'Hara, and Paul Bowles. Grosser died in 1986, three years before Thomson.

Thomson's most important friend during this time was Gertrude Stein, who worked with him as a collaborator and mentor. After meeting Stein in Paris in 1926, Thomson asked her to write a libretto for an opera he wanted to create. Their work together led to the premiere of the groundbreaking opera Four Saints in Three Acts in 1934. At the time, the opera was noted for its style, musical content, and the use of an all-black cast to portray European saints. In 1947, Thomson and Stein worked together again on the opera The Mother of Us All, which tells the story of Susan B. Anthony, a social reformer. Thomson used music from Baptist hymns, Gregorian chants, and popular songs in both operas while using dissonance carefully.

Thomson's contributions to music were not only in opera. In 1936, he worked with film director Pare Lorentz and composed music for the documentary film The Plow That Broke the Plains for the United States government's Resettlement Administration (RA). Thomson used folk melodies and religious themes in the film score and later created an orchestral suite of the same name, which was recorded by Leopold Stokowski and the Hollywood Bowl Symphony Orchestra in 1946 for RCA Victor (#11-9522, 11-9523). In 1938, he also worked with Lorentz and operatic singer Thomas Hardie Chalmers on the documentary film The River for the United States government's Farm Security Administration. Thomson created an orchestral suite based on the film's score. A music journal called Notes later said, "Delightful as background music, the piece is an awful bore when you try to give it your full attention."

In 1948, Thomson worked with director Robert J. Flaherty on the docufiction film Louisiana Story, for which he received the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1949. At the time, this was the only Pulitzer Prize in music given for a composition written only for film. Thomson's orchestral suite based on the film's score was performed by Eugene Ormandy and the Philadelphia Orchestra in 1949 and received widespread praise.

After writing his book The State of Music, Thomson moved to New York City and became a rival of Aaron Copland. His criticisms of Copland led to accusations of antisemitism, but Copland remained on good terms with him, and Thomson admitted he envied Copland's greater success as a composer. Thomson also worked as a music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune from 1940 to 1954. A fellow critic, Robert Miles, said Thomson was "vindictive and of settling scores in print." In a 1997 article in American Music, Suzanne Robinson wrote that Thomson, motivated by "a mixture of spite, national pride, and professional jealousy," was "severe and spiteful" toward Benjamin Britten. Miles also said Thomson supported more performances of new music in New York, including his own.

Thomson believed music was "that which musicians do," and his views emphasized reducing the artistic qualities of music to market activity. He even claimed that the style of a piece was most clearly connected to its source of income.

In 1969, Thomson composed Metropolitan Museum Fanfare: Portrait of an American Artist to accompany the Museum's Centennial exhibition New York Painting and Sculpture: 1940–1970.

Thomson became a mentor and father figure to a new generation of American tonal composers, including Ned Rorem, Paul Bowles, and Leonard Bernstein. These composers shared similar musical styles and were also united by their shared homosexuality. Women composers were not part of this group, and one writer suggested that, as a critic, Thomson sometimes ignored their work or praised it less enthusiastically.

Thomson received Yale University's Sanford Medal. In 1949, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music for the film Louisiana Story. In 1977, he received the Edward MacDowell Medal from The MacDowell Colony for outstanding contributions to American culture. He was also honored with the Kennedy Center Honors in 1983 and the National Medal of Arts by President Ronald Reagan in 1988. He was a National Patron of Delta Omicron, an international music fraternity.

Thomson died on September 30, 1989, in his suite at the Hotel Chelsea in Manhattan, at the age of 92. He had lived at the Chelsea for nearly 50 years.

Works

Thomson's compositions include musical portraits of friends and people he met during his life, created from 1929 to 1985. These pieces were written during a single session while the person was present and are mostly for piano, usually less than 3 minutes long. Thomson arranged many of them and included some in larger musical works.