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The State of Music & Other Writings

door Virgil Thomson, Tim Page (Redacteur)

LedenBesprekingenPopulariteitGemiddelde beoordelingAanhalingen
522491,063 (3.33)2
"In this second volume in the Library of America's definitive Virgil Thomson edition, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page collects for the first time the great composer's four witty, incisive, and compulsively readable full-length works. Written with authority and élan, these classic books offer an engrossing tour of the tumultuous twentieth-century musical scene and Thomson's extraordinary career as one of the nation's foremost cultural critics. The volume opens with The state of music (1939), the book that made Thomson's name as a writer and won him a fourteen-year stint as chief music reviewer at the New York Herald Tribune. This feisty, often hilarious polemic, presented here in the extensively revised edition of 1962, surveys the challenges confronting the American composer attacks 'the philanthropic persons in control of our institutions' who were suspicious of new works by homegrown talent. For Aaron Copland, The state of music was not just 'the most original book on music that America has produced,' but 'the wittiest, the most provocative, the best written.' The best-selling autobiography Virgil Thomson (1966) is a gossipy tale of one musician's progress from unteachable smart aleck to revered elder statesman. It tells of an artistically precocious Kansas City boyhood, a demanding Harvard education, an apprenticeship in Paris between the wars, and a hard-won musical and literary maturity in New York. As narrator and protagonist, Thomson fascinates not only with his own story but also with those of his associates, collaborators, friends, and rivals, among them Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Nadia Boulanger, George Antheil, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, Pare Lorentz, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. Virgil Thomson is an authentic work of Americana and a first-rate, first-person history of the rise of modernism. American Music Since 1910 (1971) is a pocket guide to the music of Thomson's lifetime as told through brilliant biographical essays on its most accomplished makers, chief among them Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Aaron Copland, Edgar Varèse, and John Cage. Thomson's final book, Music with Words (1989), is one that he was born to write: a handbook for composers on the fine art of musical prosody, the setting of texts to music. Rounding out the volume are thirty-two essays, speeches, and reviews--most of them previously uncollected--on subjects including Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, The New Grove Dictionary, and the jazz scene of the 1970s"--From publisher's web site (www.loa.org).… (meer)
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LOA published Virgil Thomson's works which includes The State of Music, American Music Since 1910, Music with Words. In this volume, includes Thomson's autobiography. Thomson, a noted early 20th century music critic whose writings proved quite witty & provocative throughout his long career. His 32 essays, speeches, & reviews covered numerous musical artists & music forms left deep impressions for the readers. ( )
  walterhistory | Dec 22, 2023 |
I came to Virgil Thomson through LOA's collected works series, and so: as critic rather than composer. LOA's description put me in mind of Mencken's place in journalism, appealing enough to acquire without knowing Thomson's music nor his reputation as composer. Contra Eliot's admonition that the critical function's chief use is to improve the critic's own creative work, I suspect I will find Thomson's music primarily instructive as an insight into his commentary on music generally. Still, it's promising that Thomson allegedly influenced the "American sound" in the classical tradition, as well as that his opera paired him with Gertrude Stein and African American musical tradition, not to mention his role in film soundtracks.

A brief review of his biography also suggests a strong personal vein to his comments and criticism, some of which he owned up to (jealousy of Copland's greater accolades as a composer, for instance). Liner notes to my CD of Gershwin's Blue Monday suggest he was conservative in his appreciation of Gershwin's (and perhaps: other "non-traditional" purveyors) take on classical forms. This actually seems the opposite of what other sources say about Thomson's legacy generally, suggesting he rubbed people the wrong way and had statements taken out of context -- and/or perhaps, that Thomson's baser motivations could colour his criticism at times.

THE STATE OF MUSIC | read 2021-01

The reception (by contemporaries as well as today) seems to paint TSOM as extreme in its "economic" critique of music. I suspect this is overblown for various reasons. Clearly anything "socialist" or "communist" at the time was highly partisan in American culture, and can be expected to distort its reception or understanding. Perceptions are hardly less dogmatic today. Also, my reading suggests the argument is both unorthodox and subtle, and I suspect Thomson's reduction to "his views on music are radical in their insistence on reducing the rarefied aesthetics of music to market activity" (Wikipedia 2021-05-16) is simply laziness if not itself essentially dogmatic.

Thomson postulates in the revised edition's Preface that art (which I take to mean, "art in Western societies as publicly acknowledged") had not changed much between 1939 (TSOM originally written) and 1962 (revised), but what had changed were social and economic structures. In the first chapter, he explains the approach taken here will be to show how things appear to a musician when composing and performing music, with some insight into what is emphasized in music by music consumers, as well as by the "non-musical". Clearly this is a narrow if fruitful perspective, and at no point in the text does Thomson claim it is the only or even the principal means for understanding music. And then, before addressing music specifically, he discusses first painting & poetry via a "psychological profile" of the ideal type for painters, or poets. Many readers appear to have missed that. In taking up a farcical framework in the opening chapters, then, Thomson already sets himself up for misunderstanding and distortion by anyone unwilling to accept his project for what it is. Thomson is looking for insights into music from examining its form rather than its content, and does so deliberately, but it is quite clear he is not only capable of understanding, but also takes seriously the content of compositions. If nothing else, his own compositions are evidence of this.

Thomson notes also (Chapter 7) that "style" has at least 4 different meanings when applied to music, and he limits himself here to just one: a technical or syntactical usage, the "methods of achieving coherence" in a composition. A composer's chief source of income does influence the style employed, and Thomson is interested in this influence. Questions of "subject matter" of the piece are separate, though also influenced by economic factors, which again the typical reader of TSOM appears to have missed. Thomson's closing comments are notable: he states that music as a liberal art should be led not by its makers (the musicians employed to perform it) nor its distributors (publishers or recording companies), rather by its designers: the composers or writers of music, the creative personalities behind it.

There is a strong element of the gadfly about TSOM, I presume in many respects Thomson was pleased with the ruckus it raised. TSOM was his first published book, leading to the offer to be the Herald Tribune's chief music critic. Curious to see whether late-period books written after this gig are equally provocative; it seems clear the articles themselves (collected in his middle-period books) lived up to the reputation established in TSOM. ( )
1 stem elenchus | May 16, 2021 |
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Thomson — the only composer to win a Pulitzer for a film score, 1948's Louisiana Story — was equally gifted in writing about music as composing it. From 1940 to 1954 he was at the New York Herald Tribune.

Thomson had his shortcomings, too. Page points them out in the conversation below, which opened up broadly to include the state of classical music criticism in America.
toegevoegd door elenchus | bewerkNPR.org, Tom Huizenga (Sep 15, 2016)
 

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AuteursnaamRolType auteurWerk?Status
Virgil Thomsonprimaire auteuralle editiesberekend
Page, TimRedacteurprimaire auteuralle editiesbevestigd

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"In this second volume in the Library of America's definitive Virgil Thomson edition, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page collects for the first time the great composer's four witty, incisive, and compulsively readable full-length works. Written with authority and élan, these classic books offer an engrossing tour of the tumultuous twentieth-century musical scene and Thomson's extraordinary career as one of the nation's foremost cultural critics. The volume opens with The state of music (1939), the book that made Thomson's name as a writer and won him a fourteen-year stint as chief music reviewer at the New York Herald Tribune. This feisty, often hilarious polemic, presented here in the extensively revised edition of 1962, surveys the challenges confronting the American composer attacks 'the philanthropic persons in control of our institutions' who were suspicious of new works by homegrown talent. For Aaron Copland, The state of music was not just 'the most original book on music that America has produced,' but 'the wittiest, the most provocative, the best written.' The best-selling autobiography Virgil Thomson (1966) is a gossipy tale of one musician's progress from unteachable smart aleck to revered elder statesman. It tells of an artistically precocious Kansas City boyhood, a demanding Harvard education, an apprenticeship in Paris between the wars, and a hard-won musical and literary maturity in New York. As narrator and protagonist, Thomson fascinates not only with his own story but also with those of his associates, collaborators, friends, and rivals, among them Gertrude Stein, Alice B. Toklas, Ezra Pound, James Joyce, Nadia Boulanger, George Antheil, Pablo Picasso, Jean Cocteau, Max Jacob, Pare Lorentz, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. Virgil Thomson is an authentic work of Americana and a first-rate, first-person history of the rise of modernism. American Music Since 1910 (1971) is a pocket guide to the music of Thomson's lifetime as told through brilliant biographical essays on its most accomplished makers, chief among them Charles Ives, Carl Ruggles, Aaron Copland, Edgar Varèse, and John Cage. Thomson's final book, Music with Words (1989), is one that he was born to write: a handbook for composers on the fine art of musical prosody, the setting of texts to music. Rounding out the volume are thirty-two essays, speeches, and reviews--most of them previously uncollected--on subjects including Leonard Bernstein, Paul Bowles, The New Grove Dictionary, and the jazz scene of the 1970s"--From publisher's web site (www.loa.org).

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