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First Published in 2002. Routledge is an imprint of Taylor & Francis, an informa company.
Virgil Thomson was a gifted composer and one of the nation’s foremost cultural critics. The best-selling autobiography Virgil Thomson (1966) is his gossipy telling of his own extraordinary progress from unteachable smart aleck to revered elder statesman. It recounts his artistically precocious Kansas City boyhood, demanding Harvard education, apprenticeship in Paris between the wars, and 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. Complete with 32 pages of photographs.
This essential reader includes Thomson's essays on making a living as a musician; his articles on classic composers; his relation to his contemporaries; his articles on newcomers in the music world, including John Cage and Pierre Boulez; his autobiographical writings and commentary on his own works.
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Virgil Thomson had already established himself as one of the nation's leading composers when he published The State of Music (1939), the book that made his 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 in a hide-bound world where performance and broadcast outlets are controlled by institutions shocked by the new and suspicious of 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.”
Gertrude Stein & Virgil Thomson are known as much for their formidable egos as for their contributions to 20th century arts. This collection of roughly 400 letters from between 1926-1946 reveals the spark that existed between the two American masters over the course of their sometimes rocky & always fascinating friendship.
A cultural history of a famous collaboration, Virgil Thomson's and Gertrude Stein's making of the modernist opera, Four Saints in Three Acts. Watson explores the transatlantic, commercial, racial, gay, and artistic aspects of this story (NewYork/Paris, with Kansas City thrown in for fun; Thomson's score echoes the very American rhythms of his youth). Juicy, smart, and sophisticated writing and analysis.
Written with exclusive access to Virgil Thomson's papers, this first full-scale account of Thomson's experiences as a composer, influential critic, and gay man chronicles his relationships with Gertrude Stein, Aaron Copeland, and others in 1920's Paris. Photos.
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