An unprecedented collection of polemical and autobiographical writings by Americarsquo;s greatest composer-critic. Following on the critically acclaimed 2014 edition of Virgil Thomsons collected newspaper music criticism; The Library of America and Pulitzer Prizendash;winning music critic Tim Page now present Thomsonrsquo;s other literary and critical works; a body of writing that constitutes Americarsquo;s musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939); the book that made Thomsonrsquo;s name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the New York Herald Tribune. This no-holds-barred polemic; here presented in its revised edition of 1962; discusses 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 Thomsonrsquo;s time; are dominated by tin-eared; non-musical patrons of the arts who are shocked by the new and suspicious of native talent. Thomsonrsquo;s 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 Indash;era 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; Varegrave;se; Copland; Cage; and others who helped define a national musical idiom. Music with Words (1989); Thomsonrsquo;s final book; is a distillation of a subject he knew better than perhaps any other American composer: how to set Englishmdash;especially American Englishmdash;to music; in opera and art song. The volume is rounded out by a judicious selection of Thomsonrsquo;s magazine journalism from 1957 to 1984mdash;thirty-seven pieces; most of them previously uncollected; including many long-form review-essays written for The New York Review of Books.From the Hardcover edition.
#328897 in eBooks 2015-07-06 2015-06-25File Name: B010RFF06Q
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