Revisit the Golden Age of classical music in America through the witty and adventurous reviews of our greatest critic-composer: For fourteen memorable years Virgil Thomson surveyed the worlds of opera and classical music as the chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. An accomplished composer who knew music from the inside, Thomson communicated its pleasures and complexities to a wide readership in a hugely entertaining, authoritative style, and his daily reviews and Sunday articles set a high-water mark in American cultural journalism. Thomson collected his newspaper columns in four volumes: The Musical Scene, The Art of Judging Music, Music Right and Left, and Music Reviewed. All are gathered here, together with a generous selection of Thomson’s uncollected writings. The result is a singular chronicle of a magical time when an unrivaled roster of great conductors (Koussevitzky, Toscanini, Beecham, Stokowski) and legendary performers (Horowitz, Rubinstein, Heifetz, Stern) presented new masters (Copland, Stravinsky, Britten, Bernstein) and re-introduced the classics to a rapt American audience. LIBRARY OF AMERICA is an independent nonprofit cultural organization founded in 1979 to preserve our nation’s literary heritage by publishing, and keeping permanently in print, America’s best and most significant writing. The Library of America series includes more than 300 volumes to date, authoritative editions that average 1,000 pages in length, feature cloth covers, sewn bindings, and ribbon markers, and are printed on premium acid-free paper that will last for centuries.
The first definitive biography of the acclaimed American composer and music critic describes Thomson's youth in turn-of-the-century Kansas City, his long struggle to accept his homosexuality, his musical studies, his rivalry with colleagues ...
Virgil Thomson: His Life and Music
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 ...
Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson
This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomson’s name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the New York Herald Tribune.
Spanning two decades, from 1968 to 1989, these letters, written as jeux d'esprit and presented in the same spirit, touch upon Gertrude Stein and Marcel Duch& music criticism; travel, food, and wine; Thomson's life, compositions, and ...
A Virgil Thomson Reader
This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomson's name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the New York Herald.
Virgil Thomson
Virgil Thomson, a Bio-bibliography