Virgil Thomson: The State of Music & Other Writings (LOA #277)

Virgil Thomson: The State of Music & Other Writings (LOA #277) (Library of America Virgil Thomson Edition)

An unprecedented collection of polemical and autobiographical writings by Americaâ€™s greatest composer-critic.Â Following on the critically acclaimed 2014 edition of Virgil Thomson's collected newspaper music criticism, The Library of America andÂ Pulitzer Prizeâ€“winning music critic Tim Page now present Thomsonâ€™s other literary and critical works, a body of writing that constitutes Americaâ€™s musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomsonâ€™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 Thomsonâ€™s time, are dominated by tin-eared, non-musical patrons of the arts who are shocked by the new and suspicious of native talent. Thomsonâ€™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 Iâ€“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, VarÃ¨se, Copland, Cage, and others who helped define a national musical idiom. Music with Words (1989), Thomsonâ€™s final book, is a distillation of a subject he knew better than perhaps any other American composer: how to set Englishâ€”especially American Englishâ€”to music,Â in opera and art song. The volume is rounded out by a judicious selection of Thomsonâ€™s magazine journalism from 1957 to 1984â€”thirty-seven pieces, most of them previously uncollected, including many long-form review-essays written for The New York Review of Books.
Country USA
Brand Library of America
Manufacturer Library of America
Binding Hardcover
Color Black
ReleaseDate 2016-08-30
UnitCount 1
EANs 9781598534672

Country	USA
Brand	Library of America
Manufacturer	Library of America
Binding	Hardcover
Color	Black
ReleaseDate	2016-08-30
UnitCount	1
EANs	9781598534672

Virgil Thomson: The State of Music & Other Writings (LOA #277) (Library of America Virgil Thomson Edition)

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