Book contents
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Music Examples
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- I Introduction
- II Some Autobiography
- III An American Apprenticeship
- IV Writings About Music
- V Literary Connections
- VI Peter Dickinson on his own Music
- VII Interviews and a Memoir
- VIII Travels
- Appendix 1 Peter Dickinson: Chronological List of Works
- Appendix 2 Peter and Meriel Dickinson: Discography
- Index
1 - Satie – Stein – Cummings – Thomson – Berners – Cage
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 June 2021
- Frontmatter
- Contents
- List of Illustrations and Music Examples
- Preface and Acknowledgements
- I Introduction
- II Some Autobiography
- III An American Apprenticeship
- IV Writings About Music
- V Literary Connections
- VI Peter Dickinson on his own Music
- VII Interviews and a Memoir
- VIII Travels
- Appendix 1 Peter Dickinson: Chronological List of Works
- Appendix 2 Peter and Meriel Dickinson: Discography
- Index
Summary
▪ Toward a Context for the Music of Virgil Thomson
The original version of this article was an illustrated talk given in the presence of Virgil Thomson at the opening session of the 1982 Special Joint Meeting of the Sonneck Society [now Society for American Music], the Midcontinent American Studies Association, the Midwest Chapter of the American Musicological Society and History SRIG-Music Educators National Conference at Lawrence, Kansas, on 1 April 1982, and at the Institute of Studies in American Music (now the Hitchcock Institute for American Studies), Brooklyn College, New York on 5 April 1982. I should like to thank the composer for his generous help with my queries and also Richard Jackson, then at the New York Public Library who, in his dissertation and New Grove articles, made a major contribution to Thomson studies. So did Anthony Tomasini, Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (New York, 1997): my review of this book follows as the second part of this chapter.
Stein herself, considering the painter Cézanne her chief master, believed that under his silent tutelage a major message had jumped like an electric arc from painting to poetry. And she also suspected that its high tension was in process of short-circuiting again, from her through me, this time to music.
Virgil Thomson, ‘A Portrait of Gertrude Stein’,New York Review of Books, 7 July 1966A slender but important thread in twentieth-century music can be traced through a network of mostly French and American names in literature as well as in music extending from Harvard to Paris and back. These names form a kind of ‘charmed circle’, to borrow the title of James Mellow's book on Stein, expanding significantly into later generations. Erik Satie and Gertrude Stein both lived in Paris; E. E. Cummings was influenced by Stein and admired Satie; Virgil Thomson followed Cummings at Harvard, lived in Paris, and was fundamentally affected by Stein and Satie. All of them wrote for the magazine Vanity Fair, a forum for fashion and the avant-garde, and their interests were in multimedia. Stein was deeply involved with painting, wrote a book on Picasso, and Tender Buttons coincided with abstraction in art. Satie was a writer in the tradition of Alphonse Allais and made sharply incisive pen and ink cartoons. Cummings was a painter, apart from his musical interests.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Peter Dickinson: Words and Music , pp. 48 - 63Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2016