Introduction

Virgil Thomson was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1896 and died in New York City in 1989. His upbringing centered on the Baptist Church and its musical heritage. He was an organist and, after a period of army training, he entered Harvard in 1919. There he began a lifetime devotion to French music, accompanied the Harvard Glee Club, encountered the music of Erik Satie and the writings of Gertrude Stein—he said they changed his life— and began to compose. He spent a year in Paris studying with Nadia Boulanger; then, back at Harvard in 1923, he gave the American premiere of Satie's Socrate, which would influence Cage. In 1925 he returned to Paris, where he lived until 1940.

Thomson met Gertrude Stein in 1926 and immediately started setting her words to music. Their two operas, Four Saints in Three Acts and Mother of Us All, were pioneering examples of the nonnarrative musical theater developed later by Philip Glass and others. In view of the impact Stein had on Cage and some of his colleagues such as Earle Brown and the writer Jackson Mac Low, it is worth noting that Thomson said, “It was … the discipline of spontaneity, which I had come into contact with through reading Gertrude Stein, that made my music simple.” I took this parallel further, with the composer's approval: “Thomson comes closer than any other composer to reflecting the literary techniques of Stein in music by means of the same short-circuiting from poetry to music which she herself had experienced earlier from painting to writing.”

During his years in Paris, Thomson began writing documentary film scores, anticipating Copland in this medium, and he perfected his own type of musical portraits actually composed in front of the sitter. On returning to New York he became highly influential as chief music critic of the Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954, the period when he met and supported Cage. In an obituary tribute I wrote: “Virgil Thomson was a composer and writer of originality, courage and wit formed by a unique mixture of American and French influences… . He came from a generation of American composers which had to find its own way without benefit of university patronage. In that kind of free market he thrived and survived—and so will the best of his music.”