Virgil Thomson on Music and Culture

As a composer Virgil Thomson was a minor master, but his critical prose ranks with some of the best writing on music in English.

To pass from reading a contemporary essayist to one of the middle decades of the 20^th century is often to enter another world, one of succinct elegance and inborn culture. The Missouri-born Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) was a composer and a music critic, one of a select few persons who have successfully written both music and words about music. In his case, those words amounted to thousands during his fourteen years as chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune (1940 to 1954). As a composer Thomson was a minor master, but his critical prose ranks with some of the best writing on music in English. Its appeal is not limited to musical adepts; like many writers and journalists of his age, Thomson wrote with a breadth of cultural understanding that makes his pieces a joy to read for a wide audience. Thomson’s best essays have been collected in Virgil Thomson: A Reader and the Library of America’s Thomson: Music Chronicles. Some pieces are reviews of performances—time capsules of a particular time and place—and others are more extended essays about general musical matters. These collections provide a bottomless well of cultivated pleasure, insight, and wit from a writer who, in the words of another critic, offered “as profound a vision of American culture as anyone has yet achieved.” Indeed, what comes out of Thomson’s writings is the broad cultural significance of music and how it fits into civilized life as a whole.

Raised in Kansas City, Missouri, Thomson went to school at Harvard and, later, in Paris. This cosmopolitan background allowed him to build a bridge of sorts between European and American culture. Thomson believed strongly in the validity of American culture, and his references to American places and institutions show true affection and a conviction that they are on an equal footing with other places in the world. (Thomson writes of the beauties of “Pittsburgh in the springtime” with the same delight that another writer would ascribe to Paris.) He wrote about our major symphony orchestras as causes of national artistic pride and as entities each with its distinct style and character that expressed the ethos of the cities of Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Chicago, and so on. He also championed modern music at every opportunity, because he saw it as an expression of the times in which one is living. But far from indiscriminately embracing everything new, he intelligently discussed the merits of various modern composers and styles, with the modern placed in dialogue with the past.

An example of how Thomson achieved a universal breadth in his writing about music is a trio of essays treating the “Expressive Content,” “Intellectual Content,” and “Ethical Content” in music. In Thomson’s treatment, analyzing music is never simply a matter of dry technical processes, a game for academics; it is always involved with questions of meaning and expression, with no hint that such ideas are merely “subjective” overkill. The question of form versus content in music was one on which Thomson disagreed with his colleague, composer Aaron Copland, whose music appreciation manual What to Listen For in Music stressed the need for the listener to learn to discern the form of a piece of music. Thomson rarely if ever in his essays discusses the formal layout of a musical work, preferring to discuss its expressive or rhetorical content—i.e., what the music is trying to say, or as Thomson puts it, “What is it about?” Whereas conductor Arturo Toscanini insisted that one of Beethoven’s symphony movements was simply Allegro con brio and denied that it had any extramusical meaning, Thomson explicitly refers to Beethoven’s Fifth as a “symphonic editorial” and gives us the reasons why he hears it this way. (His discussion is not altogether complimentary, and this is another of Thomson’s strengths: He is not afraid to dissent from fixed opinions.)

Above all, you come away from Thomson’s essays with the conviction that music is something to be listened to, to be enjoyed, and not merely fodder for abstract intellectual discussions. The idea that music must above all sound was sometimes lost sight of in 20^th century composition, especially in the atonal school. Thomson, to his great credit, never lost sight of it. He in fact devotes a good deal of time to describing the sound of music, and with remarkable aptness:

“French works, as [Eugene Ormandy] plays them, come out less distorted than is usual here and with far more vibrancy or timbre than is common anywhere. The trumpet passages that start the march section in Debussy’s Fetes, for instance, were articulated last night so brightly, and yet so softly, that one might easily have taken them for an off-stage effect. I have never before heard trumpets to be played so quietly and still to sound like trumpets.”

Notable everywhere is the clarity of Thomson’s thought, the simplicity and precision of his language. Also, its plainness, wit, and common sense. Thomson’s plainspoken straightforwardness and commonsensical humor bring to mind his fellow Missourian Mark Twain. He was an enemy of pretention, but he also wrote against closeminded, hidebound attitudes—attitudes that, in musicians and music management, caused the repertoire to become stale and fossilized. We should, Thomson believed, treat art as a living and vital thing, not a superficial adornment.

Thomson preferred short, declarative sentences, which gave his writing force and directness. “[Thomas Beecham’s Haydn] has gusto and sentiment along with its grace. It breathes with ease and steps a real measure.” His writing leans on strong nouns, secondarily on verbs and adjectives, with the result of greater concreteness and less abstraction. He valued exactness in the use of adjectives, insisting that words like “wonderful,” “magnificent” and “sublime” be used according to their literal Latin sense so as to avoid vagueness and banality.

His writing also reveals what seems to me a key stylistic trait of his era—let us define it as the 1920s through the ‘60s—the combination of great elegance and culture with a casual tone (“sassy and classy” in Thomson’s words) that is just about unknown today. One might imagine writers of his era to be stuffier and more formal than today, but such was not the case. Thomson writes, on the art of conducting: “Orchestral conducting would seem to have attained to the prestige of a national sport…Lotsa pep! That’s what we want!” In another piece he refers to the self-proclaimed arbiters of correct aesthetics as “the taste-boys.”

By means of this strong, simple and witty prose style, Thomson accomplished one of the hardest—indeed, paradoxical—things in writing, to describe in words the sounds and sensations of music. Yet he also broadens his discussion, especially in the longer essays, to the humane significance of music and art in general. He is at his most lyrical in discussing the aura that surrounds art of the past:

“There is a prestige attached to any art work that has survived the death of its author that no work by a living hand can enjoy. This fact of survival is correctly called immortality, and that immortality surrounds the surviving work with a white light. In that radiance all becomes beautiful. Obscurities disappear, too; or at least they cease to bother. When I refer, as not infrequently I do, to live music and dead music, I mean that there is the same difference between the two that there is between live persons and dead ones. The spirit and influence of the dead are often far more powerful than those of the living. But they are not the same thing, because you can only argue about them, never with. The dead have glory and a magnificent weight, The living have nothing but life.”

He was capable of pointing a paradox, as when explaining the nature of tradition and change in music:

“Music, the most traditional of all the Western arts, is by that very fact the most frequently revolutionized, a constant violation of tradition being its most traditional requirement.”

I’m not sure I’m at one with Thomson on this point; musical history doesn’t seem to support the view that music is constantly undergoing revolutions, much less requires it. But that is the pleasure of Thomson’s writing. You don’t have to agree with everything he says to be entertained, enlightened, and provoked into a fresh perspective on music—a product in oversupply today yet one upon which we rarely reflect deeply. Thomson, for one, seemed to believe that the experience of music is one of the most remarkable we enjoy and something that should not be taken for granted:

“Never must one forget, never does one forget, hearing for the first time a work that has absorbed one from beginning to end and from which one has returned to ordinary life, as it were, shaken or beatified, as from a trip to the moon or to the Grecian Isles.”

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The featured image is a picture of Virgil Thomson taken by Carl Van Vechten. It is in the public domain, courtesy of Wikipedia Commons.