When it falls to America’s great composers to wrest the Tesseract from Thanos, these are the guys Nick Fury assembles. Then Bernstein conducts “West Side Story,” and it is the orchestra that snaps.

Back-to-front, we have Aaron Copland, William Schuman, Walter Piston, Leonard Bernstein, and Virgil Thomson – all of them, with the exception of Lenny, recipients of the Pulitzer Prize for Music. Piston was honored twice.

At the fore, Thomson defies us to take our best shot. His superpower is that he was not only a respected composer, but also a feared critic at the New York Herald-Tribune. This is a man even Thanos would think twice about crossing.

He is especially powerful on this date every seven years or so, during the alignment of his birthday with Thanksgiving.

I understand there are some who remain resistant to his charms. His brand of “faux-naïf” Americana is perhaps not for everyone.

His “Symphony on a Hymn Tune” was composed during his Paris years. Thomson, like Copland and so many others, studied there with Nadia Boulanger. The symphony was inspired by the composer’s memories of his Kansas City boyhood. The “Sunday best” of the church hymns occasionally gets tangled up in a few modernistic burrs – the exchanges between the violin, cello, trombone, and piccolo at the end of the first movement, for instance – but in 1928, it was a landmark in terms of helping to establish a distinctly American idiom. To me, it is perfect Thanksgiving music.

More austere, perhaps, is Thomson’s symphonic poem “Pilgrims and Pioneers” – but just stick around for the fiddle tunes.

Finally, a seasonal work: the Concertino for Harp, Strings and Percussion, “Autumn” – according to Thomson, actually more of a “portrait of an artist ageing.”

And Thomson sure did age. Hard to believe I was already doing radio in his later years.

Happy birthday, Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) – and Happy Thanksgiving!

Check out Thomson on TV!

PHOTO: Just don’t make him angry. You wouldn’t like him when he’s angry. THOMSON SMASH!