Virgil Thomson was not only a composer, he was a writer on music, who wielded power of a kind unimaginable in this day of eroded standards, as a critic at the New York Herald-Tribune.
Perhaps his brand of “faux-naïf” Americana is not for everyone. Still, it earned him a wide and enduring audience. His music for Robert Flaherty’s “Louisiana Story” (1948) remains the only film score ever to be awarded a Pulitzer Prize.
For Thomson’s birthday, here’s some music to get you in the mood for Thanksgiving.
His “Symphony on a Hymn Tune” was composed during his Paris years. Thomson, like Aaron Copland and so many others, studied in France 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.
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.”
Happy birthday, Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) – and Happy Thanksgiving!
Check out Thomson on TV!
PHOTOS: Thomson, enjoying all his pleasures at once
