Virgil Thomson

Thomson's music is built on a paradox — it sounds almost naively simple, drawing on hymn tunes, folk songs, marches, and waltzes, but these plain materials are assembled with a Cubist's eye for unexpected juxtaposition and context-shifting. His harmonic language is diatonic and deliberately 'white-key,' yet his melodic and rhythmic choices create a subtle dislocation that makes the familiar strange. His orchestration is lean and transparent, favoring bright primary colors over Romantic blending.

Thomson studied with Nadia Boulanger in Paris and absorbed the clarity and anti-Romantic aesthetic of Les Six, particularly Satie's deadpan wit and Poulenc's unpretentious charm. His long residence in Paris gave him an outsider's perspective on American vernacular music that he exploited brilliantly. As chief music critic of the New York Herald Tribune, he wielded enormous influence over American musical life and engaged in memorable feuds with Toscanini admirers and serialists alike.

Thomson's Paris years in the 1920s-30s produced the Stein collaborations that made his name. His return to New York brought his influential decade as a music critic (1940-54) and the film scores that established the 'American pastoral' sound. Later works, including Lord Byron and increasingly abstract orchestral pieces, showed a more serious and complex side. His enormous body of musical portraits — short pieces capturing friends' likenesses in sound — remained a lifelong project.

Thomson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts (1934), with Gertrude Stein's bewildering libretto and an all-Black cast, was the unlikely hit of the Broadway season — running for 60 performances and confounding audiences who couldn't tell if it was profound or absurd. Thomson insisted it was both. The opera's radical simplicity — plain triads, hymn-like vocal lines — was as shocking in its own way as any avant-garde gesture.

Thomson composed over 150 'musical portraits' — short pieces written while sitting with his subject, the way a painter would do a sketch. These portraits of friends, colleagues, and acquaintances constitute one of the most unusual and charming bodies of work in American music, and they're almost entirely unexplored in concert.

Thomson is underperformed relative to his importance — the film suites appear occasionally, but the operas are rare. Four Saints in Three Acts deserves far more stagings than it receives. The musical portraits are ideal for recital programming and almost completely untapped. He's a natural for programs exploring American identity or the Paris-New York axis of the 1920s-30s.