Virgil Thomson Podcast Transcript

Kelly Yamaguchi: Welcome to a series of podcasts brought to you by Yale University. “Voices of
American Music” features excerpts from interviews in Yale’s Oral History of American Music
archive. This segment focuses on composer, author, and critic Virgil Thomson.
Libby Van Cleve: I am Libby Van Cleve, Associate Director of Yale’s Oral History of American
Music, a unique archive of hundreds of recorded interviews with major musical figures of our times.
The founding director, Vivian Perlis, and I wrote a book and edited CDs based on materials from
the archive. It’s called Composers’ Voices from Ives to Ellington, published by Yale University Press in
2005. It features thirteen composers, among them, Virgil Thomson.
Music: Thomson, Symphony 3, mvt. 2: Tempo di Valzer; New Zealand Symphony Orchestra; James
Sedares, conductor
Vivian Perlis: I am Vivian Perlis, Oral History of American Music Director. In the seventies, I
interviewed Virgil Thomson at his apartment in the legendary Chelsea Hotel in New York City.
Thomson is recognized as one of the leading figures in American music with a career that spanned
the entire twentieth century. His ties with Yale are strong: Thomson’s manuscripts and papers
including correspondence with leading literary and musical figures are held by the Yale University
Library, and at the end of his life, Thomson taught a seminar at Yale entitled “Words and Music”
which later became a book published by Yale University Press. Here is a sample of Thomson
addressing his Yale students:
Virgil Thomson: [Sings "Tiger! Tiger!" Text by William Blake]
Tiger! Tiger! burning bright
In the forest of the night,
What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?
You see, it's just as dramatic as you can make it, because it's a very dramatic text.
Music: Thomson, "Tiger! Tiger!" from Fives Songs of William Blake; Mack Harrell, baritone; The
Philadelphia Orchestra; Eugene Ormandy, conductor
Perlis: Born in 1896, Virgil Thomson grew up in Kansas City, Missouri and spent his early adult
life in the rich artistic atmosphere of Paris. Thomson’s inimitable blend of southern style and urban
sophistication was the result of this unusual combination of Kansas City and Paris.
Thomson: My father's people, who came from Virginia, were also slave owners and Southern
Baptists, and they always took people home from church for lunch, you know, on Sunday. Southern
hospitality and country hospitality was a fact that I was brought up with. Oh, yes. Paris and Kansas
City both had a highly corrupt political background and a rather elaborate religious superstructure.
Whether it was Catholic or Southern Baptist, it's all the same thing.
Music: Thomson, Family Portrait, A Scherzo: Priscilla Rea; London Gabrieli Brass Ensemble;
Christopher Larkin, conductor
Thomson: You see, there is a difference between rebelling at the beginning and rebelling
afterwards. I used to see these French boys who were my age--some a bit younger--and they would
be sent to the Jesuits for high school, and they would make a big rebellion about it, but only after
they'd been there and got out. Only one of them said: "I am not having any of those Jesuits," and he
had to be taken right out. That's the only kind of rebellion that counts, the rebellion that says: "I am
not having any." Rebellion after you've absorbed it all--my heavens, that's just decorative.
Perlis: Virgil Thomson lived in Paris until the Second World War. After his return to New York, he
became music critic for the Herald Tribune. His unique qualities of personality, wit, and intellect
made him an integral part of the New York music scene and an unforgettable character.
Thomson: The fifty percent of the reviewers that are or have been practicing composers are the
ones whose reviews can make sense and in some cases make history. After all we read Debussy and
Berlioz and Schumann. Whereas the polemicists and the historians and the just-smart-aleck writers
go by the wayside. It was proposed to me as a possibility and I said I didn't think they would like it.
I thought I'd be fired right off for offending some big wig around the Metropolitan Opera. No – no
– no, they're used to that, they like it.
And so when I tried it, I liked it and they liked it. Although I made a number of indiscreet
gestures, so to speak, in my first year or two, they didn't too much mind because I was lively. And
because I was a musician, I knew what I was talking about, and I could write. And reviewing is a
writing job. Writing is what you do.
Music: Thomson, Something of a Beauty: A Portrait of Anne-Marie Soullière
Thomson: Composition isn't something you decide. Composition is something you have a
compulsion about. You can decide that you're going to learn to play the piano because that requires
a method and work. You can decide that you are going to master the techniques of composition.
But you cannot decide that you are going to be a composer because the inspiration or the
development may not occur.
If it doesn't come, you're out of luck. But you have to keep on waiting, and if it keeps on not
coming, then you give up the profession.
What am I in business for except to do good work? And by good work I mean work that
pleases me. There is no point in being more or less poor all your life if you have to be also bored.
Music: Thomson, Solitude: A Portrait of Lou Harrison; David Del Tredici, piano
Thomson: I don't view musical compositions as static productions. I view them as in continuous
movement, and one hopes that there is a semblance of something like organic movement there so
that the materials develop and remain related, integrated--in constant transformation perhaps--but,
growing like a plant.
Music: Thomson, Autumn: Promenade; Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; Ann Mason Stockton,
harp; Neville Marriner, conductor
Thomson: Everybody, I think, has to learn his own best working methods. People don't have the
same kind of working methods, and they don't have the same kind of lives. The reason, I think,
why artists of all kinds are most at home in great art centers is because there they see other artists all
the time, and find out what the various methods of work are; what kind of food life, exercise life, sex
life, reading life, boozing or not boozing, drugs or not drugs. You have to find out for yourself what
is a good creative hygiene.
Music: Thomson, Autumn: Promenade; Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra; Ann Mason Stockton,
harp; Neville Marriner, conductor
Thomson: Poets have a very different hygiene from us. Music takes a sufficient amount of time
that it's awfully hard to get into trouble, especially since you not only take the time to write down
scores, but musicians are practically all performing musicians, too, and you go to rehearsals and you
play music and you give concerts, and all that takes a lot of time in the day, and running around
town, so that music is a busy affair.
The painters are not so busy. They wait ‘til the light is good, and they sometimes paint ‘til
the light goes bad. In a dark city like Paris or San Francisco or something, the light is really good,
say, from about ten to three in the wintertime, and that's long enough for anybody to work. When
the light goes bad, but then they either make love to their model or quarrel with their wife or go out
to the café. But having worked that day, they have a perfectly clear conscience, so they are cheerful
and jolly, and the gay Bohemian life always follows the painters because they are good for the
evening.
Musicians give a lesson or play a concert or copy some music or something. You don't see
quite so many of those around in the evening. And the poets and the literary people are all around,
picking up atmosphere or quarreling [laughs].
Thomson: You have to do your practice, keep your health, keep your inspiration, keep your
intellectual contents and your energies, and above all keep relaxed because it can't come through
unless you're relaxed.
When I was younger I found that I worked awfully well in bed. As they say in France, the
nervous system is only in repose in bed. I can work either in bed or sitting at a table, but I wait for
the moment when I sort of automatically reach for a pencil.
Music: Thomson, "Before Sleeping"; Betty Allen, mezzo-soprano; Virgil Thomson, piano
Thomson: If you can put the surface or your mind at rest and let the deeper parts come up
spontaneously then you get a deeper and more vivid result. Any poet knows that, and any
composer knows it. -- I am not a theologian. It might be the Holy Ghost. It might be your
unconscious memory of all the music you ever heard in your life. In any case, it's something a little
deeper than the surface of your mind.
Perlis: Virgil Thomson was one of the first American students of the celebrated French pedagogue,
Nadia Boulanger. From this time on, he formed very definite opinions about teaching composition.
Thomson: The American composer is a university teacher. That has conditioned him in a number
of ways which are possibly beneficial and in some maybe not. Being surrounded constantly by the
university, the whole music thing tends to get over-verbalized, because a university is built around
a library. A university consists of transmitting from one generation to another that which can be or
is written down, because if it isn't written down it's lost anyway. So the library is the repository of
all knowledge, and the idea of the library, the presence of the library and the history of the art and
all the rest of it dominates the music department insofar as that music department is a purely
academic one.
Music: Thomson, Sonata da Chiesa: Fugue
Thomson: The test of a good teacher is: do the students write music? Nadia Boulanger's students,
over a long period of years--hundreds of them have written music. Arnold Schoenberg's students
wrote music. Olivier Messiaen's students write music. Pierre Boulez has had students, but they
don’t write music very much. They perform music.
Any musician likes a gifted student. You can do anything with a gifted student, even let him
go right ahead and learn, which he's going to do if he’s gifted, but the ungifted student--or the
moderately gifted student, as you encounter them in college classes, I didn’t feel was quite my
personal talent. I don’t have that fatherly instinct that pedagogues have or that motherly one that
Nadia had.
I found out very early in my professional life that you can’t follow somebody else’s ideas and
you can’t afford to be a prisoner of group ideas. If you believe in the group ideas, you’re not a
prisoner. But if somebody’s tried to force them on you, then you are a prisoner. And the great
advantage of being young and poor is that you’re not obliged to do anything you don’t want to do.
Perlis: Gertrude Stein was one of the avant garde figures that Thomson came to know while living
in Paris. Their collaboration in the forties on the opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” made history
with its unusual libretto and all-African American cast. The production made them both famous.
Thomson: If one is going to start writing opera seriously or well in a new language, which would
be American, then one had better start, not from a decayed form of the art, which is nineteenth
century opera, but from a primitive form, which is the opera seria. And I've explained this to
Gertrude. You take a serious mythological subject with a tragic ending; you concentrate the
emotional moments into set pieces and the commerce of the play you put into rapid recitative--to
get on with it. Well, that's what we started out thinking we were going to do, but when we started
looking for mythological subjects obviously there were a great many around easy at hand that you
couldn't use at all. The [Isadora] Duncan family had practically a patent on Greece. Richard
Wagner had so completely made Norse mythology his own that competition there was bound to be
fruitless. We said to each other, history could be considered as mythology. "Oh fine," says
Gertrude, "what about George Washington?" And I said, "No, I don't like Eighteenth Century
costumes, they make everybody look alike." And we moved on from there to: I said, "well, the lives
of the saints, that is mythology." Oh, that was just fine. That really kind of clicked with both of us.
She picked out her own saints, which--she is a woman of letters, she can determine her characters.
Music: Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts, Act IV: Intermezzo; Virgil Thomson, conductor
Thomson: I’ve been something of an éminence grise. I haven’t invented anything. Well, yes, maybe I
have. I haven’t created the career of Philip Glass, but as he pointed out to me, I was doing
minimalist music fifty years before he did.
Music: Philip Glass, Einstein on the Beach; The Philip Glass Ensemble
One, two three, four.
One, two, three, four, five, six.
One, two, three, four, five, six, seven, eight.
One, two, three, four
One, two, three, four, five, six …
Thomson: I also pointed out to him, as a joke, that he’d had considerable success at writing operas
in Sanskrit, and I’d done perfectly well writing operas in Gertrude Stein.
Music: Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts; Orchestra of Our Time; Joel Thome, conductor
Text by Gertrude Stein
One, two, three as one, one and one
One, one to be,
One with them, one with them, one with them.
With are with are with with it.
Thomson: Gertrude Stein said it so simply--she said, “If you remember the history of your art while
you are working, your work comes out dead. If you can keep your mind on what you’re writing
about, then it comes out live.” Well, it’s as simple as that, really as simple as that.
Music: Thomson, Four Saints in Three Acts; Orchestra of Our Time; Joel Thome, conductor
Text by Gertrude Stein
There are as many saints as there are saints in it.
How many saints are there in it?
There are saints in it.
Saint Celestine, Saint Lawrence.
There are as many saints
There are as many saints as there are as many saints as there are in it.
Thank you very much.
Kelly Yamaguchi: "Voices of American Music" is a production of the Yale School of Music and the
Oral History of American Music Project. Transcripts of the interviews as well as information and
the performers of the musical excerpts are available at yale.edu/oham. For more information about
music at Yale, and for additional netcasts, please visit music.yale.edu.
Produced by Vivian Perlis, Libby Van Cleve, Stefan Weisman, Jef Wilson, and Keturah Bixby of
OHAM with the help of the staff of the Yale School of Music.