Red, White and Blue Boulevardier

By Michael Walsh

Composer Virgil Thomson turns a hale and peppery 85

The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American, and then write any kind of music you wish.

--Virgil Thomson

As a child in Kansas City, Mo., he banged out his first compositions at the piano, with the sustaining pedal down and the dynamic level up. Years later, an American sophisticate in Paris, he collaborated on an opera with Gertrude Stein, Four Saints in Three Acts, fashioning deceptively simple, homey music out of "Pigeons on the grass alas." His 1937 score for Filling Station, with its truck drivers, state troopers and gun-toting gangsters, became the first successful all-American ballet. Although serious composers generally have shunned film scores as hack work, he produced seven of them, and in 1949 collected a Pulitzer Prize for one, Louisiana Story. As music critic of the New York Herald Tribune from 1940 to 1954, he skewered arrogance and stupidity in the musical establishment with a perceptive gusto unknown since the critical heyday of George Bernard Shaw. Composer Aaron Copland, his contemporary, calls him "about as original a personality as America can boast." This week, in what is far from the least of his accomplishments, Virgil Thomson turns a hale and peppery 85.

The occasion was marked earlier this month with a concert performance of Four Saints at Carnegie Hall. Thomson bounded onstage for tumultuous curtain calls, still pink-cheeked and cherubic and grinning impishly. A recording of Four Saints is now being made and is due out next year. A new collection of his writings, A Virgil Thomson Reader,has just been issued (Houghton Mifflin; 582 pages; $25). Convivially holding court in the suite that he has occupied for decades in Manhattan's Chelsea Hotel, the old boy (as he has been fondly called) chats with a stream of visitors while fielding a barrage of calls from well-wishers and colleagues. (The phone's bell is amplified to fire-alarm intensity because of his partial deafness, his one apparent concession to age.)

A red, white and blue boulevardier. his native good sense sharpened with Parisian wit, Thomson deftly sidesteps the question of his reaction to all the tributes: "I don't know what my emotions are. I don't give them names. If you give names to your feelings, then you are stuck with them." Chatting with fellow Composer Philip Glass--whose opera Satyagraha has been the most discussed piece of the year--he succinctly bridges the gap between his own down-home aesthetic and Glass's new-wave minimalism: "Glass makes an opera in Sanskrit, and I make an opera in Gertrude Stein."

Thomson has always been a man of broad artistic sympathies. Four Saints astonished its first listeners with its folksy, hymnlike tunes drawn from the composer's Baptist background and sung by an all-black cast. Although the 1928 work has dated badly--a little of Gertrude Stein is, after all, a lot of Gertrude Stein--it is still a landmark, something that served to define what "American" was between the wars.

In other works, Thomson has dabbled in modality and flirted with serialism; like Ives, he is not above quoting a famous melody (like My Country, 'Tis of Thee) when it suits his expressive purposes. The French influence on him is strong, as befits a prize pupil of Nadia Boulanger; the opening chords of the Louisiana Story suite might have been harmonized by Ravel. But whatever the style, the music is always unmistakably Thomson's: attractively urbane, piquant, eminently civilized.

Despite his cordiality to Glass, Thomson asserts: "There is less originality in music today than 50 years ago or 75 years, when it was booming.

The major action now is the distillation of the novelties of 30 years ago." Ever the critic, he pithily appraises such composers as Elliott Carter ("not negligible"), John Cage ("a certain comic value") and Roger Sessions ("for the school and college trade"). Erik Satie, the sardonic French aesthete who raised understatement to a cardinal principle of composition, is still his ideal and greatest influence.

One of the last survivors, along with Copland and Sessions, of an important generation of composers that included Walter Piston, Roy Harris, Douglas Moore, Howard Hanson and Leo Sowerby, Thomson's lasting contributions are likely to be the two operas he wrote with Stein (the second was the 1947 The Mother of Us All) and his criticism. Critic Thomson cheerfully concurs about the operas, at least: "I think I am a good opera composer. There have been some 3,000 performances of The Mother of Us All. It makes you know it is foolproof." No major opera house has yet produced a Thomson opera, and the composer is puzzled by the neglect. But in the long run he is philosophical: "I agree with one French critic who said that I am essentially a predecessor." Of what? That is for his successors to decide. "Some artists close things," says Thomson. "I am the kind who opens things."

--By Michael Walsh. Reported by Nancy Newman/New York

With reporting by Nancy Newman

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