Library of America To Release of Virgil Thomson's Work

Following on the acclaimed 2014 edition of Virgil Thomson's collected newspaper music reviews, Library of America and Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page now present Thomson's four classic full-length works in one volume for the first time. An engrossing tour of the tumultuous twentieth-century cultural scene and Thomson's extraordinary career as both a proponent and a practitioner of musical modernism, the volume opens with The State of Music, the no-holds-barred 1939 polemic that made Thomson's name as a critic.

The autobiography Virgil Thomson is a classic American memoir, marked by a buoyant wit, a true gift for verbal portrait-making, and a cast of characters including Aaron Copland, Gertrude Stein, James Joyce, Paul Bowles, John Houseman, and Orson Welles. American Music Since 1910 is a series of incisive essays on the lives and works of Ives, Ruggles, Varèse, Copland, Cage, and others who helped define a national musical idiom. Music with Words, Thomson's final book, is a distillation of a subject he knew better than perhaps any other American composer: how to set English-especially American English-to music, in opera and art song. The volume is rounded out by a selection of Thomson's magazine journalism from 1957 to 1984-thirty-seven pieces, most of them never before collected.

Virgil Thomson is published with support from the Virgil Thomson Foundation, Ltd.

Previously published

Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles 1940-1954

Long unavailable to the general reader, here are the witty and incisive music reviews of the composer who became an acclaimed newspaper critic: an unsurpassed delight for classical music and opera lovers. 1200 pp. • $45 • LOA #258

"It is difficult to think of an American critic more lucid than Thomson, or, for that matter, a wittier one, who reads so well these many years later." The New Criterion