Volume 35, Number 10 · June 16, 1988
Pulling No Punches
By Robert Craft
Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson
edited by Tim Page, edited by Vanessa Weeks Page
Summit Books, 413 pp., $24.95
No writer has contributed more toward the sophistication of musical life in the United States than Virgil Thomson, whose incumbency as music critic of the New York Herald Tribune between 1940 and 1954 defines the brief Age of Enlightenment in American music journalism. Though the whole of this anthology of his correspondence adds cubits to his reputation as critic, moralist, and—no less substantially—entertaining gossip, the most valuable section is the long chapter representing his newspaperman years. While supporting such originals as Webern ('spun steel'), Varèse, and Carl Ruggles, and attacking the Beaux Arts provincialism, the managerial manipulation, and the misguided patronage systems controlling New York's musical institutions, Thomson generated an excitement difficult even to imagine in today's game of on-the-run, promotion-style reviewing.
Review, 3052 words
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