Thomson, Virgil

(Garnett), many-faceted American composer of great originality and music critic of singular brilliance; b. Kansas City, Mo., Nov. 25, 1896; d. N.Y., Sept. 30, 1989. Thomson began piano lessons at age 12 with local teachers. He received organ instruction and played in local churches, and also took courses at a local junior college.

In 1920 Thomson entered Harvard University, where he studied orchestration with E. B. Hill and became assistant and accompanist to A.T. Davison, conductor of its Glee Club. He also studied piano with H. Gebhard and organ with W. Goodrich in Boston. In 1921 he went with the Glee Club to Europe, where he remained on a John Knowles Paine Traveling Fellowship to study organ and COUNTERPOINT with NADIA BOULANGER. Returning to Harvard in 1922, he was made organist and choirmaster at King's College. After graduating in 1923, he went to N.Y. to study conducting and counterpoint at the Juilliard Graduate School.

In 1925 Thomson returned to Paris, which remained his base until 1940. He established friendly contacts with groups of musicians, writers, and painters, including Gertrude Stein, an association that was particularly significant in the development of his aesthetic ideas. In his music he refused to follow any one modern theory, instead embracing the notion of popular universality. This allowed him to use the techniques of all ages and all degrees of simplicity or complexity, from simple TRIADIC harmonies to I2-TONE intricacies.

Thomson's most famous composition is the opera 4 Saints in 3 Acts, to a LIBRETTO by Stein, in which the deliberate confusion wrought by the author (there are actually four acts and more than a dozen saints, some of them in duplicate) and the composer's solemn, hymnlike treatment, create a hilarious modern OPERA BUFFA. It was first introduced at Hartford, Connecticut, in 1934, characteristically announced as being under the auspices of the "Society of Friends and Enemies of Modern Music," a group that Thomson directed from 1934 to 1937. The work became an American classic, with constant revivals staged in America and Europe. Also well known are his two other operas, The Mother of Us All, also to a libretto by Stein, on the life of the American suffragette Susan B. Anthony (N.Y., May 7, 1947), and Lord Byron (1961-68; N.Y., April 13, 1972).

In 1940 Thomson returned to the U.S. to become music critic of the New York HeraldTribune. Far from being routine journalism, Thomson's music reviews are minor masterpieces of literary brilliance and critical acumen. He resigned in 1954 to concentrate on composition and conducting.

Thomson received the Pulitzer Prize in music in 1948 for his score to the motion picture Louisiana Story. He also received the Légion d'Honneur in 1947, and in 1948 he was elected to the National Institute of Arts and Letters and in 1959 to the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 1982 he received an honorary doctor of music degree from Harvard University. In 1983 he was awarded the Kennedy Center Honor for lifetime achievement. He received the Medal of Arts in 1988.