How to Kill a Dead Writer - New English Review

by Richard Kostelanetz (September 2015)

Virgil Thomson

Some years ago I judged that no American composer ever wrote as well about serious/classic music, whether measuring sentences. paragraphs, reviews, or extended essays, as Virgil Thomson (1896-1989). From 1924 to just before his death, in addition to composing music that is, alas, less memorable than his best prose, Thomson produced reviews and, especially, essays that are worth rereading and thus reprinting decades after their initial appearance. Because he was for fourteen years a newspaper journalist, Thomson became a model for later newspaper reviewers—among them, John Rockwell, Tim Page, and Anthony Tommasini. Nonetheless, few major writers have been so badly served, especially posthumously.

By portraying Thomson as no more than a 1000-word mind, Music Chronicles diminishes Thomson, who also wrote brilliantly, indeed more substantially, at longer lengths. Secondly, because the reviews are printed in chronological order, the editor has shirked such opportunities as identifying the strongest or heightening Thomson’s recurring preoccupations, such as, say, American composers in contrast to European or arts other than music. One lesson lost on the Lib of America producers is that Thomson, in his first self-collection, distributed his reviews under eight rubrics: Covering the Orchestras, Chiefly Conductors, Compositions and Composers, Opera, Recitalists, Sacred and Choral, etc.

Because Music Chronicles is so under-edited, I found myself unable to read at a single sitting more than twenty reviews in 996 pages of tiny type, coming to think that VT was a windbag but then realizing that any newspaper critic’s short reviews reprinted in bulk, as here, would portray him or her as a repetitious blowhard. (Try to think of a better book wholly of newspaper reviews.)

Indeed, a more engaging Thomson text appears as an appendix beginning on page 1025 and continuing for 85 pages. These “Notes on Musicians” are short paragraphs, nearly all less than 100 words in length, about individual musicians, most of them barely remembered now, some worth recalling, especially if they don’t yet have a Wikipedia entry:

Ephraim Kurtz (1900-1995) Russian-born conductor. Educated in St. Petersburg, he conducted orchestras in Berlin, Stuttgart, and Monte Carlo before immigrating to the US in 1942. He was music director of the Kansas City Philharmonic (1943-48) and the Houston Symphony (1948-54).

Since I’d met Kurtz on a few occasions, I can remember around 1992 asking the great musical lexicographer Nicolas Slonimsky about his existance, recalling that Slonimsky compiled “a stiff list” of biographical entries who had died recently. Slonimsky replied, “He’s not yet a stiff.” In fact, the two musicians from St. Pete died in the same year of 1995.

According to the headnote to this section, these entries come not from Thomson’s newspaper reviews, which is the ostensible subject of this anthology, but from his book, American Music Since 1910 (1971). However, this isn’t true, not even superficially so, as anyone with both books in hand can check. That earlier Thomson book has only, in a section titled “106 American Composers,” entries of a few hundred words apiece and nothing about performers.

Whoever wrote not only this about Babbitt but the shorter fresh entries on performing musicians, such as Kurtz among many others, gets no credit. If Thomson’s ghost gave Kurtz, say, a death year well after Thomson’s own, may I suggest that the Library of America alert newspapers about their monumental discovery? (Can we imagine some LoA flack claiming “channeling”?)

Another problem with this book, likewise reflecting peculiar publishing, is that it lacks any introduction or even a preface. Instead, what might serve that purpose begins as “Note on the Texts” on page 1019 (that’s correct, well after page 1000). These thousand words outline succinctly Thomson’s career at the New York Herald-Tribune, identifying his backers and his helpers that made his tenure there possible. As no writer is credited with this appendix, can we assume these were written by Page, even though TP is acknowledged by name in the third person toward the end of this text! Scholarly odd this Library of America is.

In sum, while pretending to honor Thomson as a writer, this book Music Chronicles diminishes. Since he had no heirs, may I imagine that his estate, represented by The V.T. Foundation, ought to be pissed. One question raised by this weak book is whether Thomson’s literary reputation will be strong enough to survive after admirers’ repeated attempts to kill it.

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