Virgil Thomson

Virgil Thomson (November 25, 1896 – September 30, 1989) was an American composer from Missouri, whose rural background gave a sense of place in his compositions. He studied with Nadia Boulanger, and later established himself in New York City, as a peer of Aaron Copland and was also a music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune from 1940 through 1954. He won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1949 with his film score for Louisiana Story.

Quotes

• I got myself into a lovely little—shall we say controversy—with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries.
  • Virgil Thomson (1981). A Virgil Thomson Reader, p.548. New York: E.P. Dutton Inc.
    • See: André Breton