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This chapter examines Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson's opera Four Saints in Three Acts. It suggests that this opera was a landmark collaborative creation of U.S. modernist artists engaged in early-twentieth-century efforts to establish a distinctly and genuinely American voice in transatlantic high culture. It also highlights the queer expressive potential of artistic abstraction within the homophobic context of twentieth-century U.S. culture, and the crucial confluence of queer lives and culture with artistic activity and culture.

This chapter examines composer and music critic Virgil Thomson, a man who liked to present himself as apolitical but who had close ties to the federal government and the secretly CIA-funded Congress for Cultural Freedom. Thomson embraced the opportunities that the Cold War created. But unlike William Schuman and Howard Hanson, Thomson showed little interest in the politics motivating such programs. He willingly embraced and advanced the new interpretation of American exceptionalism, although he was not personally invested in it, because it created opportunities to gain greater status for American composers. Thomson’s various Cold War activities help us gain a fuller understanding of centrist American liberalism as it shaped musical life during the Cold War.

Virgil Thomson was one of the most outspoken critics of neoclassicism, at one point disparaging it as a “lingua franca” that was essentially “an indigestible mixture cocktail of culture”. Thomson's contradictory behavior is intriguingly present in Capital, Capitals, a work from 1927 that mixed sex, religion, and music. It was performed twice on the Copland-Sessions Concerts, first in New York City in February 1929 and two years later in London, England. Capital, Capitals is a key transitional work, reflecting a time when Thomson switched from a branch of neoclassicism that exhibited the acerbic harmonic edge of Igor Stravinsky to one which embraced the ultra-diatonicism of Erik Satie. It is daring for its simplicity rather than its complexity. But the internal tensions in Capital, Capitals reached beyond neoclassicism to involve an impish fusion of sacred and secular, both in its particular blend of historic styles and in the way it encoded a homosexual message within an aura of high church. With Capital, Capitals, Thomson found the voice that so distinguished him from other neoclassically inclined American composers.

The first chapter examines musical portraits of literary figures. It first explores Virgil Thomson’s multiple works in the genre including his portrait of Gertrude Stein, to interpret the influence of Stein’s modernist literary portraits on Thomson’s compositions. It then turns to Pierre Boulez’s orchestral portrait Pli selon pli: portrait de Mallarmé. Analyzing Boulez’s incorporation of elements of Stéphane Mallarmé’s poetry as well as the complex and idiosyncratic theories regarding the relationship between poetry and music that Mallarmé developed in his essays. Through the discussion of these portraits, the chapter addresses the crucial role of language in the musical representation of identity.

This chapter focuses on the music of composer Virgil Thomson, whose vocabulary for America's middle landscape was made up primarily of Protestant hymn tunes. In the mid-1930s, Thomson considered himself a pioneer in the incorporation of Americana into classical music. Later famous for his role as music critic for the New York Herald Tribune, he did some of his earlier “heralding” from the composer's pulpit. Thomson's Symphony on a Hymn Tune (1926–28) gave him a claim on Americana that he felt an increasing need to protect from urban interlopers. These themes are subtly interwoven in Thomson's first and most famous treatment of the plant family that he would later memorialize in the grasslands of his documentary film score The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936) and the orchestral movement Wheat Field at Noon (1948).

This chapter describes the researching and reconstructing of what was perhaps the most infamous modern music event of the 20th century after Stravinsky's Rite of Spring, George Antheil's “Ballet Mecanique” for player piano, eight concert grands, xylophones, drums, a fire siren, doorbells, and aeroplane propellers. It was designed to shock, but beneath its wild surface lies a story that includes the poet, Ezra Pound; artists and film makers Leger, Man Ray, and Picabia; composers W. C. handy (and his all-negro Orchestra) Colin McFee, Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson; and the violinist, Olga Rudge. It was the first work to encompass silences, some as long as twenty-four seconds, and in many minds, minimalism.

This chapter provides a detailed musical and cinematic analysis of Of Mice and Men, Copland’s first Hollywood film score. The discussion begins by outlining Copland’s interest in film and Hollywood, his desire to engage in mass entertainment, and his eventual first Hollywood commission. Copland’s ideas are compared with the shared values of novelist John Steinbeck, which embrace Popular Front ideals, nationalism, and Americanism. Likewise, Milestone’s cinematic vision, which borrows Dorothea Lange’s photographic depiction of the realities of Depression-era migrant workers, is echoed by the sonic aesthetic of simplicity realized in Copland’s style. Copland’s score is discussed within the larger context of 1930s American music with references to Virgil Thomson and the critique of Arthur Berger.

The chapter illustrates the criticisms on music made by composer-critic Virgil Thomson. Thomson was hired to work for the Boston Evening Transcript. In America composer-critics are frowned upon, since it is assumed the critic's own tendency as a composer will create a bias. But almost all critics are biased one way or another without being composers. As a composer himself, Thomson was much concerned about the way composers were treated in the press. One thing that could advance a composer's reputation, he was convinced, was to have his or her picture in a metropolitan newspaper. He insisted that many notions which one ascribes to as individuals and which one trace as influences from one musical personality to another with the acumen of musicologists are in the air, and are properties accessible to all, in the public domain. The critic should make the distinction between servile imitation and legitimate indebtedness to a seminal composer whose endowment has determined the direction of music's evolution. Music as an art did not issue directly from nature (despite birdsong) in the way that painting and literature did; it exists by virtue of composers who have forged a tradition.

This chapter examines the climax of north-south sameness-embracing, the period following the outbreak of war in September 1939. One manifestation of Pan Americanist culture was Latin American–themed music by U.S. composers, much of which verged on the commercial. Virgil Thomson, who reviewed Villa-Lobos’s music (and whose antinationalist barbs parallel the sentiments of many Latin American composers and critics), laid the groundwork for Brazilian universalism. Villa-Lobos’s reputation in the United States also gained luster from the alliance between the Brazilian strongman Getúlio Vargas and the United States, cemented in 1942 after a long courtship and touted by art music critics and the U.S. music industry. Reflecting the commercial bent of much Pan Americanist culture, Villa-Lobos was also bound to Hollywood and the culture industry, as corroborated by his foray into the American musical, Magdalena, read here in the context of Pan Americanism’s abrupt deterioration during the early years of the cold war.

This chapter looks at how the American Symphony Orchestra League reported that thirty million people in the U.S. are actively interested in concert music. This does not mean jazz, popular ditties, hillbilly dance-bands, hymn singing, or wedding marches, but classical music. Writer Virgil Thomson noted in his column that whereas during the previous year ticket buyers had spent $40 million on baseball, patrons of classical music had spent $45 million. This passion for what Thomson called “serious music” had been stirred even as World War II was in progress, and by the end of the Fifties it was still going strong. Never before has there been such an interest in music in America. The changed atmosphere had been apparent even just a few years after the war's end. For composers, this made the future seem very promising.

This chapter discusses the 1934 black-cast opera Four Saints in Three Acts, composed by Virgil Thomson with a libretto by Gertrude Stein. Employing Stein’s landscape dramaturgy as an interpretive lens, this chapter explores the staging of an imagined South in a modernist opera that, lyrically or musically, seemed to have nothing to do with blackness. The Spanish setting of a black-cast opera reveals a matrix of global southern relations and exchanges; through a dizzying set of equivalences and substitutions, Four Saints in Three Acts put the global South on a modernist stage. The opera, the chapter concludes, not only staged transatlantic modernism but also theatrically echoed the pastoral South of the hit black-cast musical The Green Pastures.

This chapter covers Blitzstein’s work on the film score to Joris Ivens’ The Spanish Earth (about the Spanish Civil War) with Virgil Thomson; his involvement with The Arrow Press; his radio opera, I’ve Got the Tune, which featured in its premiere himself in the starring role along with Shirley Booth and Lotte Lenya; his contribution to the union revue, Pins and Needles; his involvement with the American Communist Party, the Theatre Arts Committee, and Cabaret TAC; and his scores for Orson Welles and John Houseman’s Mercury Theatre, including Julius Caesar and Danton’s Death.

Latouche had friendship with a circle dubbed by Virgil Thomson “The Little Friends,” which included Harry Dunham, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, and Latouche’s future wife Theodora Griffis, the scion of a distinguished and wealthy family. Latouche introduced Jane and Paul Bowles to each other. Latouche’s romantic relationship with Griffis led to marriage, although both were essentially homosexual. The Little Friends formed part of a larger group that included notable composers, such as Copland and Thomson, and artists, such as Kristians Tonny and Frederick Kiesler. Several of these artist friends drew Latouche’s portrait and photographed him. The social settings of these friends included the celebrated salon of Kirk Askew and his wife.

In fall 1933, Barbara Harrison rests at a Swiss sanitarium for a spot of TB. Monroe keeps her company. George fears this will thwart Monie’s planned visit to New York. George’s socializing leads him to prominent commercial portrait subjects. Russell and Mildred join George at Adelaide’s guest inn. Monroe arrives around Thanksgiving but travels to Evanston for Christmas. Barbara invites Katherine Anne Porter to join her in Davos to complete her next HOP project, the story “Hacienda.” Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts, involving a roster of transatlantic creators, premiers at Hartford’s Wadsworth Atheneum. George photographs choreographer Frederick Ashton with three African American male dancers, revealing the era’s “negrophilia” and racialized homosexual tropes. Four Saints manages a brief Broadway production. Lloyd and Mildred wed in May 1934. Monroe and Glenway settle in New York, then in summer join George to share a larger flat at 89th and Madison.

The author shares his brief encounters with composers such as Igor Stravinsky, Nadia Boulanger, Darius Milhaud, Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson, and various other composers. During one of his visits to Stravinsky, the composer confided in the author that when he came across a musical line that would traditionally be scored for violin(s) he would very likely put it into the trumpet or some other wind instrument. During a meeting with female composer Nadia Boulanger, the composer said that she should have been a man, as a woman cannot have a career. Darius Milhaud was a colleague of author at Mills College and appreciated author's compositions. During his visit to Thomson's New York apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in the mid-1930s, the author noticed the Victorian décor of the apartment.

Nabokov’s first major initiative as CCF secretary general was to organize in Paris, in the spring of 1952, a major arts festival celebrating the artistic achievement of the first half of the twentieth century, emphasizing the connection between artistic creativity and artistic and intellectual freedom. Whereas Picasso’s flirtation with communism limited his involvement and the French Left remained mostly critical, the festival was a triumph for Balanchine, Stravinsky (who conducted a Cocteau-designed Oedipus Rex), but also Berg (whose Wozzeck was staged in Paris for the first time) and Schoenberg, while the young Leontyne Price, at Nabokov’s urging, made her debut in Thomson’s Four Saints in Three Acts.

In Jennifer DeLapp-Birkett’s analysis, the “identities and dichotomies” of her title concern a single piece of music, Aaron Copland's Piano Quartet (1950) but also a number of extramusical issues that preoccupied the composer at the time. She places Copland’s work, including his Hollywood film score for “The Heiress” and the efforts of his contemporaries (such as Schoenberg, Virgil Thomson), within the complex political landscape post-World War II, the Red Scare in the United States, and the Cold War. Several incidents in Copland’s career circa 1950 indicate that he, with good reason, felt vulnerable to the forces of reaction at work. DeLapp-Birkett demonstrates conclusively that in his public statements and in his compositional development Copland was responding consciously to the pressures from a variety of sources.