The state of music & other writings

"In this second volume in the Library of America's definitive Virgil Thomson edition, Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic Tim Page collects for the first time the great composer's four witty, incisive, and compulsively readable full-length works. Written with authority and élan, these classic books offer an engrossing tour of the tumultuous twentieth-century musical scene and Thomson's extraordinary career as one of the nation's foremost cultural critics. The volume opens with The state of music (1939), the book that made Thomson's name as a writer and won him a fourteen-year stint as chief music reviewer at the New York Herald Tribune. This feisty, often hilarious polemic, presented here in the extensively revised edition of 1962, surveys the challenges confronting the American composer in a hide-bound world where performance and broadcast outlets are controlled by institutions shocked by the new and suspicious of homegrown talent.^ For Aaron Copland, The state of music was not just 'the most original book on music that America has produced,' but 'the wittiest, the most provocative, the best written.' The best-selling autobiography Virgil Thomson (1966) is a gossipy tale of one mu