Sequenza21/The Contemporary Classical Music Weekly

Virgil T at Norfolk

This summer’s Norfolk Chamber Music Festival and Norfolk New Music Workshop are focusing on the music of Virgil Thomson, both by offering performances of his music (with players and singers including Dawn Upshaw, Susan Narucki, and Gilbert Kalish), and by use of Thomson’s music as a point of departure for the participants in the New Music Workshop which will be devoted to the composition of songs. Among the events are talks by Anthony Tommasini, Chief Classical Music Critic of the New York Times and Thomson’s biographers (Wednesday, June 24, at 7:30 pm), poet and librettist J. D. McClatchy (Wednesday, July 1, at 7:30pm), and composers who were associated with Thomson in various ways, including Ned Rorem (Saturday, June 27, at 3:00pm), Charles Fussell (Thursday, June 25, at 4:00pm), Scott Wheeler (Tuesday, June 25, at 4:00pm) , Deniz Ulben Hughes (Monday, June 29, at 4:00pm), Graeme Koehne (Tuesday, June 30, at 4:00pm), and me (Friday, June 26, at 4:00pm). Concerts including or featuring works of Thomson’s will be on Saturday, June 27, at 8:00pm (recital by soprano Susan Narucki and pianist JJ Penna), Thursday, July 2 and Friday, July 3, at 7:30pm (Norfolk Contemporary Ensemble), Friday, July 17, at 8:00pm, Friday, July 24, at 8:00pm, and Saturday, August 22, at 4:00pm. (Further information is available at www.norfolkmusic.org.)

I would like to think that this might be some kind of beginning of a resurgence of interest in Thomson’s music. I’ve been a little puzzled for a while with certain aspects of the fact that Copland has become THE American composer of that generation. Not that Copland’s music isn’t good–far from it. But of the group of composers who Thomson referred to as “the commando unit,” Copland, Thomson, Sessions, Harris, and Piston, the composers who “put American music on the map” in the 1920s and 30s, at least the first three are really first class composers (there may be some people who want to make cases for Harris and Piston, but most of the music by them I know, anyway, doesn’t come up to the level of the others). Most of the people whose paths cross mine seem not to know any Thomson at all (for that matter, for all the hoopla about Copland, most people seem to know a very thin slice of his work, and the handful of really well know pieces that everybody seems to know aren’t, at least as far as I’m concerned, among his best work).

posted by Rodney Lister 6/23/2009