Critic's Morning After

In the guerrilla warfare between musicians and critics, last week a truce was called for. The herald who appeared between the two armies had fought on both sides: chubby-cheeked, baldish Virgil Thomson, 48, a onetime Paris expatriate from Kansas City. He is both a critic (the New York Herald Tribune) and a composer (the Gertrude Stein opera, Four Saints in Three Acts; cinema music for The Plow That Broke the Plains). He thus admonished his fellow critics: "A dispassionate reporting of facts [is] the part of criticism that constitutes a communication. The rest is just flourish."

Having said his say as a critic, Composer Thomson then mounted the stage of Carnegie Hall and led Manhattan's Philharmonic Symphony through the first U.S. performance of his own Symphony on a Hymn Tune. His own program notes described it as a "halfin and half-out-of-focus harmonization" of two Southern camp meeting melodies, How Firm a Foundation and Yes, Jesus Loves Me.

Next day Musician Thomson got the full business from his unregenerate colleagues--not only an adequate report of the facts but some flourishes thrown in. Sample from his own paper: "wholehearted noise-making . . . awkward, droll and rough. . . ." Curtly dismissing Composer Thomson ("trivial. . . flimsy"), the New York Times' Olin Downes soothingly patted Fellow Critic Thomson on the back for his journalistic "brilliance and lucidity . . . sensitiveness and perspicacity. . . ."

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