Tired of Listening

Being a music critic and a composer at the same time is a little like playing quarterback and simultaneously having to blow the referee's whistle. But Composer-Critic Virgil Thomson has long managed to write his own music and blow the whistle on the music of others without missing a play. Whether he was reporting on the nuances in a symphony performance, "discovering" a debutante performer, delivering an essay on one of the intricacies of composition itself, or unabashedly plugging his own works, he hardly ever bored a reader. Last week, after 14 years of what he calls a "honeymoon" with New York's Herald Tribune, waspish Virgil Thomson, 57, announced that he was "tired of listening to music," was quitting to do more composing, lecturing and conducting.

Musician by inclination and wit by trade, Kansas City-born Virgil Thomson studied music in Paris (after Harvard), was an organist, choirmaster and freelance writer on music before he went to the Herald Tribune. He left New York's music public gasping with his very first column, a deft and devastating panning of the sacrosanct Philharmonic-Symphony ("the sombre and spiritless sonority of a German military band"). Thereafter, he shaded old-style critics by his saucy phrases, e.g., hearing Violinist Jascha Heifetz overpower a sonatina "made one feel . . . that one had somehow got on the Queen Mary to go to Brooklyn." His compliments were apt to be delivered off his backhand: one composer, he said, "wrote Mexican music ... in the best Parisian syntax. No Indians around and no illiteracy."

Says Thomson: "Unusual works have more news value than Toscanini. The history of music is the history of composition, not performance. There is great validity in the constant performance of classical music, but the real news is deviation from the routine. For instance, I might be very fond of roast beef, but as food editor, I would find it exceedingly difficult to write very many interesting articles about the taste of roast beef."

Critic Thomson's musical taste buds respond best to French music, and his own scores (Louisiana Story, Four Saints in Three Acts) resemble it in their neatness, transparent textures and often, inconsequence. His departure leaves a gap in the ranks of U.S. music journalism: there is now no practicing musician in its top ranks, no dedicated champion of modern U.S. composers. His post on the Trib will be filled by Columbia University's Budapest-born Music-Historian Paul Henry Lang, author of the scholarly, 1043-page Music in Western Civilization. Quips one friend: "He thinks music ceased to exist at the death of Schubert."

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