Word: thompson
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Dates: during 1950-1959
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...Thompson regards his teaching as a full-time operation and relegates composition to reading periods or else to his summer vacations in Gstaad, a quiet Swiss village. "I need absolute seclusion when I compose," says Thompson. "I have to work intensively before I can write music with ease, much as an athlete must get into shape before he can perform adequately. If I am interrupted at all, I have to start over again...
...Thompson expressed vehement disapproval of the imitation of contemporary masters. "Nothing strikes me as more futile than to become a little Stravinsky or a little Bartok. I have tried, just as Stravinsky and Bartok have done, to make a purely personal synthesis of the musical teachings of the past." Thompson is no conservative, however. He says quite firmly that, "Modern music and, specifically, atonal composition seems to me to be a logical development from the experimentation of Wagner and Strauss. After all there are many passages in Wagner where there is extended tonal ambiguity. From this, it is just...
...Thompson's favorite points about modern music concerns contemporary sophistication. "Despite the heroic attempts for sublimity in the Berg Concerto, contemporary idioms in general lend themselves only with great difficulty to anything approaching the sublime. After all, though a tinkle-tinkle here and there in a Webern score may satiate one's thirst for the piquant and highly flavored, it does not quench the far more important thirst of the soul. Elevated feeling in the human spirit is generally ignored by modern composers, but it is an important response to the musical art. Any thinking person who made a list...
...Thompson's patrons was Serge Koussevitsky who, for so many modern American composers, was a source of both income and inspiration. Koussevitsky, Thompson recalls, "had a genius for challenging you into writing a work. It was at his insistance that I composed, on extremely short notice, a chorus for all the students at Tanglewood to sing at the festival's dedication in 1940. He made it sound like the most important commission ever offered a composer...
After some reflection Mr. Thompson stated his basic philosophy of composition. "As a composer, I always feel an intene obligation to communicate directly to my audiences, of course without sacrificing my own desires to theirs. My greatest ambition is to try my very best to speak as meaningfully and as broadly to listeners as the past masters have. I am very honored to find out that my music can be appreciated even by people 'like...