Word: thomson
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COMPOSER: VIRGIL THOMSON...
...BOTTOM LINE: Thomson's cheery, uncomplicated score is at odds with the poet's flamboyant life and works...
...Virgil Thomson was a first-rate music critic, able author, brilliant dinner- party conversationalist and world-class gadfly, but he wasn't much of a composer -- which is, alas, primarily how he thought of himself. Turning his back on nearly every major compositional technique of the 20th century, with the notable exception of pastiche, Thomson wrote archly naive, perversely | wholesome music -- tonal, uncomplicated and almost completely unmemorable...
...Thomson's creative reputation today rests primarily on his operas -- notably the groundbreaking 1928 Four Saints in Three Acts, to a libretto by Gertrude Stein, and The Mother of Us All (1947) -- as well as on the 1928 Symphony on a Hymn Tune and the film score The Plow That Broke the Plains (1936). But the work that has long intrigued Thomson's admirers is his last opera, Lord Byron, which premiered at the Juilliard School...
This semester, Thomson Professor of Government Harvey C. Mansfield Jr. '53 did his part to cleave the campus along ideological lines. Mansfield, the conservative icon of Harvard's predominantly liberal Faculty, linked the admissions office's affirmative action policies with grade inflation at Harvard...