Virgil Thomson

From Philosopedia

Thomson, Virgil (1896–1989)

Thomson, an eminent American organist, composer, and critic, wrote two operas: Four Saints in Three Acts (1928) and The Mother of Us All (1947), with librettos by Gertrude Stein. From 1940 to 1954, he was the noted music critic of The New York Herald Tribune.

Anthony Tommasini’s Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle (1997) relates the composer’s varied musical successes. Included are details of the composer’s various loves as well as his lack of interest in the Christian theology believed in by his family and the small Missouri community in which he had grown up.

At one point, in fact, Thomson had dissected a collection of Baptist hymns and had found closeted erotic feelings throughout. God, he found, interested believers less than Jesus, “the perfect, though very human ‘lover of my soul.’ ” This love-is-the-theme message led to hymnal exhortations to “taste his delights” and “Resist Him no More!” H. L. Mencken, himself a non-believer, failed to be convinced, however, that closeted erotic feelings are to be found everywhere in church hymns.

At Kansas City Polytechnic Institute Thomson founded the Pansophists, writing in its publication, Pans, that the club aimed to emulate the Sophists of Greece, who “disputed for the sake of dispute, and who discussed merely for the pleasure of talking well.” When accused of heading an artificial, narrow, elitist, and undemocratic group, Thomson pleaded guilty:

• Any attempt to unite distinct classes of minds is necessarily artificial. . . . Humanism itself is narrow.

As for the club’s and its members’ being different,

• Conventionality is its own punishment,” he retorted, Wilde-like.

Thomson lifted fragments of ideas from Schopenhauer (his view of the world as a constant conflict of individual wills resulting in frustration and pain), said Tommasini, and from Nietzsche (his contemptuous rejection of Christian “slave morality” in favor of a “will to power”).

When the club publicized Edgar Lee Masters’s Spoon River Anthology and the campus heard of the poetry’s tales of abortion, lust, lesbian relationships, hypocrisy of small-town neighborliness, and corruption of civic officials, Thomson had to appear before a disciplinary committee which threatened him with expulsion.

Thomson had tried peyote once during his junior college days in Kansas City. His supplier had been Dr. Frederick Madison Smith, whose grandfather had founded the Mormon religion[[1]] and who became head of the church. Smith described his peyote “highs” to Thomson, with their “characteristic excitation to feats of endurance and to colored visions,” then supplied him with “five bumpy little buttons, less than an inch across and hard as wood” obtained from Texas Indians. Although the Mormons had prohibitions against alcohol and drugs, as head of the church Smith reasoned that peyote was a natural substance, not a drug, an ancient means to tap one’s inner powers. He had observed native American Indians who ate the drug in pellet form and had seen others, Catholic converts, who made from it a tea for communion. Smith’s Ph. D. dissertation, subsequently a book, was The Higher Powers of Man (1918), an examination of ecstatic states, a phenomenon that some men and, likely, that Jesus had experienced. After further study at Harvard, Thomson became one of America’s best music critics, a master of the organ, and a composer with an international standing.

In 1949 for his film score for Louisiana Story, Thomson earned a Pulitzer Prize for Music.

Flamboyantly homosexual, Thomson when ninety showed a new secretary around his Hotel Chelsea apartment on 23rd Street in New York, telling him,

• This is what you do if you show up and I’m dead. Don’t call a doctor; it will be too late. Call the lawyer. He knows what to do. Then call the locksmith to come change the locks. Then call AP, UPI, and The New York Times - the culture desk, not the obit boys.

Thomson also wanted to make sure his final memorial would be a memorable one and requested that it be held in Manhattan’s biggest cathedral.

Asked if he wanted to be buried or cremated, Thomson told his friend Dick Flender, “Cremated. Easier to ship.” Thomson’s memorial was held per his instructions at New York City’s largest church, which he termed “St. John’s the Too-Too Divine.” Despite his wish that absolutely no words be spoken, the minister successfully insisted that he say something at the very beginning.

Tommasini’s biography makes it clear that Thomson was not into organized religion but, however, did not go on record any further concerning his freethinking. Although he was not a card-bearing secular humanist and had written church music, Thomson had said, wryly, “I just didn’t take to salvation.”