Music: 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. . . .”