Virgil Thomson Quotes

7 Sourced Quotes

Reviewing music or reviewing anything is a writing job. It's nice if you are experienced in the field you are writing about, but writing is what you are doing.

Virgil Thomson
Every composer's music reflects in its subject-matter and in its style the source of the money the composer is living on while writing the music.

Virgil Thomson
The way to write American music is simple. All you have to do is be an American and then write any kind of music you wish.

Virgil Thomson
Verbal communication about music is impossible except among musicians.

Virgil Thomson
This book is in every way except actual authorship Alice Toklas's book; it reflects her mind, her language, her private view of Gertrude, also her unique narrative powers. Every story in it is told as Alice herself had always told it. … Every story that ever came into the house eventually got told in Alice's way, and this was its definitive version.

Virgil Thomson
A libretto that should never have been accepted on a subject that should never have been chosen bya man who should never have attempted it.

Virgil Thomson
I got myself into a lovely little—shall we say controversy—with André Breton, by pointing out that the discipline of spontaneity, which he was asking his surrealist neophytes to adopt, was new for language but something that composers had been practicing for centuries.

Virgil Thomson