Revisit the Golden Age of classical music in America through the witty and adventurous reviews of our greatest critic-composer For fourteen memorable years Virgil Thomson surveyed the worlds of opera and classical music as the chief music critic for the New York Herald Tribune. An accomplished composer who knew music from the inside, Thomson communicated its pleasures and complexities to a wide readership in a hugely entertaining, authoritative style, and his daily reviews and Sunday articles set a high-water mark in American cultural journalism. Thomson collected his...

An unprecedented collection of polemical and autobiographical writings by America s greatest composer-critic.Following on the critically acclaimed 2014 edition of Virgil Thomson's collected newspaper music criticism, The Library of America andPulitzer Prize winning music critic Tim Page now present Thomson s other literary and critical works, a body of writing that constitutes America s musical declaration of independence from the European past. This volume opens with The State of Music (1939), the book that made Thomson s name as a critic and won him his 14-year stint at the...