THOMSON: BALLET AND FILM SCORES (arr. for piano) - JACQUELYN HELIN

VIRGIL THOMSON BALLET AND FILM SCORES liner notes

A Personal Statement by Virgil Thomson -- I was born in Kansas City, Missouri, in 1896, grew up there, and went to war from there. That was the other war. I had organ and piano lessons there and attended the public schools. Then I was education some more at Harvard, also in Paris and New York. As a composer, I was mainly the pupil of Nadia Boulanger. While still young, I taught music at Harvard and played the organ at King's Chapel in Boston. Then I returned to Paris and lived there for many years, till the Germans came, in fact. After that I was for 14 years chief music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune. All my life | have written music. There is a great deal of this music. My most famous works are the operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother Of Us All (both to texts by Gertrude Stein), The Plough That Broke the Plains and The River (films by Pare Lorentz), and Louisiana Story (film by Robert Flaherty). In 1968 I completed a third opera, Lord Byron (libretto by Jack Larson), produced in 1972 in New York. There are also symphonies, concertos, Masses, ballets, string quartets, and many other works in many forms. I have made nearly 150 musical portraits too, most of them drawn from life, the sitter posing for me as he would for an artist's portrait.