Virgil Thomson's Symphony on a Hymn Tune
Firm foundations for a life as a composer and outspoken critic
Jun 26, 2009
He was a long-time music critic for the New York Herald-Tribune, but Kansas City's Virgil Thomson was first and foremost a composer. And in most instances, he was a really good one.
Known chiefly for his Pulitzer Prize-winning music for the documentary Louisiana Story, for his film scores The Plow that Broke the Plains and The River, as well as working with Gertrude Stein for his opera Four Saints in Three Acts, Thomson broke through in the orchestral world while composing in Paris in the 1920s. In some respects, he was writing Aaron Copland music before Copland started writing Copland music. And Symphony on a Hymn Tune reflects that approach: honest, homespun music that could only come from an American.
From the Hymnal to the Concert Hall: A Closer Look at Thomson's Music
A traditional four-movement symphony, the main idea is based on the hymn "How Firm a Foundation." (A secondary hymn, "Yes, Jesus Loves Me," figures prominently.) When the tune is presented, the strings take the first four bars with original harmonies intact. The woodwinds take over the other four bars with the kinds of prickly dissonances that inhabit Thomson's scores. The juxtaposition of unadorned, almost brazen consonance with strategic harmonic clashes is a primary hallmark.
The symphony also exhibits some adventurous orchestration and form. Thomson spends the final two-and-a-half minutes of the first movement, Introduction and Allegro, on an odd call and response with the unlikely quartet of a violin, cello, trombone and piccolo. It all ends abruptly with a bass drum thwack.
It's especially clear hereafter that Thomson's music contains plenty of humor and lightheartedness. There's some liberal use of a ratchet in the percussion section, along with incessant slide tromboning at the end of what is overall a quiet and reserved second movement that from his own notes is "the suggestion of a distant railway train."
If any music theorist or professor needed a three-minute excerpt to teach a Thomson lesson, the Allegretto third movement would certainly suffice. At its core is the bass line of the hymn, and everything that follows filters out of it, creating a lovely, spacious atmosphere.
In the finale, Thomson throws in a quotation of "For He's a Jolly Good Fellow," which fits decidedly well. He would later revisit "Jolly Good Fellow" at greater length in his music for the ballet Filling Station. Before the symphony can end happily, the listener better beware of the out-of-the-blue orchestra hits.
Thomson as Critic: Candid Yet Caustic
Practically nobody was spared from Virgil Thomson's acid pen. He was unwavering and could be merciless in his critiques. He certainly approved of his share of music written at the time, but when he expressed distaste, it was often visceral and construed as needlessly cruel and insensitive. Take his assessments of two seminal works of the 20th century.
On Gershwin's Porgy and Bess, he wrote, "I don't like fake folklore, nor fidgety accompaniments, nor bittersweet harmony, nor six-part choruses, nor gefiltefish orchestration." He also felt that Shostakovich's Leningrad symphony, despite vast public acclaim, "seems to have been written for the slow-witted, the not very musical, and the distracted."
Those evaluations aside, Thomson was a gifted writer who could back up his pointed analysis with fine music of his own. Ironically, the reviews for Symphony on a Hymn Tune weren't exactly all glowing. "The press was almost wholly disapproving," he once wrote. In reality, though, the symphony is brash, appealing and unmistakably American through and through. Leonard Bernstein chose to memorialize him this way (from the album liner notes of Thomson's three symphonies):
"Most of us preferred his unpredictable, provocative prose. But he will always remain brightly alive in the history of music, if only for the extraordinary influence his witty and simplistic music had on his colleagues, especially on Aaron Copland, and through them on most of American music in our century."
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