The music he heard was part and parcel of the wide-open world around him - Civil War songs, cowboy songs, the blues, barn-dance music, Baptist hymns, folk songs, sentimental popular songs, as well as the canons of Western art music that he studied. This image of Kansas City never left him and was a dominant factor in his personality. Virgil Thomson observed and absorbed the exciting frontier sportsmanship, often not so polite derring-do, of a mobile, burgeoning self-confident city. This warm, close-knit family gave their spoiled child pretty much a free hand to explore all the allurements, the prim and the rowdy, of a thriving river town.īy the 1890s, Kansas City, Missouri, was a commercial and artistic rival of Chicago. Virgil Thomson's sympathetic Scottish father was tone deaf his English-Welsh mother musical, forthright, and practical his beloved sister artistic, gifted in painting. ![]() The Thomsons were genteel folk, solid, sturdy stuff not rigid, a wisely tolerant middle-class family. They admired him but were aware of the need to protect themselves from his boundless energy and perceptive ability to ferret out fuzzy conclusions and illogical thinking. He must have been a difficult child to handle and was surely an oddball to his many friends. Thomson was a prodigy: intellectually, verbally, musically, and literarily, and he voraciously apprehended the world around him. Scott Fitzgerald, Sherwood Anderson, Langston Hughes, Ernest Hemingway, Cole Porter, and Marianne Moore. In fact, the entire Midwest is a bedrock of our cultural history whose native sons and daughters include T. The journalist Horace Greeley, the editor William Allen White, the painter Thomas Hart Benton, and Harry Truman are among its glories. The state has never been a cultural desert its historical and sociological history is of great importance in our political life. Thomson's great romance with Missouri needs no apology. ![]() You did not speak of Kansas City, Kansas, often.or go there unless you had business." The truculence of these sentences was his benchmark to his dying day. He set the record straight in the first sentences of his spic and span autobiography (1966): "To anyone brought up there, as I was, 'Kansas City' always meant the Missouri one. Commissioned for the Thomson centennial catalog (1996) ( Download a PDF)Įverything may have been up-to-date in Kansas City, Kansas, as Rodgers and Hammerstein wrote, but everything happened in Kansas City, Missouri, where Virgil Thomson, its most inimitable citizen, was born on 25 November 1896.
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