This month, WQXR is taking 30 pieces from the 2014 Classical Countdown and asking music experts to give us their "next step" compositions.
Countdown Piece: Copland's Appalachian Spring
Countdown Position: No. 32
For a next step: Try Virgil Thomson's The Mother of Us All
Choice by: Tim Page, professor of journalism and music at the University of Southern California; Author of Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles - 1940-1954
Recording available at Arkivmusic.com
If you enjoy Copland's Appalachian Spring, what's a good next step? We asked Tim Page, a professor of journalism and music at the University of Southern California and a Pulitzer Prize-winning arts journalist, who proposed The Mother of Us All by American composer Virgil Thomson.
Composed three years after Copland's landmark orchestral score, The Mother of Us All (1947) is an abstracted look at the life of feminist leader Susan B. Anthony. Like Appalachian Spring, it's filled with sentiment and gentle nostalgia, as well as doses of Americana: marches, waltzes and hymn tunes run through the score. The opera's librettist is Gertrude Stein, who had died shortly before the premiere: "I am sorry now that I did not write an opera with her every year," Thomson later said. "It had not occurred to me that both of us would not always be living."
"This really sums up Thomson's aesthetic," said Page who is editor of the recently published collection of writings, Virgil Thomson: Music Chronicles - 1940-1954. "It was deeply rooted in the hymns that Thomson remembered from his Baptist childhood in Kansas City."
"There's a sort of direct simplicity to it," Page continues. "The thing that's interesting is that Copland grew up on Washington Avenue in Brooklyn and yet he's probably best known for these evocations of the American heartland. Virgil grew up in Kansas City and spent a lot of his time in Paris. He used to say that he wrote music to tell Parisians about America."
Listen to two excerpts from the opera in a recording by the Manhattan School of Music, starting with the "Hymns"
Additional Excerpts: