The Composer’s Voice: Virgil Thomson

“Composition isn’t something you decide. Composition is something you have a compulsion about.”

Listen to Virgil Thomson speak these words and many others in a netcast featuring excerpts from historic interviews.  Over a period of three years, Vivan Perlis of Yale’s Oral History of American Music project interviewed Thomson in his historic apartment in New York’s Chelsea Hotel. This netcast intersperses highlights of those interviews with an outline of Thomson’s life and career.

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