Composer Scott Wheeler Remembers Virgil Thomson

Composer Scott Wheeler’s opera Democracy was commissioned by Plácido Domingo and premiered by Washington National Opera. His first opera, The Construction of Boston, is available on the Naxos American Classics series. His most recent commission is for an opera for the Metropolitan Opera and Lincoln Center Theatre. Scott is the recipient of the Stoeger Prize from the Chamber Music Society of Lincoln Center, as well as awards from the Guggenheim Foundation and many others.   Some of his songs will be performed in the Music Shed on Friday, July 3, beginning at 7:30, as part of this year’s Virgil Thomson Project.

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Festival:  How did you meet Virgil Thomson?

SW: My composer friend Rodney Lister introduced me to Virgil’s music, then, in the spring of 1976, to Virgil himself. The occasion was Virgil’s visit to Boston for the Boston Lyric Opera production of The Mother of Us All. Rodney and I met Virgil at his hotel (the Ritz) and took him to the Harvard Square apartment of our friend Ezra Sims, who served us all afternoon tea. As I recall, Virgil wasn’t in a good mood, perhaps because the BLO production wasn’t very good. I don’t remember much about that performance, but it certainly didn’t encourage me to get to know this wonderful opera.
My next meetings with Virgil were in the spring of 1979, also through Rodney. I was in my first year teaching at Emerson College; Rodney was my accompanist and suggested an all-Thomson program for our spring concert. We did the Cantata on Poems of Edward Lear, an excerpt from Four Saints in Three Acts, and several smaller works, including the brilliantly original Capital Capitals, for which I played piano. On this visit, Virgil was in a much better mood.

In those years, Tony Tommasini comprised the other half of the Emerson music department. The main musical focus at Emerson was (and still is) musical theatre, but Tony and I created the Emerson Opera Workshop. Our first production was a shortened version of Monteverdi’s Coronation of Poppea, in English. Its success emboldened us in February 1981 to produce The Mother of Us All, in a four-player orchestration; Tony played piano and I conducted. Virgil on this visit was very happy and at his most charming. He invited me and Rodney to study vocal writing with him that summer, which we did, coming three mornings a week to his apartment at the Chelsea Hotel. I asked that he include some work in orchestration, in which I felt my training had been deficient, so we did that too. At the end, he considered our orchestration good enough to engage us to orchestrate some of his piano portraits for an orchestral commission in Wisconsin. From that point on, Virgil and I were good friends, despite an age difference of 56 years.

Festival: What sort of person was he?

SW: Virgil was a rigorous and exacting musician, a fellow who loved to drink and say naughty things over dinner, a cranky guy who made life difficult for waiters and a succession of secretaries, and a very generous friend to me and to many others. I still miss him.

Festival: What did you learn from him that has become important in your own compositions?

SW: Virgil’s teaching of text setting focused on syllable lengths and the stresses of both words and word groupings. These concerns were almost completely technical – he was less interested in “what you’re trying to do here” than any other composition teacher I had encountered. He taught that to set a text is to give a line reading, as an actor does. As with an actor’s line reading, the object isn’t to show how deeply you feel the emotion of the words but rather to project the text in a way that is clear, so the audience may feel that emotion. These principles seem simple enough, but I’ve spent much of the rest of my composing life exploring their implications in setting poetry and prose in song and in opera. This clear and useful way of thinking about words and music has also informed my work as a conductor and coach in both opera and musical theater.

From Virgil’s own music I have taken few specific techniques but rather an attitude of playful invention. As he said, writing music isn’t about competing with Beethoven, it’s just a function of the musical mind.

I also learned from Virgil’s example of a composing life that took place in the professional rather than the academic world. His basic schedule has always been my ideal: he composed in the morning, took care of letters and other business in the afternoon, and had an active and varied social life in the evening.

Festival: And in your teaching?

SW: Virgil talked to any young musician as one professional to another. At first his manner struck me as blunt to the point of rudeness, but I quickly found it refreshing, and have kept this as a model in my dealings with my own students.

Festival: In which works of yours in particular where you feel yourself as part of the same tradition as Virgil Thomson?

A couple of my songs are modeled after Thomson songs in their vocal line, in their accompaniment, or in certain aspects of the texts I selected. Virgil’s settings of Kenneth Koch inspired my interest in that wonderful poet, who provided the libretti for my opera The Construction of Boston and a short dramatic work The Gold Standard. The Construction of Boston is dedicated to Virgil, and includes a couple moments of direct homage to Four Saints in Three Acts. I have also taken up Virgil’s practice of writing musical portraits from life.

Festival: What does the phrase “American Music” mean for you?

SW: American music is not a goal for me – I’m surrounded by it, as most of us are. Virgil famously said that American music is any sort of music that Americans care to write. He didn’t want to be limited by anyone’s notions or prescriptions.

Festival: If there is one thing you would like students today to know about Virgil, what would it be?

SW: Most young composers could benefit from Virgil’s advice about text setting, which is more liberating than limiting, and a big difference in helping vocal music to communicate. Young composers would also be encouraged by Virgil’s attitudes and insights into the world in which we composers find ourselves. He fought against the marginalization of composers in the world of music. Like us, he faced the notion that the inheritors of the great tradition of Beethoven and Mozart are the performers of the classic masterworks rather than living composers. He regarded this attitude as a ridiculous fiction perpetrated by wealthy amateurs, marketing people, and various other interested parties. Virgil’s witty and penetrating analysis of the situation in his book The State of Music is still pertinent and hilariously readable.

Festival: And what would you say to today audiences about his music?

SW: I don’t like to tell audiences anything – I just invite them to listen. Virgil’s music has much to enjoy.