Skip to main content Accessibility help
×
  • This book is no longer available to purchase from Cambridge Core
Online publication date:
May 2020
Print publication year:
2018
Online ISBN:
9781576473320

Book description

The Road Not Taken: A Documented Biography of Randall Thompson chronicles the extraordinary career of a composer, conductor, arts administrator, teacher, and reformer of music curricula. Based on extensive archival research, interviews, and a thorough knowledge of his compositions, it is the first full-length study of "The Dean of American Choral Composers" as he was affectionately known. Thompson's life intersected with numerous composers and conductors including George Antheil, Leonard Bernstein, Ernest Bloch, Aaron Copland, Walter Damrosch, Archibald "Doc" Davison, Serge Koussevitzky, Gian Francesco Malipiero, Walter Piston, Fritz Reiner, Harold Schmidt, Roger Sessions, Bruno Walter, and G. Wallace Woodworth, among many others. Illustrated with more than fifty photographs, the book emphasizes his study at Harvard (1916-20), his year with Bloch (1921-22), his Damrosch Fellowship years at the American Academy in Rome (1922-25), his work heading the College Music Study (1932-35), and his academic life at Wellesley College, University of California at Berkeley, Curtis Institute, University of Virginia, Princeton, and Harvard (1928-65). Virtually all of his more than 120 compositions are considered with emphasis given to his most important works such as Symphony no. 2, Alleluia, The Testament of Freedom, The Last Words of David, Requiem, Frostiana, and The Passion according to Saint Luke. It argues that he followed a more conservative compositional path compared to other composers of his generation whose music often stressed atonality, rhythmic complexity, and serialism, which was for Thompson the road not taken.

Refine List

Actions for selected content:

Select all | Deselect all
  • View selected items
  • Export citations
  • Download PDF (zip)
  • Save to Kindle
  • Save to Dropbox
  • Save to Google Drive

Save Search

You can save your searches here and later view and run them again in "My saved searches".

Please provide a title, maximum of 40 characters.
×

Contents

Metrics

Altmetric attention score

Full text views

Total number of HTML views: 0
Total number of PDF views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

Book summary page views

Total views: 0 *
Loading metrics...

* Views captured on Cambridge Core between #date#. This data will be updated every 24 hours.

Usage data cannot currently be displayed.