THOMPSON'S DIRECTORSHIP BEGINS

Following President Bok's address at the beginning of the fall term, Thomp¬son led the student body in singing Bach chorales plus music by Mozart and Palestrina. During his years at Curtis there were two choral groups: a Madrigal Chorus of twenty-five students begun the year before he came conducted by Barber, and an Institute Chorus that Thompson established and conducted. Unfortunately, both were disbanded before his brief tenure end¬ed. Noted Barber authority Barbara Heyman has written:

Musicologist and performer Alfred Mann, who sang in both groups, remem¬bered the Institute Chorus.

He also remembered that the Madrigal Chorus had two projects: rehearsing Monteverdi's Book 2 madrigal Ecco mormorar l’onde (not well known at the time) and making a studio recording for broadcast on April 23, 1940 of Bar¬ber's 1939 A Stopwatch and an Ordnance Map about the death of a soldier in the Spanish Civil War.

WORKING IN NEW YORK CITY 1925-26

The years between his arrival stateside in late October 1925 and his marriage in early 1927 were challenging but exciting for Thompson. First he had to find work and establish an American reputation, cultivate a number of impor¬tant musicians upon whom he could rely, and learn about the business aspects of his profession.

Once back, Thompson stayed briefly with his parents in Boston, where his father was headmaster of the Roxbury Latin School, before renting an apartment in New York's Greenwich Village in a four-story 1899 building at 180 Sullivan Street and taking up residence there. Looking back years later he recalled:

He returned to a country in the middle of Prohibition (1920-1933), and a city, that was reported to have had more than 30,000 speakeasies to “ease the pain.” Moreover, 1926 was the year that saw the death of Claude Monet in France, the first use of 16 mm film in the United States, the publication of Hemingway's novel The Sun Also Rises, the opening of Martha Graham's first dance studio, and the impressive debut of the canine Rin Tin Tin as the biggest box office draw.

In spite of pecuniary angst, he returned with a growing group of in¬fluential friends: Howard Hanson was now Director of the Eastman School of Music in Rochester, New York and a prominent conductor; Leopold Mannes's parents headed the Mannes School of Music; Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge continued to support composers and performers in the States and abroad; Elwell and Sowerby were gaining prominence as composers; and Malipiero would give him sage advice concerning his Second Symphony in the early 1930s. Contact had been established with BSO conductor Serge Koussevitzky, and New York City boasted numerous influential Harvard alumni including Daniel Gregory Mason who congregated at places such as the Harvard Club and the Century Association where Thompson became a member.

POST-STROKE RECOVERY

With Randall at home recovering from his stroke, Margaret flew from Kennedy Airport to Paris on October 2, 1975, and in the following days visited Giverny before going to London on the 7th to attend a number of theater productions. On the 19th she flew to Paris for fittings and by early November was back in Cambridge.

Meanwhile Randall was well enough by November 11th to resume occasional visits to several of his Boston clubs, where he enjoyed camaraderie and intellectual stimulation. In December he travelled to his first post-stroke conducting engagement, this in Lincoln, Nebraska at the First-Plymouth Congregational Church where Jack Levick was organist and choirmaster. Anticipating a return to what he loved, Thompson wrote:

While there, at a Sunday service he conducted the Plymouth Choir and the Nebraska Wesleyan University Choir in his Alleluia and Frostiana (nos. 1 and 6) among other pieces. Levick conducted performances of The Nativity on the evenings of December 12 and 13, 1975 before Thompson returned to Boston via United Airlines on the 14th. Almost immediately he was involved in rehearsals for the Tavern Club's December 18th production of Promotion, Oh Promotion (RT 105; play by Daniel Sargent) for which he wrote four brief numbers: a march and three songs.

In January 1976, growing in strength, he travelled to Cleveland for a concert at the Epworth-Euclid Church.

“I’m glad I’ve done more than compose. The other jobs make composing more interesting,” remarked Randall Thompson when interviewed in 1950. By then he was an eminent professor at Harvard University whose thirty-year career following graduation from Harvard in 1920 had already included study abroad, teaching, composing, conducting, accompanying, researching, writing, and work as an administrator. Although today Thompson is pri¬marily thought of as a composer of choral music sung by tens of thousands around the world, the simple fact is that the greater part of his career was spent as an academic. Teaching was his most important priority, one that often left him little time for composition. He was a distinguished and sought after music educator whose ability to lead as an administrator and whose superb educational vision and integrity have left an indelible mark on music education in the United States. He loved to travel, especially to his beloved Gstaad, Switzerland, and reveled in Italian culture.

The seminal event in his early career—one that drew great attention to him, both positive and negative—occurred when he returned to America in the early 1930s following a John Simon Guggenheim Fellowship that saw the composition of his highly-regarded Symphony no. 2 in E minor. Thomp¬son had relinquished his untenured teaching position at Wellesley College in 1929 to accept the Guggenheim, which was subsequently renewed for a sec¬ond year. Married with two children and with a third due in July, he returned home in May 1931 staying with his wife Margaret's parents in Montclair, New Jersey while looking for a full-time academic position to support his family. None having materialized, he quickly accepted part-time positions as guest conductor of the Dessoff Choirs during Margarete Dessoff's leave of absence and of the Madrigal Choir and Supervisors's Chorus at the Juil¬liard Graduate School. For the Dessoff Choirs he wrote his satirical piece Americana (commissioned by The League of Composers) on texts by H. L. Mencken. He also published occasional articles in Modern Music, Musical America, and Musical Quarterly and contributed a number of book reviews to the Saturday Review of Literature. A significant opportunity came in late 1931 when an Association of American Colleges “Subcommittee on selec¬tion of director” unanimously nominated him “for director of the investiga¬tion of college music under the sponsoring committee.”

While College Music: An Investigation was wrapping up in February 1935, the Thompsons established residence in Peace Dale, Rhode Island about eight miles south of Saunderstown. From there, with a wife and four young children to support, he once again sought work, but no academic position ma¬terialized for the 1935 fall term. While doing so, he maintained his interest in attending concerts when he could, and on February 5th, along with a large group of composers, he was in New York City for a concert performance of Dimitri Shostakovich's new opera Lady Macbeth of Mtsensk by the Cleve¬land Orchestra under Artur Rodzinski. He was once again in the city on the 18th to hear a League of Composers concert at the French Institute featuring Bartók's String Quartet no. 4 and Frederick Jacobi's String Quartet no. 2 (both Pro Arte Quartet), five songs by Nicholas Nabokoff sung by Anna Les¬kaya accompanied by Harrison Potter, and Roger Sessions's Piano Sonata no. 1 performed by John Duke. His informative review of the music was soon published in Modern Music. Ten days later he was in Washington D.C. to hear his own Second Symphony.

Over the next two years he wrote an occasional article, accepted an invitation to lecture again at Surette's Concord Summer School in 1935 as mentioned above, slowly resumed his compositional activity, was appointed secretary to the Harvard University Music Department Visiting Committee in 1934 and chair of a sub-committee on curriculum reform in 1935, had a growing number of performances of his compositions, lost his mother-in-law to illness in 1935 and his father shortly thereafter, and finally received an interim teaching position at Wellesley College for the 1936 spring semester. When pressures became acute in late 1935, he travelled to London and St. Anton, Austria to recover his equilibrium before starting the appointment at Wellesley. These years, immediately preceding his move west to the University of California at Berkeley in fall 1937, were the last before his academic career took flight, and he was never again unemployed until he retired.

BACKGROUND AND FOUNDING OF MUSICAL FELLOWSHIPS AT THE AMERICAN ACADEMY

The idea of establishing a place in Europe where American architects, paint¬ers, and sculptors could congregate and study had taken root when a group was planning for the 1893 World's Columbian Exposition in Chicago. A temporary American School for Architects in Rome was established in 1894, but this was dissolved after two years and reformed as the American Acad¬emy in Rome. Just after the turn of the century, with the financial assistance of founding members from New York including J. P. Morgan, J. P. Morgan Jr., John D. Rockefeller Jr., and the Carnegie and Rockefeller Foundations among others, an endowment was established. After functioning in various locations, the Academy was finally situated at the Villa Aurelia on Rome's Janiculum Hill and in buildings on adjacent land subsequently purchased by J. Pierpont Morgan, Sr. and transferred to the American Academy. Eighteen years later, the American School of Classical Studies merged with the Acad¬emy thus combining fine arts and classical studies under the auspices of a single administration.

In 1915 Academy Secretary C. Grant La Fargue cogently summarized the Academy's intent.

With Ode to the Virginian Voyage successfully performed in early April 1957, his son Whitney and daughter Varney happily married in late June, and his chairman's duties completed on July 1st, Thompson looked forward to a much-needed sabbatical that began and ended with summer stays abroad. During the first summer he resided once again at Gstaad's Park Hotel from early July through the 28th. “Switzerland is fine as ever. I begin to feel like a new man,” he wrote to recording engineer H. Vos Greenough. He also wrote to his godson Benjamin Fairbank providing him a glimpse of Gstaad and his routine.

While there he composed a song entitled The Passenger (RT 82), after which he spent time relaxing and travelling. Once returned to Cambridge on Sep¬tember 29th he devoted the fall and winter to composing an extensive a cap¬pella Requiem (RT 83). As he later told a Harvard Crimson reporter:

ROGER SESSIONS AND STUDY WITH ERNEST BLOCH (1920-21)

Having graduated from Harvard with clear aspirations of becoming a com¬poser, Thompson had to think seriously about his future and chart a course. One Harvard student he had looked up to since their meeting in 1917 was Roger Sessions. Precocious to say the least, Sessions had entered Harvard at age fourteen in 1911 and completed his bachelor's degree in three years though hardly with a sterling academic record. He then went to Yale Univer¬sity to study with Horatio Parker in 1916, and by fall 1917 had been hired to teach at Smith College. In 1919 Sessions's old Harvard College friend John Burk—who had succeeded him as editor of the Harvard Music Review when Sessions received academic probation—was now program annotator for the BSO. Burk gave him tickets to a performance of Psalms 137 and 114 by Ernest Bloch (1880-1959), and soon thereafter Sessions arranged a meeting with Bloch.

First interviews with the renowned composer for would-be students had the reputation of being rather daunting. In Sessions's case, he had pur¬chased several scores before his initial appointment at Bloch's 955 Lexing¬ton Avenue, New York City apartment in order to become acquainted with Bloch's music. He brought with him his own Symphonic Prelude, and after a few pleasantries was beckoned to the piano. As Sessions later recalled:

The period between Thompson's return from his Guggenheim Fellowship and the completion of College Music: An Investigation was pivotal. It moved his career in a significant new direction, that of assessing the role of music in liberal arts colleges and becoming a leader in curricular reform. This was a most important step toward future academic positions. Moreover, these years solidified his credentials as a choral conductor, welcomed the birth of his third and fourth children, and witnessed the exponential expansion of a group of influential friends. Sadly, it also witnessed the decline of his moth¬er's health and ultimately the death of both parents. While the success of his Second Symphony propelled him into the national spotlight as a composer, the necessity to work much of the time in non-academic settings curtailed his compositional output. These years yielded but a single new composition: Americana (RT 52) for chorus and piano. They also yielded a book and ten published articles. Unsure what employment summer and fall 1931 might bring, the family stayed with Margaret's parents in Montclair. As had been the case when returning after his Prix de Rome years, Thompson busied him¬self looking for work, which fortunately was not long in coming.

He wrote a series of articles: two concerned Antheil, and a third reviewed the Juilliard School performance of Jack and the Beanstalk, Louis Gruenberg's opera on John Erskine's libretto. A fourth concerned the second year at Yaddo, a Festival that had begun in 1932 and at which Thompson was present. He is one of seventeen pictured in a famous H. B. Settle photograph of composers and critics taken in the Reception Hall of the Trask Mansion in Saratoga Springs, New York. The opportunity to meet so many famous musicians must have been a welcome experience. His article, however, was quite uncomplimentary toward the failed direction he saw the festival moving yet it concluded on a more optimistic note.

THE HIRING PROCESS

Since his second Wellesley College appointment was only for the February-June 1936 term, Thompson remained on the permanent job search merry-go-round he had ridden more than a few times. During summer 1936 he and his family spent some time in New York before he set off for the White Top Folk Festival in Grayson County in the Blue Ridge Highlands of Vir¬ginia. This festival, which ran between 1931 and 1939, was organized by John A. Blakemore, Annabel Morris Buchanan, and John Powell. Although we do not know the number of visitors in 1936, the previous year in excess of ten thousand heard more than three hundred performers; however, Afri¬can-American performers were not allowed to participate. During the fall and winter Thompson was busy with Harvard Visiting Committee activities and correspondence with Oliver Strunk and staff at the Library of Congress concerning a performance of The Wind in the Willows that ultimately took place on March 11, 1937. Only sketchy information exists about his other activities between the end of his Wellesley stint and his position in Berkeley, though he continued to consider teaching positions.

He had in fact been courted by several institutions with offers to head their music departments, but his busy schedule of diverse duties as well as his desire not to be part of a “diploma mill” led him to reject them. What is clear, however, is that in late February or early March 1937 Thompson was contacted about a potential position at the University of California in Berkeley. Principal players in the impending negotiations included President Gordon Sproul, Vice-President and Provost Monroe E. Deutsch, Professor of Spanish and Portuguese Rudolph Schevill, and the three-member Music Department Search Committee: Albert Elkus (Chair of the Music Department) and Professors Edward Griffith Stricklen and Charles Cushing. By March 9th Elkus had written to Eric T. Clarke (AAC in New York City and a member of the Harvard Visiting Committee) hoping to set up a “sounding out” meeting at Harvard between Clarke and Thompson.