Composers brought some problems upon themselves, though, as Thomson explained in an exposé of the “International style” of complex contemporary music. Music that “was never intended for anything but prizewinning and the impressing of other musicians, has given a black eye to all music written since 1918,” Thomson wrote. “The general music public and the trustee class have both revolted.”  This book earned Thomson his job at The Herald Tribune. Once in place, Thomson sagely recruited other composer-critics to assist him, among them Lou Harrison, Arthur Berger and Peggy Glanville-Hicks.  I was already researching a biography of Thomson when I started writing reviews for The Boston Globe. Delighted with this turn in my career, Thomson took me under his wing. For more than a year I sent him copies of every review of mine The Globe published. He filled them with penciled comments. Periodically I reported to his apartment at the Chelsea Hotel in Manhattan for his post-mortem critiques.  I was fascinated that, from the start, Thomson treated me as a musician with perfectly fine training who was fully entitled to his opinions. He seldom questioned what I said. But he painstakingly took apart how I said it. What did I mean by using vague adjectives like “magnificent” to describe a thrilling performance? If indeed it was exciting, then magnificent, besides being a dull word, was the wrong one.  He scratched out my every use of what he considered slang, words like “gutsy” or “hotshot.” What did I mean by the phrase “Fauré-like atmospherics?” He continually pressed me to come up with simple ways to make vivid the sound of the music or the character of a performance.  How is this done? Here is Thomson the master at work: Wanda Landowska’s harpsichord recital was “as stimulating as a needle shower.” The opera “Die Meistersinger” is enchanting because “Wagner without his erotico-metaphysical paraphernalia is a better composer than with it. He pays more attention to holding interest by musical means, wastes less time predicting doom, describing weather, soul states, and ecstatic experiences.” Arthur Rubinstein at the piano is “authoritative, direct and courteous, like the captain of a trans-Atlantic liner.”  In time, Thomson understood that the protocols of journalism had changed. Critics had to be careful about turning their position into a platform for polemics, or about dispensing provocative generalizations, as he once gleefully had. Even if his approach might not meet contemporary ethical standards, the way he championed new music and exposed artistic timidity remains a model of how to do the job.  It’s still inspiring to read his 1951 column taking down Rudolf Bing, the general manager of the Metropolitan Opera. In a radio interview Bing had defended the company against the charge of neglecting living composers by arguing that the public showed scant interest in new opera. But, Bing said, next season the company was presenting the new Stravinsky opera “The Rake’s Progress,” so “we shall see then what the public reaction will be.”  In the final flourish of this withering column, Thomson asked: “Does this mean that he is giving contemporary music just one chance to compete with ‘Carmen?’ Really, one has heard double-talk before from Metropolitan spokesmen but nothing quite so cynical as this.”  FROM “THE STATE OF MUSIC” (1939) Thomson explains that the “basic sales trick” of the music “appreciation-racket” is the use of “the religious technique.”  “Music is neither taught nor defined. It is preached. A certain limited repertory of pieces, 90 percent of them 100 years old, is assumed to contain most that the world has to offer of musical beauty and authority ... It is further assumed (on Platonic authority) that continued auditive subjection to this repertory harmonizes the mind and sweetens the character, and that the conscious paying of attention during the auditive process intensifies the favorable reaction. Every one of these assumptions is false, or at least highly disputable, including the Platonic one.”  ON DIMITRI MITROPOULOS CONDUCTING THE NEW YORK PHILHARMONIC AT CARNEGIE HALL (1953) Thomson writes that Mitropoulos’s “personal excitement, bordering on hysteria, was least under control” during Schumann’s Third Symphony.“Actually, when the conductor, in moments of calm, conducted straightforwardly and with a minimum of motion, his orchestra followed with a maximum of beauty and with the authority that is our Philharmonic’s way. But for the most part he did everything to the orchestra but conduct it. He whipped it up as if it were a cake, kneaded it like bread, shuffled and riffled an imaginary deck of cards, wound up a clock, shook a recalcitrant umbrella, rubbed something on a washboard and wrung it out. Really, there were very few moments when a film taken of the conductor alone, without sound, would have given any clue to the fact that he was directing a musical composition.”  FROM “VIRGIL THOMSON” (1966) On his critical principles: “These principles, as I understood them, engaged me to expose the philanthropic persons in control of our musical institutions for the amateurs they are, to reveal the manipulators of our musical distribution for the culturally retarded profit makers that indeed they are, and to support with all the power of my praise every artist, composer, group or impresario whose relation to music was straightforward, by which I mean based only on music, and the sound it makes.”  A version of this article appears in print on July 31, 2016, on page AR7 of the New York edition with the headline: An Essential Critic, but Not a Role Model. Order Reprints| Today's Paper|Subscribe
The Library of America releases the second of two volumes devoted to the composer Virgil Thomson, whose feisty opinions would be a conflict of interest today.