Biography

Thompson started learning music at a very young age and was composing by the time he was in his teens.  He decided early on that he wanted his life to be in music, but it is telling that he attended Harvard University—a liberal arts school—to achieve this goal rather than a conservatory.  At Harvard he studied with Archibald T. Davison, Edward Burlingame Hill, and Walter Spalding; this last had studied himself with Joseph Rheinberger of Abendlied fame.  One of the defining events of his time at Harvard was failing his audition for the Glee Club.  He later claimed that “My [entire] life has been an attempt to strike back” for that failure.  He also lost out in the 1920 Boott Prize competition to Nathaniel Dett, who won for his popular Listen to the Lambs.

Such failures notwithstanding, he eventually earned his A.B. degree.  In case you are wondering why Harvard designates its bachelor’s degrees as A.B. rather than B.A. (the way normal places do), it is because the diplomas are written in Latin; ergo (to throw a little Latin around) students receive an “artium baccalaureus” degree rather than a Bachelor of Arts degree.  To be honest, many things at Harvard seem to be different just for the sake of being different.  Students do not live in dorms but rather in “houses;” they do not declare majors but rather “concentrations;” a course that lasts a full year (two semesters) is a “full course” while a one-semester course is a “half course,” and so on.  Or at least that’s how things were when I was there; perhaps some things have changed (students still live in “houses,” though.)

After graduation Thompson moved to New York where he studied briefly with Ernest Bloch, and then he was back at Harvard for a master’s degree.  This was followed by three full years at the American Academy in Rome, where his composition colleagues included Leo Sowerby and Howard Hanson, the latter soon to lead the newly established Eastman School of Music.  In Rome he also became close to composer and noted Monteverdi scholar Gian Francesco Malipiero, who instilled in Thompson the idea that choral writing “was an art form of the highest seriousness of purpose, not to be relegated to a second place in back of so-called ‘absolute music’“ (Urrows).

Back in the United States Thompson had a teaching career at a series of important places that included Wellesley College, Berkeley, the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia (where he was director, and where Bernstein was one of his students), the University of Virginia (where he was head of the Music Department in the School of Fine Arts), Princeton, and finally Harvard, where he served as chair of the Music Department.  A major achievement in that last position was establishing the Eda Kuhn Loeb Music Library, an absolutely superlative collection that is a musicologist’s dream.

In addition to his faculty positions, Thompson also held not one but two Guggenheim Fellowships.  Further, he undertook (on commission) a three-year study of collegiate music education.  This led to the publication of College Music in 1935, where he advocated strongly for a Liberal Arts approach to music, e.g. no course credit for lessons or ensembles (this practice held true until relatively recently at places such as Harvard, Williams, etc.)  Following this study, he proposed curricular revisions for Harvard, at their request.  Thanks to Thompson, Harvard began its course Music 1: The History of Music, which was a novelty at the time but was soon copied by other colleges and universities.  A more accurate title for the class would have been “A History of Western Classical Music,” although by the time I was a teaching assistant for the class, many decades later, it had broadened slightly to include jazz and musical theater.

Given Thompson’s very strong preference for a music education that downplayed technical facility, it is surprising that he was asked to be director of the Curtis Institute.  What is not surprising is that he was not successful in this position.  He tried various curricular changes; for example, all students had to sing in the (no credit) choir that he rehearsed (all students, not just voice majors) and he required all students to attend lectures by visiting luminaries.  Of course, this sounds great to me, but I’m a choral singer and a musicologist, not an aspiring concert pianist or violin virtuoso.  The one really positive thing that he attempted was offering a faculty position (with few obligations) to Béla Bartók, whose final years in America were plagued by terrible financial problems.  Sadly, Bartók declined his offer.

Thompson remained in Cambridge after his retirement from Harvard, which led to my one almost-encounter with him.  When I was a graduate student, he contacted the Music Department to find someone who could serve him as a general compositional dogsbody.  My initial reaction was “wait—Randall Thompson is alive?”  We were then told that, if we pursued this opportunity, we must be very careful never to address him with “hi.”  Evidently this slovenly alternative to “hello” was anathema to him, and possibly indicative of depraved youth.  In any event, I decided to pass on this chance to interact with Thompson, although one of my fellow graduate students, composer Roger Bourland, did end up working for him.

Works

It is somewhat amusing to read in the Norton/Grove Concise Encyclopedia of Music that Thompson is “best known for his choral music, three symphonies...two string quartets...and the symphonic fantasy A Trip to Nahanti.”  A more accurate statement would stop at “best known for his choral music.”  As far as I can tell, the instrumental music has essentially vanished from the repertoire, although his “Wind in the Willows” string quartet does sound intriguing.  And perhaps the recent interest in mid-century American composers will stir up some of his non-choral works; for example, my mother’s The Concert Companion: A Comprehensive Guide to Symphonic Music from 1947 includes his second symphony, supposedly the most popular of his three.

Also amusing to read is the Oxford Concise Dictionary of Music, where, of Thompson’s “many choral works,” the only three mentioned by name are Americana, the Luke Passion, and the Requiem—three pieces that nobody else would list as his most significant.  These odd reference works notwithstanding, Thompson is a huge figure in American choral music.  He has been called “the Dean of American Choral Composers” (the equally unofficial position of “Dean of American Music” was reserved for Copland.) Thompson was certainly the most frequently performed American choral composer for close to 60 years, until Morten Lauridsen came along, and you would be hard put to find an American choral singer who has not performed something by Thompson.

His best-known work is surely his Alleluia, which, for most of the twentieth century, was the most frequently purchased and performed choral composition by an American composer.  Next in line would be Frostiana, a set of seven choruses (variously for mixed choir, women’s voices, and men’s voices) to seven of Robert Frost’s poems.  I personally prefer a little more bite in my music than these pieces offer, but it’s possible I was scarred by bad performances in High School.  Interestingly, these quintessentially American works were composed in Switzerland, where Thompson owned a home and where he considered becoming a citizen.  Having lived happily in Europe for several years, though, I can attest that one spends a certain amount of time contemplating one’s native heath.  Just think of American Henry James, resident in Britain, almost all of whose novels deal in some way with the Europe/America question posed to all who experience both.

Other popular works include the cantata The Peaceable Kingdom, the motet The Last Words of David, and of course The Testament of Freedom.

Thompson has been called the “Norman Rockwell of Music,” a designation not intended as a compliment, and Richard Dyer called him “A composer more often performed than honored.”  In fact, he received many, many, honors throughout his lifetime.  And surely the greatest honor a composer can receive is constant performance.  His choral works are unlikely to fall out of the repertoire anytime soon.

Alleluia

The Alleluia is, hands down, Thompson’s most famous piece.  Here is a work that has, in the 85 years since its creation, sold more than three million copies; generated countless performances, including one before Pope John Paul II; been given arrangements for women’s voices and men’s voices by Thompson himself; and received arrangements by others for symphonic band, strings, horn quartet, and even four tubas.  The unauthorized brass arrangement by the American Legion was almost the subject of a lawsuit; they received a “cease and desist” order and their illegal scores and parts were confiscated.  And just the other day I heard a lovely string quartet performance by the Ying Quartet.  Since we choral singers have taken over the gorgeous Adagio from Samuel Barber’s String Quartet, it seems only fair that string quartets should return the compliment by adding the Thompson Alleluia to their repertoire.

1940 saw the opening of the Berkshire Music Center at Tanglewood, then as now the summer home of the Boston Symphony Orchestra.  When BSO music director Serge Koussevitzky and choral conductor G. Wallace Woodworth, who was the assistant director of the BMC, discussed plans for the opening ceremony, the following exchange took place, as described by Woodworth (much of the information on the Alleluia’s genesis comes from the excellent The Road Not Taken: A Documentary Biography of Randall Thompson by Cart Schmidt and Elizabeth Schmidt, as well as Carl Schmidt’s The Story of Randall Thompson’s Alleluia Revisited).

Woodworth:  “What about a classical overture or a symphony by BSO members?”

Koussevitzky: “No, the whole school must participate, every member—it is their own opening session.”

W: Then perhaps “two or three of the noblest Bach chorales as fitting and above all practicable for the occasion?”

K: “Bach would be fine, but we are an American music center and a new one! We must have a new work, especially for the occasion.  I will ask Randall Thompson.”

Thompson, at that time director of the Curtis Institute, accepted the commission and began it immediately after he finished providing 65 pages of an orchestral score for his choral work Americana, which previously had only a piano accompaniment.  As he wrote to a friend, he “returned home to write a choral piece which Koussevitzky had requested for performance at the opening exercises of the Berkshire Music Center.  By rights, I suppose, I should have declined to write it, but I was afraid he might then ask someone at Eastman or Juilliard to do it [HM: the horror!], and that would never do...I was tired enough to go to sleep for a week. The thought of turning out a piece of music was like unto squeezing water from a stone.  Still I always like to write ‘on order’ and in fulfil[l]ment of definite specifications; and Koussevitzky’s request was certainly that. The piece had to be of a kind appropriate to such an occasion and at the same time simple and direct enough to be performed successfully after one hour’s rehearsal [Thompson’s emphasis] by the student body, on the first day of school. I began it on Monday, July 1st, and on Friday I turned it over to the lithographers...The 300 copies arrived just in time for the rehearsal and the student body sang it—apparently to perfection—at the close of the opening exercises.”

Woodworth had, understandably, been worried about whether the work would arrive on time, since on Saturday, just 48 hours before the opening ceremonies, nothing had been heard from Thompson.  Someone called the composer; he said that the copies would arrive Monday morning.  Nothing came during the morning; Woodworth, who was to conduct, hid copies of Bach chorales in the barn where the one-hour chorus rehearsal was to begin at 2:00 in case they needed to move to Plan B (B for Bach, of course).  Five minutes before 2:00 the music appeared—all was well!

Woodworth conducted the work (Thompson was not present) at the conclusion of the opening ceremonies on July 8; it was performed again later in the summer (16 August) as part of a Tanglewood fundraising concert for “Allied Relief Fund Benefit (for British Aid).”  The original performers likely had no idea how incredibly popular the work would become, or that it would be performed every year henceforth at the opening ceremonies (and, after Koussevitzky died, annually at his grave to mark his July 26 birthday), or that it would receive performances worldwide up to the present.  Inevitably the piece was sung at Thompson’s own funeral.

After the premiere, Thompson wrote to his good friend and Harvard classmate Leopold Damrosch Mannes.  Mannes was the son of the founders of the Mannes School of Music; on the Damrosch side of the family, his grandfather and two uncles were noted conductors.  With this background, it’s not surprising that Leopold, a pianist and composer, eventually became President of Mannes.  And now for a little Rochester connection: in his spare time, Mannes invented Kodachrome film (I’m not making this up!)

Thompson considered Mannes his “most fastidious and effective critic,” and thus wrote to him that “The whole Academy student body sang my Alleluia after one rehearsal, an hour before, at the opening exercises. (I knew they would be expected to and wrote with this in mind.) Will you be good enough to give me your sternest criticism of the piece?  I want to publish it right away, but I don’t like to do so without your permission.  Perhaps you won’t think it’s worth criticizing.  If so, just let me know that, bluntly.  If it’s any good at all, I’d like to have it be as good as possible: it’s the kind of piece that would fit so many different types of occasion.”

Mannes made various suggestions; Thompson followed some but not all.  Mannes’s final take on the work was that “If the piece does not dare as much as other things you’ve done, and if it is definitely embedded in tradition, I don’t doubt that it is because it was written to be learned quickly or even read at sight.  That being the case, it is a marvel of choral writing, and I take my hat off, honestly I do.”

E. Schirmer, Thompson’s usual publisher, brought the work out quite quickly, on September 16 of the same year.  Thompson had various suggestions about the publication that Schirmer appears to have followed: he wanted the work published separately rather than as part of a series, he wanted specific wording presented in a specific way on the cover, in dark green letters, and he wanted a cover of “pale green with yellowish tinge.”  That color choice was meant to be ecumenical and also to reflect the fact that “the Shed at Tanglewood (where the piece was first sung) is pale yellowish green, against the dark green of the surrounding foliage.”  The copy I am singing from looks like it comes from an early printing (yellowing scotch tape holding everything together, four successive catalogue numbers from the Eastman Ensemble Library) and its sickly green color and title page layout indicate that Schirmer followed most of Thompson’s suggestions.

Thompson wrote the work for SATB a cappella chorus; he considered using the text “dona nobis pacem” (grant us peace), which would have been fitting given its time of composition.  But mindful of the limited rehearsal time and the fact that not everyone singing the piece would be a vocalist (though all were musicians), he restricted the text to just two words: Alleluia for 76 measures, followed by Amen in the last two measures (in fact, the altos never sing that final word).  The text setting is frequently syllabic and the melodic motion is often by step, two factors that facilitate performance.  Much of the work is written in invertible counterpoint, where voice parts can be exchanged without causing any harmonic or voice-leading issues.  The harmony rarely strays from D major, another helpful decision on Thompson’s part, but the work begins with a second-inversion tonic triad rather than the root position chord one might expect.  The unique 5/4 measure in the printed version began life in the original manuscript as a standard 4/4 bar without the spicy cross-relation between soprano A# and bass A natural.

The initial tempo is lento, another good choice, and no tempo change occurs until more than halfway through the work.  Thompson himself conducted the work rather slowly (quarter note = 52/54; his rendition took about six minutes to perform), and he wanted no breath between the first two measures.  The dynamics are almost always quite soft.  This means that when the music finally does get louder, and the tempo finally does speed up, it makes for a very satisfying climax and contrast to what has gone before.  Overall, an hour’s rehearsal would indeed work for musicians at the level of the Berkshire Music Center.  And these days the piece is so familiar that even those of us who have never sung it before basically know “how it goes.”

We’ll close with Thompson’s thoughts on the piece.  He said that “I’m always getting letters about the next piece [Alleluia].  People want to know what it means or they want to know how to conduct it or some other question.  And they want to know how fast it should go and why it doesn’t work if you sing it loud and fast.  It simply doesn’t.  The reason is it isn’t the kind of Hallelujah...that Handel had in mind.  There are various ways of saying “Blessed be the name of the Lord” or whatever the literal meaning is.  You can say it on your knees or you can say it shouting.  You can say it quietly to yourself.  This piece was written at the time of the fall of France.  I think that Dr. Koussevitzky wanted a rather sensational kind of fanfare, a gesture that really booms and I just didn’t feel like writing it.  It was too, too sad.  O those wonderful, wonderful words of Job which are always used, or almost always I guess, used in the funeral service, quoting Job who says: “The Lord gave and the Lord hath taken away.  Blessed be the name of the Lord.”  This is an Old Testament way of saying what the New Testament says when it says ‘Thy will be done.”  “Blessed be the name of the Lord”—so that I think I mention this to explain why this is not a shouting kind of Alleluia.”

The Testament of Freedom

The Testament of Freedom sets four texts by Thomas Jefferson.  Today we look at Jefferson with a somewhat jaundiced eye.  The man was a slaveholder, after all, and it is now widely—though not universally—acknowledged that he had a decades-long sexual relationship with Sally Hemings that resulted in at least six illegitimate children.  It is extremely difficult to imagine that this relationship was consensual, given that (1) Hemings was enslaved and (2) she was only 14 when all of this began (he was 44).  Sadly, such “relationships” were all too common in antebellum America.

In 1943, however, Jefferson was one of the unquestioned greats of American history.  One of the Founding Fathers (taxation without representation = bad = time to break away from Britain), he was the main author of the Declaration of Independence as well as the Governor of Virginia, an ambassador (technically “minister”) to France, the first Secretary of State (under Washington), the second Vice-President (under Adams), and the third president of the United States, at which time he enabled the Louisiana Purchase that effectively doubled the country’s territory.  Fun fact: back in the day, the person who lost the presidential election became Vice President—yowza!  Jefferson’s own Vice President was the infamous Aaron Burr, who killed Alexander Hamilton in a duel (thereby ruining his own life as well).  Jefferson is the subject of one of the most beautiful memorials in Washington (all those cherry blossoms!), his face is on the nickel as well as the $2 bill, and so on.  And hey, the guy’s on Mount Rushmore!  (along with Washington, Lincoln, and Teddy Roosevelt).

More to the point, he was the founder of the University of Virginia, where Thompson was working in 1943 when he wrote this piece.  The composition was meant to mark not just the annual Founder’s Day (April 13), but more specifically the bicentennial of Jefferson’s birth, and the premiere was on just that day, 13 April 1943.  The piece was written for TTBB chorus and piano; Thompson played the piano at the premiere.  The reason for the all-male chorus was that there were no undergraduate women on the Charlottesville campus in 1943, because everyone knew they had cooties.  Jesting aside, there weren’t any undergraduate women because they weren’t wanted.  Oh, women could get a degree from the University of Virginia, but they were safely sequestered on a separate campus so that they wouldn’t pollute the pure atmosphere of the real UVa (gorgeous campus designed by Jefferson).  And in case you were wondering, yes, this was an all-white school.  It took a lawsuit in the 1950s to integrate the campus, and women weren’t allowed until 1970.  So just stop to think about this for a minute.  This is a PUBLIC university, supported by everyone’s taxes (not just taxes paid by white men), that was exclusively for the use of white men.  Talk about taxation without representation!

The premiere of the work was a big deal.  It was recorded by CBS and broadcast, and then transmitted by short wave radio to the Allied Armed Forces in Europe (remember, we are in the middle of World War II at this point).  Afterwards Thompson orchestrated the work, which meant that following the unexpected death of President Franklin D. Roosevelt on 12 April 1943, Serge Koussevitsky was able to use the piece to conclude Boston Symphony’s memorial concert in Carnegie Hall (or almost conclude; it was followed by the Star-Spangled Banner).  In 1960 Thompson created an arrangement for band, and he provided a version for mixed chorus in time for the bicentennial in 1976.

The four movements of the Testament use the following writings by Jefferson (all chosen by Thompson himself):

1. A Summary View of the Rights of British America (1774)
2. Declaration of the Causes and Necessity of Taking Up Arms (1775)
3. Ditto
4. Letter to John Adams (1821)

As numerous writers have noted, the composition follows a quasi-symphonic structure.  After the opening instrumental flourish, whose rhythm corresponds nicely to “Tho-mas Jef-fer-son,” we commence with a stately, hymn-like first movement (with its immediate reference to God) sprinkled with fanfare-like motives.  The attaca second movement corresponds to the slow movement of a symphony.  In this movement it is apparent to the chorus that we are singing prose, not poetry (the more common source of choral texts) as we scramble to get all of those polysyllabic words attached to the proper eighth notes.  The snappy third movement (the symphonic scherzo, as it were) is marked as “alla marcia,” and its dissonant bugle calls get us in the mood for our own bugle-like calls at “taken up arms.”  We are back to a majestic mood for the last movement, where Thompson ties the whole work together by bringing back text and music from the first movement.

Not everyone loves (or loved) this work.  Musicologist Elliot Forbes, a friend of Thompson’s, called it “popular rather than original,” while composer Donald Fuller thought it would “suit some child’s game with toy soldiers.”  But critic Olin Downes noted that it served as “reassurance...in a troubled hour,” and the first time I sang portions of this work was at a memorial concert after 9/11, certainly another troubled time.  As I write this essay in the run-up to the 2024 American presidential election, we should recognize that democracy can be fragile and that there are always people ready to be despots.  Thomas Jefferson was very much a flawed human being, but he wrote words that are still well worth bearing in mind today, and Thompson’s music brings them to life.

September 2024. Revised February 2025.