Portraits in Beams and Barlines: Critical Music Editing and the Art of Notation

By Mark Clague

Composer and critic Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) is known for extending the genre of musical portraits by having his subjects "pose" nearby as he sketched in sound. He composed around 150 such musical likenesses, exploring not only characterization but a personal "discipline of spontaneity." What Thomson drew in sound, style, melody, and harmony was an impression—of the individual sitting before him, of his own relationship to this person, and of his subject's connections to the world at large. Thomson's repertory of symbol and inference opened a broad range of representational possibilities, yet for all their expressive range, his portraits were inevitably drafted with pencil on staff paper. Thomson communicated his musical characterizations in concrete and traditional form using a longstanding practice of Western European cultural representation—musical notation.