The Unknown Randall Thompson: “Honkeytonk Tunesmith, Broadway Ivory-Tickler”

While a few readers of this journal may have known Randall Thompson personally, many more have sung or heard something he penned: his austere a cappella The Peaceable Kingdom (1935), his serenely beautiful Alleluia (1940), The Testament of Freedom (1943), which he called his “celebration of the idea of freedom as a God-given blessing,”¹ his stunning The Last Words of David (1949), his cherished Frostiana (1959), or his vigorous Symphony no. 2 (1930–31), which was performed numerous times during Thompson’s lifetime by conductors from Howard Hanson to Leonard Bernstein—just to name two. Thompson’s career also included distinguished academic accomplishments as teacher, choral conductor, director or department chair with appointments at Wellesley College (1927–29 and 1936), the University of California at Berkeley (1937–39), the Curtis Institute (1939–41), the University of Virginia (1941–45), Princeton University (1945–48), and Harvard University (1948–65). He guest-conducted the Dessoff Choirs and the Juilliard School Madrigal Choir (1931–32) and wrote the 1935 groundbreaking Carnegie Commission report published as College Music: An Investigation for the Association of American Colleges, from research that began in 1932.² His long-time colleague Elliot Forbes noted that this study “was widely influential in strengthening music as one of the recognized Liberal Arts in American colleges.”³ As early as 1922, George H. Palmer, professor emeritus of philosophy at Harvard, predicted Thompson’s prodigious success, writing to the American Academy in Rome that “[h]is success can be counted on with some assurance, for his general good judgment and breadth of intelligence are no less remarkable than his musical genius.”⁴

But the purpose of this essay is to examine a single critical year in Thompson’s development that predates all of the accomplishments highlighted above—the seminal year 1926. This is the year that Thompson “hung out his shingle” in New York City to make a living as a composer. This is the year he wrote, arranged, and/or played piano in two off- Broadway shows and wrote songs on commission. Strikingly, it is the same year that Aaron Copland, writing in the March/April 1926 issue of Modern Music, astutely named Thompson one of “America’s Young Men of Promise”:

Randall Thompson (1899), after three full years in Rome, has but recently returned to this country. His preliminary training at Harvard and a year under Bloch have given him a firm grasp of the materials of composition. He writes with ease in all forms. His most mature works, written in Rome, include choral settings for Seven Odes of Horace (three with orchestral accompaniment);⁵ Piper at the Gates of Dawn for orchestra; a piano sonata and a suite, and a string quartet.

Each one of Thompson’s compositions is finished with a most meticulous pen—not an eighth note which does not receive full consideration before it is put on paper. For the moment this very excellence of workmanship seems to be offered in lieu of a more personal style. While Thompson never borrows outright from any one composer, it is not difficult to detect the influence of certain Europeans, Pizzetti, Bloch, Strawinsky, in the several movements of a single work. Thus far, Thompson’s Ode to Venice [recte Venus] for chorus and orchestra, and especially his string quartet are the works in which he seems nearest to the achievement of a personal idiom.⁶

How did he reach the level of Copland’s praise and yet earn the appellations “Honkeytonk Tunesmith” and “Broadway Ivory-Tickler” as one 1947 newspaper proclaimed him?⁷

Let us first consider Thompson’s education and training. Thompson was raised in a family where both parents nurtured his interest in music, and his father, a private school English teacher, encouraged his study of language and literature. His high school education was at the prestigious Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where his father taught. There he acquired a decent grounding in literature, Latin, German, and the Bible. According to his father, though, he had also “done very earnest work in piano, organ, and harmony...