In American music, honors are always more attractive than performances. Honors mean piety, publicity, and parties; performances mean hard decisions about repertory, personnel, box office, rehearsals, and concerts—and then (God rest our busy souls) an audience actually has to be assembled to listen to the music. Indeed, so much is this the case across the contemporary serious music scene that a rule can be drawn from all the evidence: composers are more honored in the speech than they are in the hearing.
Something of the truth of this rule can be gathered from events of the last New York musical season. Two of our most honored composers, Virgil Thomson and Roger Sessions, turned eighty-five during this period. Both were given the usual rounds of compliments, celebrations, and media coverage proper to their age and eminence. Sessions was awarded a Pulitzer Prize for his Concerto for Orchestra. This strong new work, commissioned by the Boston Symphony Orchestra for its hundredth anniversary, although performed in Boston, will not receive its New York premiere until next season. Thomson was accorded special literary coverage, doubtless because of his own extensive critical writings; the publication of these writings in a new edition was the occasion for particular praise.
More interesting than all the verbiage, however, was the treatment accorded a much talked-about work of each composer during the celebratory season just past. In the case of Virgil Thomson, the work in question was undoubtedly his greatest achievement, the opera Four Saints in
