New Haven

I'm way late in posting about this, but in June I took a field trip to New Haven to conduct preliminary research at Yale's Irving S. Gilmore Music Library. I spent the better part of four days working in the Virgil Thomson Papers, for which (thank goodness) there exists an online finding aid. The finding aid helped me to identify the materials I wanted to look at in advance, so that I didn't have to waste time in the library.

If you read my original statement of purpose for the project, you'll remember that Virgil Thomson (the composer, music critic, all around cool guy you see to the right) inspired me to think about the relationship between music and money through his classic expose of the music world, The State of Music (1939). Since his writing in that book is quasi-satirical and always tongue-in-cheek, I wondered whether he actually believed that income source could explain musical style (which is a huge claim). By examining the VT Papers (including correspondance, financial records, and other materials that he saved over the years), I hoped to find some proof of Thomson's sincerity (or lack thereof), and I hope to learn about what led him to make the money/music connection so central to his book.

In the end, I didn't find much about either.

I did, however, remember what archival research feels like: slow, sometimes painful, with occasional moments of surprise, humor, and satisfaction. For instance, reading through VT's checkbooks mostly made me want to cry. But at a certain point I realized that his precarious financial situation throughout the 1920s and 1930s made a certain argument possible - that his preoccupation with money in his book came out of real-life circumstances, which makes it likely that the preoccupation is sincere.

Other encouraging signs that suggest my project isn't some grand wild goose chase: in a letter to his publisher written while the book was in progress, VT claimed that his "economic-esthetic theory" would constitute the "main meat" of the book. (Letter to Thayer Hobson, October 4, 1938) What's more, in a 1961 reprint of The State of Music, VT added a preface in which he remarked, "even the chapter on the economic conditioning of musical style, admittedly a scherzo, has in it far more than just a nubbin of truth."

So, according to VT, I'm not wasting my time. That's a relief. One archive ransacked, 20+ to go.

At least I ate well.