Randall Thompson achieved extraordinary success not only as the nation’s pre-eminent composer of choral music, but also as a highly-respected educator who was instrumental in establishing the great choral masterpieces as standard repertoire for our college and university choruses.

Although his family was musical, young Thompson was not encouraged to take up music as a profession. But as a student at the Lawrenceville School in New Jersey, where his father was an English teacher, he was engaged as a school organist.

When he entered Harvard University in the fall of 1916, Thompson tried out for the Harvard Glee Club and was rejected by its conductor “Doc” (Archibald T.) Davison; Thompson’s conclusion: “My life has been an attempt to strike back!” Doc taught him counterpoint, the history of choral music, and took time outside of class to criticize his early efforts in composing choral music. But the greatest impact that Davison had on him was the man’s taste, his cultivation of the choral legato, and his adoration of the great choral literature.

In 1922 Thompson won the Damrosch Fellowship to study at the American Academy in Rome. Here he began what turned out to be a lifelong friendship with the Italian people, their music and their language. He also started writing the first of his significant musical compositions: the five Odes of Horace, set for chorus and completed in 1924.

On his return to the United States, Thompson lived in Greenwich Village, taking on various musical jobs, including that of composing songs and music for The Straw Hat and Grand Street Follies of 1926, a witty highbrow revue.

A year later, he married Margaret Quayle Whitney of Philadelphia, who proved to be the ideal companion and sustainer of his ambitions. Her warm intelligence and unaffected charm complemented his reserve and apparent austerity of manner, just as her humor tempered his wit. Their four children made the household at once boisterous and musical, though music was not the sole topic of conversation for which their hospitality was notable.

That same year, 1927, Thompson was appointed assistant professor of music, organist and choir director at Wellesley College, and from then on his academic and directorial career followed a natural course. He was lecturer at Harvard, guest conductor of the Dessoff and Madrigal choirs, and the Juilliard chorus in New York, and professor of music successively at Berkeley, the University of Virginia, Princeton, and Harvard.

In one interval he was two years director of the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, where included among his students and assistants were Samuel Barber and Leonard Bernstein. (With the latter he continued to maintain a close personal and professional friendship and was often a source of guidance for the younger composer and conductor.) But Thompson disliked the administrative work that robbed him of time for composing.

Between 1932 and 1935 Thompson was the chief architect of a survey which ultimately revolutionized the teaching and performance of music on America’s campuses. The results of this published study (College Music, 1935) provided the impetus which started the upward march toward professional competence. If today our college choirs are singing Brahms’ Liebeslieder Walzer or Vaughan Williams’ Five Mystical Songs, instead of Yo-ho-ho and a bottle of rum, it is largely because of Thompson’s masterly handling of a delicate investigation.

Guest conducting choruses in New York created the impetus to return to writing choral music. In 1935 he received a commission from the League of Composers to write something suitable for college chorus. The result was The Peaceable Kingdom, a sequence of choruses a cappella, based on selected texts from the Book of Isaiah. Herewith, Randall Thompson’s reputation was a writer of choral music was firmly established; and a flood of commissions followed from schools, churches, communities, and ranking musical institutions across the country, assuring his reputation both nationally and internationally.

(Compiled from the writings of Randall Thompson’s close friends and distinguished musicians: Professor Elliot Forbes, Harvard University, and Professor Jacques Barzun, Columbia University (reprinted form Proceedings of the American Academy and Institute of Arts and Letters).

Randall Thompson Annotated Choral Catalog

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