Virgil Thomson had already established himself as one of the nation's leading composers when he published The State of Music (1939), the book that made his name as a writer and won him a fourteen-year stint as chief music reviewer at the New York Herald Tribune. This feisty, often hilarious polemic, presented here in the extensively revised edition of 1962, surveys the challenges confronting the American composer in a hide-bound world where performance and broadcast outlets are controlled by institutions shocked by the new and suspicious of homegrown talent. For Aaron Copland, The State of Music was not just "the most original book on music that America has produced," but "the wittiest, the most provocative, the best written."

Virgil Thomson (1896-1989) was a gifted composer and, as the chief music reviewer for the New YorkHerald Tribune from 1940 to 1954, one of the nation's foremost cultural critics. Among his most famous works are the operas Four Saints in Three Acts and The Mother of Us All (both with texts by Gertrude Stein), scores to "The Plow That Broke the Plains" and "The River" (films by Pare Lorentz), and "Louisiana Story" (film by Robert Flaherty), and the books The State of Music and Virgil Thomson, an autobiography.