The Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson: Composition as Conversation (review)

Modern Drama ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 54 (2) ◽  
pp. 252-255
Author(s):  
Tram Nguyen
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Virgil Thomson

BOOK REVIEWS

Tempo ◽  
2011 ◽  
Vol 65 (255) ◽  
pp. 65-72
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
List Type ◽  
Pierre Boulez ◽  
Virgil Thomson ◽  
Percy Grainger

Pierre Boulez ‘Tombeau’ facsimiles Peter O'HaganThe Letters of Gertrude Stein and Virgil Thomson Rodney ListerComrades in Art: Correspondence of Ronald Stevenson and Percy Grainger James M Floyd

ANOTHER COMPLETELY INTERESTING OPERA: ‘THE MOTHER OF US ALL’ PART I: HISTORY AND BACKGROUND

Tempo ◽  
2010 ◽  
Vol 64 (254) ◽  
pp. 2-10
Author(s):  
Rodney Lister
Keyword(s):  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Pearl Harbor ◽  
Recent Letter ◽  
Carl Van Vechten ◽  
The Subject ◽  
Virgil Thomson

On 5 December 5 1941, two days before the Japanese attack on Pearl Harbor, Virgil Thomson wrote to Gertrude Stein, his friend and the cocreator of their opera Four Saints in Three Acts. The bulk of the letter concerned Thomson's most recent plan for publication of the opera, including details of dividing the royalties and expenses involved in the undertaking (a continual source of disagreement and haggling between them). At the end of the letter, referring to Stein's assurance at the end of her most recent letter to him that the European war would be over soon and that they would soon meet again in Paris, Thomson wrote, ‘… I miss you a great deal but do hope that you are right that we shall be seeing each other soon in Paris. I wouldn't know; I have no prophetic sense about wars … When the war is over we must write another opera. Only we must wait till then, because I don't think we could choose the subject very well by mail'. His next preserved letter to her was almost five years later. In that letter, dated 5 March 1946, Thomson wrote, ‘Carl [Van Vechten] says the opera is nearly finished. I hope so. I want to see it. I pine for it’.

Readies for Bob Brown's Machine

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Robert Carlton Brown
Keyword(s):  
Text Messaging ◽  
Gertrude Stein ◽  
Ezra Pound ◽  
William Carlos Williams ◽  
Public Attention ◽  
Avant Garde ◽  
Internet Media ◽  
Facsimile Edition ◽  
Viewing Screen ◽  
Writing Technology

This is the much-anticipated new edition of the important volume of avant-garde writing, Readies for Bob Brown's Machine. The original collection of Readies was published by Brown’s Roving Eye Press in 1931. Despite including works by leading modernist writers including Gertrude Stein, Ezra Pound, William Carlos Williams, Kay Boyle, F.T. Marinetti, and 35 other writers and artists, this volume has never been re-issued. Like the ‘talkies’ in cinema, Brown’s machine and the ‘readies’ medium he created for it proposed to revolutionise reading with technology by scrolling texts across a viewing screen. Apart from its importance to modernism, Brown’s research on reading seems remarkably prescient in light of text messaging, e-books, and internet media ecologies. Brown’s designs for a modernist style of reading, which emphasised speed, movement, and immediacy, required a complete re-design of reading and writing technology. Complete with a new Preface by Eric White and a new Introduction and a separate chapter on the contributors by Craig Saper, this critical facsimile edition restores to public attention the extraordinary experiments of writing readies for a reading machine.

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