The Critics Speak

Sunday, October 14 , 2007
7:30 pm,
Hill Hall Auditorium

ANTHONY TOMMASINI is chief classical music critic for The New York Times. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Yale University, a Master of Music degree from the Yale School of Music, and a Doctor of Musical Arts degree from Boston University, where he has also received a Distinguished Alumnus Award.

Tommasini taught music at Emerson College in Boston, and has given non-fiction writing workshops at Wesleyan University and Brandeis University. His interest in the work of the composer and critic Virgil Thomson resulted in 1997 in the publication by W. W. Norton of Virgil Thomson: Composer on the Aisle. This biography is highly praised: "Indispensable to anyone concerned with American cultural history of the period" (Robert Craft, The New York Review of Books); "By a wide margin, the finest biography yet written of an American composer" (Terry Teachout, Commentary). The book received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1998.

As a pianist, Tommasini can be heard on two Northeastern Records CDs of Thomson's music, entitled Portraits and Self-Portraits, and Mostly About Love: Songs and Vocal Works. Both were funded by grants from the National Endowment for the Arts. As a journalist, Tommasini has written also about theater, dance, jazz, rap, books, and AIDS.

TIM PAGE is chief classical music critic for The Washington Post. He holds a Bachelor of Arts degree from Columbia University and has taught courses on music criticism at Juilliard and the Peabody Conservatory. In 1997, Page was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for “lucid and illuminating music criticism.”

In 1981, Page began an 11-year association with WNYC-FM, where he presented an afternoon program that broadcast interviews with composers and musicians, including Aaron Copland, Virgil Thomson and Philip Glass. An interview with Glenn Gould, comparing the pianist's two different versions of Bach's Goldberg Variations, was recorded just before Gould's death in 1982 and released by Sony in 2002 as part of a three-CD set entitled A State of Wonder. Page’s books on Gould include The Glenn Gould Reader (Knopf, 1984) and Glenn Gould: A Life in Pictures (Random House, 2002).

Among Page’s other books are Music from the Road (Oxford University Press, 1992), William Kapell: An Illustrated Life History of the American Pianist (International Piano Archives at Maryland, 1992), Dawn Powell (Henry Holt, 1998), Tim Page on Music (Amadeus Press, 2002), an edition of Selected Letters of Virgil Thomson with Vanessa Weeks Page (Summit Books, 1988) and, most recently, an edition entitled “What’s God Got To Do With It?”: Robert Ingersoll on Free Thought, Honest Talk and the Separation of Church and State (Steerforth Press, 2005).

THE CRITICS SPEAK brings two of the country's leading music journalists together to discuss the place of music and music criticism in America today. As the title suggests, this is not a lecture, but a public conversation. With Page as interlocutor, the two critics discuss a wide variety of topics, including the role of the critic in American musical life, the health of the American orchestra, the state of music education, newspaper criticism and the internet, and the classical music recording business. The floor will be open for questions and comments from the audience.