Music: More Stein Songs

Of all poets acknowledged or alleged, none is less "musical" than Gertrude Stein, the middleaged Pennsylvania woman with a mannish haircut who lives in Paris and sends her readers into fits of esthetic joy or muzzyminded despair with her meaningless, impressionistic word-jumbles entitled, for example, Tender Buttons and As a Wife Has a Cow, a Love Story. Yet a smooth-haired little Missourian named Virgil Thompson, who used to teach music at Harvard and used to be music critic for precious Vanity Fair, has set Gertrude Stein's "songs" to music. Some time ago Manhattanites heard a strange collaboration called Capital Capitals chanted by four men with piano accompaniment under the auspices of Composers Aaron Copland and Roger Sessions (TIME, Feb. 25, 1929). Last week in Chicago a letter from Gertrude Stein was made public revealing latest Stein-Thompson plans. Excerpt:

"Virgil Thompson spent about two weeks with us and we had a nice time and he put my film to music. . . . We played our whole opera [Four Saints in Three Acts, An Opera to be Sung] together and were more pleased with ourselves than before. And then Virgil has done some awfully good piano things lately. And then we had an idea he caught a glimpse of Mary Garden in the south [of France last summer], and he says she looks exactly like St. Therese, and would she be ours? She might, only we don't know quite how to bell the cat. . . ."