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...