Putting Music to Words : MUSIC WITH WORDS <i> by Virgil Thomson (Yale University Press:</i> $17.95; 178 pp.; <i> 0-300-04505-0) </i>

Virgil Thomson always considered his importance as a composer to reside in his vocal music. “I shall probably be remembered, if at all, for my operas,” he wrote in “American Music Since 1910,” adding elsewhere, “I can make the words-and-music thing function probably better than anybody else.”

For Thomson, words were central to music. If a vocal piece was to be coherent, the text had to be clearly understood and its structure and accentuation meticulously preserved in the musical treatment. Musical tones and rhythms added only heightened energy and emotion, and they never could rightly overstep the role of an obedient handmaiden of the word. Describing his opera “Four Saints in Three Acts” in his autobiography, Thomson asked, “What gave this work so special a vitality? The origin of that lay in its words, of course, the music having been created in their image.”

The priority of words for Thomson, who died on Sept. 30, 1989, extended eventually beyond questions of musical theory to characterize his entire career, for he is at least as well known today for his critical writings as for his musical compositions. He began his career as a writer on musical subjects in 1924, during a period when he lived primarily in Paris amid an international community of writers, painters and musicians.

After returning to America during World War II, he was appointed chief music critic of the New York Herald Tribune. His powerful style of writing, clear mind and great authority as a musician quickly established him as the preeminent American music critic of the post-war period. After his retirement in 1954, he continued to write books, occasional pieces and reviews until his recent death.

His musical criticism and his style as a composer share many of the same qualities, among them clarity, simplicity, directness and a determination to communicate without unnecessary complication or sentiment. His early writings anticipated a major reorientation in American musical tastes, in which allegiance to German music was replaced by fealty to France. Thomson was first and foremost a Francophile, although he rarely allowed his personal preferences to blind him to the distinctive qualities of music of other nations. Seldom was he censorious when writing about new musical creations, whatever their style, but performers and conductors were fair game for his quick wit and deflating barbs.

His musical style found its origins in French music of the 1920s, especially in the severely reductive musical textures of Satie and the declamatory melodic idiom of Debussy, Poulenc, Ravel and the French neoclassicists. In America, his music was not viewed as a foreign import but rather as a genuine embodiment of the populist American artistic spirit of the 1930s and 1940s, comparable to the naive regionalism in paintings of Thomas Hart Benton and Grant Wood. Thomson relished a noble simplicity in music, and he rejected the complicated artifice of earlier European musical discourse.

Speaking of Thomson and Douglas Moore, Aaron Copland found an intensely American voice in their acceptance of a limited musical vocabulary. “There is nothing in serious European music,” Copland wrote in “Music and Imagination,” “that is quite like it--nothing so downright plain and bare as their commerce with simple tunes and square rhythms and Sunday-school harmonies. Evocative of the homely virtues of rural America, their work may be said to constitute a ‘Midwestern style’ in American music.”

Thomson’s book, “Music With Words,” appeared less than a month before his death. “Its aim,” he wrote, “is to share some of that experience (of writing and performing vocal music) with other workmen, viewing the subject from a composer’s point of view.” After a lifetime of eloquent commentary about the works of other composers, Thomson writes in this book about his own style, his own music and the convictions that it embodies.

There is no mention of alternative models for the relationship of music and words, no survey of the innovations of Boulez and Berio, of the use of the voice as an abstract instrument of ritual as in works by George Crumb, nor of the liberation of the voice from speech syntax in electronic music. For Thomson, vocal music is intoned speech, pure and simple. The words, their syntax and rhythm, their accentuation and scansion must be the same after musical treatment as before.

In the 11 short chapters that make up “Music With Words,” the author touches upon the practical ramifications of this postulate. He dwells especially upon the necessity of isolating word groups in a text and keeping these units together in a musical setting. Otherwise, the sense of the words will be lost or distorted (both grave dangers, in Thomson’s view). “No single group will permit any change of accentuation; nor can its runthrough be interrupted,” he writes.

With the goal of clear reproduction of the text in mind, he gives advice to the aspiring composer on the proper treatment of speech sounds: “Consonants need time to be heard. They are heard most clearly when they anticipate slightly the musical beat or follow it. . . . Consonants need always a clean ending, a slight uh , to avoid their making, at that point, no sound at all. . . . Short vowels, of course, cannot be held for long, nor can mute vowels like the third a in banana.”

There are many digressions to provide lists of the existing genres of vocal music, to dispense advice for good enunciation on the part of the singer, to summarize the history of opera, even to explain step-by-step how to write a piece of music. The final chapter, “The Nature of Opera,” tells of the hazards of opera staging, qualities of a good libretto, and distinctive aspects of opera in different languages.

More than half of the book is devoted to musical illustrations drawn from Thomson’s own works, each prefaced by descriptive notes. This anthology can provide the musician with a survey of his style, but the musical selections do not directly relate to any of the observations made in the text. The book is concluded by a highly discursive and abbreviated reading list, and by phonetic renditions of Lincoln’s Gettysburg Address in different regional pronunciations.

Thomson’s common musical sense and his lifetime of experience with the art of music shine through “Music With Words.” But even the most sympathetic reader must question its thinness of content and the decision of its publisher to parlay a few words of wisdom into a full-length book. Thomson states that he wrote the book for singers and composers, but his advice is cast in such an elementary and elliptical form that it can be of genuine use as a practical guide only to the rankest beginner. The novice composer and singer are well advised to try their hand at some type of music other than opera, which is the genre about which Thomson talks the most. The “advance praise” on the dust jacket from Nicolas Slonimsky, Ned Rorem and John Hollander is puffery in an unadulterated form.

Thomson’s brilliance as a writer and importance as a musician are, in sum, poorly represented by this volume. Readers should be guided instead to his autobiography, “Virgil Thomson,” his insightful “American Music Since 1910,” the anthology “A Virgil Thomson Reader,” or his many collections of reviews from the New York Herald Tribune to find Thomson at his best. His music, especially “Four Saints in Three Acts” and “The Mother of Us All,” constitutes by far the most eloquent testimony to the compositional values that he outlines in this book.