John Wiser:

>"That kind of thing" exists in sufficient quantity that Scarecrow Press
>has issued a little hardcover bibliography of composers' autobiographical
>writings.  I can pull down from where I sit Prokofiev, Honegger, and Arnold
>Bax, all writing of their lives at book-length.  Berlioz Memoirs not
>autobiographical? Ned Rorem's various diaries? ...  Virgil Thomson even
>had the gall to title his autobiography "Autobiography."

Add Wagner, Stravinsky, and Copland to the list.  Copland, with Vivian
Perlis, filled two very interesting volumes.  Stravinsky, with Robert
Kraft, filled several.  (We won't go into the Shostakovich case.) Rorem
wrote more than you probably want to know in his numerous volumes of
memoirs.  Thomson had lots of gall, all right, but his autobiography was
published as "Virgil Thomson," by Virgil Thomson; it offers a wonderful
glimpse of Paris in the 1920's.

Jim Tobin