“Thinking about her music and what I, as composer, find especially striking about it, I would say that it is the combination of being intriguingly complex and multi–layered on the one hand — she has little interest in the “new simplicity” that many composers in recent decades have embarked upon — yet at the same time being characterized by a gem–like brilliance, clarity, and directness. She seems to have boundless imagination and, to complement it, unsurpassed technical command of orchestration and of compositional resources. It is as though, no matter what she imagines in her mind, how ephemeral and complex, she is able to capture it and make it real, imbuing it with beauty and vitality.”
—Shulamit Ran, the Andrew MacLeish Distinguished Service Professor in the Department of Music and the College and winner of the 1991 Pulitzer Prize in Music
“[Her work] is extraordinarily colorful. Her music certainly has tended to be chromatic, but it’s much more colorful than a great deal of the music that works in the harmonic world that she does…There’s a lot of passion to it—this is music of the heart, first and foremost.”
—Christopher Rouse, winner of the 1993 Pulitzer Prize in Music
“Augusta Read Thomas’s impressive body of works embodies unbridled passion and fierce poetry. Championed by such luminaries as Barenboim, Rostropovich, Boulez, and Knussen, she rose early to the top of her profession. Later, as an influential teacher at Eastman, Northwestern and Tanglewood, chairperson of the American Music Center, and the Chicago Symphony’s longest–serving resident composer, she has become one of the most recognizable and widely loved figures in American Music.”
—Citation read at Augusta Read Thomas’ induction into the American Academy of Arts and Letters
“Ms. Thomas's compositional idiom is one of modernist complexity, yet the sheer delight she takes in exploring instrumental sonorities proves infectious.”
—Steve Smith, New York Times, December 10, 2006
“Her musical language is unabashedly atonal, though lulling diatonic elements leaven the astringent harmonies. Still, Ms. Thomas has an acute ear. When some eerie, atmospheric chord in quiet strings and winds lingers, you can almost hear her saying, ‘Just listen to that wonderful dissonance!’”
—Anthony Tommasini, New York Times, October 1, 2004
“Thomas, a prodigious talent, is the most accessible ambassador of the new modernism, and the piece, a fierce and jagged take on the love poetry of Sappho, Neruda, and Flaubert, among others, shines with passion and color."
—Russell Platt, The New Yorker, March 15, 2004
“Her concerto almost always suggests a kind of brilliant, restless motion. A guttural growl from a contrabassoon or a fluttering fanfare of trumpets will sustain, as if frozen in time, while a host of multicolored sounds swirl about in agitated orbits.”
—John Pitcher, The Washington Post, March 28, 2001
