In Defense of Song: The Contribution of Roger Sessions

Abstract

Those familiar with the critical writings of Sessions will recognize the origin of the above title: it is derived from that of an essay of 1935, Heinrich Schenker's Contribution.' I could, to be sure, have parodied a number of others used by the composer, all with some degree of appropriateness: The Musical Experience of Sessions, Roger Sessions and His Message, Observations on the Music Life of Sessions, and even, though in the friendliest spirit, Questions about the Music of Sessions. Of all these, the closest runner-up to the winner would have been Roger Sessions and His Message. But to some that phrase might imply a specifically verbal type of communication; and although Sessions has never hesitated to use words in explanation and support of his artistic positions, he has always correctly insisted on the nonverbal character of musical expression. Indeed, it is the chief burden of the essay just alluded to, The Composer and His Message, that music is concerned with the ineffable realm of psychic energy: with all, in fact, of the fine shades of variation of our inner life. It reproduces these far more directly and more specifically than is possible through any other medium of human communication.2 Music not only can do this, it must; for, as Sessions writes in another context, this is the nature of the medium itself, not the consciously formulated purpose of the composer... 3