Roger Sessions: In Honor of His Sixty-Fifth Birthday

Abstract

IT HAS FREQUENTLY been observed that Roger Sessions' musical idiom undergoing a gradual development. A transition has been traced from the early diatonicism of the First Symphony and the Violin Concerto through the First Quartet and the Pages from a Diary to the chromaticism of the Second Symphony. His subsequent adoption of the twelve-tone technique (in part or throughout, depending on the work) has been duly noted and pondered, despite the absence of fanfare to accompany it. This event takes on the aspect less of a latterday conversion than of an absorption and an acknowledgment; and it has raised scarcely a ripple on the surface of his intensely personal style. For Sessions, indeed, the mastery of the row a matter of technique, not system: a point of view consistent with his lifelong respect for the former and distrust of the latter. Sessions' position in our musical life unique. Not so long ago it was the custom among apologists for this or that middle-of-the-road composer to protest that he goes his own way, is not taken in by fads or slogans, and the like. That Sessions not just another such mugwump demonstrated by the forcefulness and profundity of the impression made upon us by his music, and by the way his words have troubled our conscience, deepened our understanding, and, in sum, given us pause. Far from ignoring the various fashions, movements, and theories which have influenced composition and pedagogy during his creative career, he appears to have been against them all. Thus it has been difficult to state exactly what he for. In an age of musical revolution he has simply evolved. Yet his rejection of formulas has not taken place without the most painstaking search for any valuable insights that might accompany them. Whether it be the conventional use of Roman numerals in harmonic analysis, or Hindemith's derivation of musical logic from acoustical laws, or Krenek's insistence on serialism as the cornerstone of the new music, or Schenker's concept of the Urlinie, Sessions has extracted from each in turn those elements which seemed vital and illuminating before subjecting the rest to a withering blast. His criti-