Roger Sessions Research Articles

Roger Sessions: A Commemorative Tribute

Everyone who came to know Roger Huntington Sessions and to admire his music was always deeply impressed by his integrity as man and musician. For us his high moral stand revealed itself in every aspect of his mature life: in his music, in his teaching, in his essays, in his moments of light-hearted humour in social gatherings. This quality has been evident to me ever since I heard his First Symphony performed by the Boston Symphony in 1927.

Roger Sessions and His Music: A Book Review

Roger Sessions and His Music: A Book Review

Copland, Sessions, and Modern Music: The Rise of the Composer-Critic in America

The American periodical Modern Music began publication in 1924 as a literary outlet for the ideas and opinions of composers and, in the words of its editor Minna Lederman, to provide news of all important developments in music, distilled by the critical rather than the reportorial mind.1 For twenty-three years its pages recorded a vital era of musical life and made a substantial contribution to the acceptance of new music. Moreover, conceived as an antidote to the indifferent press of the day, Modern Music produced an unforeseen side effect that had a profound influence on American music in the twentieth century: the development of the American composer-critic. The composer-critic made an early appearance in the periodical's life. The first few issues were dominated by European writers on the European scene and a few American writers who echoed similar international concerns. Then, in the second volume, Aaron Copland wrote a brief article about George Antheil that heralded a change in the periodical's focus from a vague, postwar internationalism to the American scene.2 Copland argued that contemporary music can be estimated from this vantage point, and there are enough people in the United States who can effect a counterweight to Europeans.3 He was confident and evidently convincing, because his subsequent writings, augmented and complemented by those of Roger Sessions, initiated in that journal a flowering of composers who developed strong identities as music critics. The present study focuses on the first decade of the Copland-Sessions contribution to Modern Music, an analysis of which reveals its fundamental importance both to the rise of the composer-critic in America and to the practice of music criticism. Differing in background, training, and emphasis in composition, Copland and Sessions balanced each other in presenting a view of the scene: for every specialized analysis by the former there was a philosophical discussion by the latter. Depending on the subject at hand, they

Roger Sessions Admired

Roger Sessions Admired

Portrait of Roger Sessions

Portrait of Roger Sessions

Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays

Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays

Roger Sessions on Music; Collected Essays

Roger Sessions on Music; Collected Essays

Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays

Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays

Roger Sessions: a Discography

This discography includes all the gramophone records I have been able to trace which contain music by Roger Sessions and were issued before September 1978 for sale or for broadcast. If there are errors or omissions, I will be grateful to those who will notify me of them via the editor of TEMPO.The compositions are numbered in alphabetical order. The dates of compositions are approximate: it is often difficult to determine when works by Sessions were begun. Some of the dates include a certain amount of ‘gestation’ and sketching while others may not.

Roger Sessions: a personal portrait

Driving north up the Connecticut River on Route 47 from Hadley, Massachusetts, one is led by signs to the local historic site, ‘Forty Acres’, or the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House. During summer months a dollar buys a guided tour of the museum-house built in 1752 and the possessions of six generations of families who lived there. With its deeds and diaries dating from the French and Indian Wars, a 178-year-old grandfather clock which keeps perfect time, former slaves' quarters, a Southern veranda (the ‘Stoop’) looking out onto the River, a secret stair-case, tales of a ghost, antique furniture, and portraits of ancestors who entered the clergy, taught at Harvard, or fought in the Revolution, the House radiates continuity with the past. One of its most famous residents, the Bishop of Central New York, the Rev. Dan Huntington, had a daughter named Ruth who grew up and met her future husband—her second cousin Archibald Sessions—at ‘Forty Acres’. Research on the biography of one of America's foremost composers, their son Roger, leads to ‘Forty Acres’, for he is a direct descendant of these New Englanders.

The Yaddo Festivals of American Music, 1932-1952

These contacts with kindred spirits among fellow composers led me to take an active interest in the welfare of American composers in general. The first problem to be attacked was the matter of performance. We thought that American compositions were not being performed enough.... With Roger Sessions I organized a series of concerts, under the name of the Copland-Sessions Concerts, which functioned from 1928 to 1931. American music made up the bulk of our programs-that was our one innovation. Later I was active in organizing several festivals of American music at Yaddo, in Saratoga Springs, New York. These proved to be the first of a series of efforts toward the improvement of the economic and artistic status of the American composer.

Roger Sessions and ‘Montezuma’

As Roger Sessions reaches his 81st year, he deserves as much recognition as we can give, certainly more than he has had. Yet his enterprise, however misunderstood or isolated, is no cause for lament; his achievement is cause for rejoicing, and he is still going. It seems like he is and always has been fifty, a middle-life sort of person, who had an uncanny foreknowledge of his life span and paced himself accordingly (as many artists have). He also has the artist's toughness, blindness, paitience, and ability to forge weaknesses into strengths. Much is written about his craftsmanship and solidity, but I hear more the abundance and sublime willfulness, Dionysian qualities, as characterizing his music and the development of his style. His music at its best is ecstatic, able to take flight. He has always proceeded in purely musical terms, and even his teaching has been antiacademic at its core.

Sessions's Concertino

‘A concerto of relatively small dimensions’ is Roger Sessions's own characterization of his Concertino for Chamber Orchestra. In a programme note accompanying the recording and (in slightly abridged form) the score, the composer explains how his conception of the work arose largely from practical, though artistically relevant, circumstances. The Concertino, written in 1971–72, had been commissioned by the Fromm Foundation for The Contemporary Chamber Players of the University of Chicago, a group directed by the wellknown composer and conductor Ralph Shapey:… Mr. Shapey's organization is composed of players who, especially among the woodwinds, are accustomed to playing several instruments in their chosen categories. Since this work, designed as it is for an orchestra of chamber dimension, … by conception as well as by the demands of the medium itself, emphasizes solo performance, I decided to avail myself of the players' versatility and give each of the various available instruments a significant role to play.

In Defense of Song: The Contribution of Roger Sessions

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

The Symphonies of Roger Sessions

Recently a composer was told by a knowledgeable critic that no one writes symphonies any more, to which he replied: ‘Yes, I know; so I call mine something else.’ Roger Sessions has not done this. His eight symphonies, which span the years from 1927 to the present, are worthy of the name, and give undeniable evidence that reports of the genre's demise have been premature. In originality and scope of expression, and in the mastery with which large-scale symphonic thinking is reconciled with a post-tonal idiom, the cycle that begins with the Second Symphony (1946) deserves to be counted among the outstanding musical achievements of the past 25 years.

In Honor of Roger Sessions

MY theme today is the Responsibility of the Composer; or perhaps it is the Responsible Composer, for the man we are celebrating is a model of the Responsible Composer today. But to whom or to what is, or should be, the composer responsible? Stravinsky, with his characteristic love of aphorism, has given one succinct answer: We have a duty toward music, namely, to invent it.1 Certainly this is the kernel of the composer's responsibility: namely, to be a composer. His first duty is to music itself, and his first duty to music is his duty to his own music: he must write it. But the responsibility does not end there. The composer must recognize at least two other important duties: to his pupils and to his public. Let me continue in the Stravinskyan strain, and say aphoristically that the composer has a duty to his pupils: he should accept them; and toward his public: he should create it. For before one can teach, one must have pupils; before one can communicate, one must have a public. So in each case-the duty to music, to pupil, to public-the composer must first of all produce the object of his responsibility. But, as with the responsibility of being a father, one's duties do not end there.

BOOK REVIEWS

BOOK REVIEWS Get access Questions About Music. By ROGER SESSIONS. Harvard U.P.London: O.U.P. 1970. pp. 166. JAMES HARTMAN JAMES HARTMAN Scarborough College, University of Toronto Search for other works by this author on: Oxford Academic Google Scholar The British Journal of Aesthetics, Volume 11, Issue 4, AUTUMN 1971, Pages 412–415, https://doi.org/10.1093/bjaesthetics/11.4.412 Published: 01 April 1971

Conversation with Roger Sessions

Conversation with Roger Sessions

Some Younger American Composers

I imagine that most people in Europe, when they think of modern American music (apart from jazz), think of the composers of the twenties and thirties and earlier who were the true pioneers in creating an American style—men like Charles Ives (1874–1954), Wallingford Riegger (1885–1961), Roy Harris (b.1898), Roger Sessions (b.1896) and Aaron Copland (b.1900). These men, together with the somewhat younger William Schuman (b.1910) and Samuel Barber (b.1910) and their contemporaries, still represent the high-water mark of American music. But, since they became known, two new generations of composers have sprung up and revolutionary changes in technique and esthetics have emerged.

Journey to America

In November, 1959, the composers Fikret Amirov, Konstantin Dankevitch, Dmitri Kabalevsky,1 Tikhon Khrennikov, Dmitri Shostakovitch, and the musicologist Boris Yarustovsky made an official visit to the United States under an agreement between the American and Soviet governments which had made possible the visit of the Americans Roy Harris, Ulysses Kay, Peter Mennin, and Roger Sessions to the Soviet Union the year before. Yarustovsky wrote an account of his impressions for the February 1960 issue of Soviet Music, a journal of the Union of Soviet Composers. In selecting excerpts from that lengthy report I have tried to retain both the breadth and the quality of Yarustovsky' s observations. Yarustovsky belongs to a society which believes that the artist is a potent ethical force and that his responsibilities to society take precedence over considerations of personal fancy. To us, the implications of that belief seem dangerous; to Yarustovsky, the danger lies in ignoring the implications.