Roger Sessions

For more information on Roger Huntington Sessions, visit Britannica.com.

(b Brooklyn, 28 Dec 1896; d Princeton, 16 March 1985). American composer. He studied with Parker at Yale and with Bloch in New York, becoming Bloch's assistant at the Cleveland Conservatory. Then he lived in Europe (1925-33) before returning to teach at Princeton (1935-44, 1953-65) and other institutions. He was the principal exponent of the internationalist approach to composition in the 1920s and the leading composition teacher, 1935-80. His pupils include Babbitt, Cone, Nancarrow and Weisgall. His writings address many difficult issues, from the practical to the philosophical.

works:
Operas

• The Trial of Lucullus (1947)
• Montezuma (1964)

Incidental music

• The Black Maskers (1923)

Orchestral music

• 9 syms. (1927, 1946, 1957, 1958, 1964, 1966, 1967, 1968, 1978)
• Vn Conc. (1935)
• Pf Conc. (1956)
• Divertimento (1960)
• Rhapsody (1970)
• Conc., vn, vc (1971)
• Concertino, chamber orch (1972)
• Conc. for Orch (1981)

Vocal music

• Idyll of Theocritus (1954)
• When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom′d (1970)

Chamber music

• 2 str qts (1946, 1951)
• Duo, vn, pf (1943)
• Vn Sonata (1953)
• Str Qnt (1958)

Piano music

• 3 sonatas (1930, 1946, 1965)
• Pages from a Diary (1939)
• Five Pieces (1975)

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The works of the American composer Roger Huntington Sessions (1896-1985) are characterized by adense chromaticism of an expressive and individual character. He was also an influential teacher.

Roger Sessions was born December 28, 1896, in Brooklyn, New York. He entered Harvard at the age of 14. Later he studied music under Horatio Parker at Yale and Ernest Bloch at the Cleveland Institute of Music (1919-1922) and then stayed on at the institute as Bloch's assistant. Sessions' first major orchestral work, The Black Maskers (1923), is usually heard today in its form as a suite. It remains the best introduction to his music by virtue of its accessibility: the warmth and color of the orchestral writing and the rhythmic ingenuity create an immediacy of excitement not characteristic of his later style; at the same time, he is in command of every compositional detail.

In following Sessions' development, one realizes that his music, though unmistakably "progressive" in style, was independent of the current trend at any given moment. Thus his First Piano Sonata (1930) opens in an atmosphere reminiscent of César Franck or Gabriel Fauré; and Sessions' music of the 1930s, in general, bears only the most superficial imprint of neoclassicism. The pandiatonicism of the Violin Concerto (1935) is perhaps the closest he ever approached to Aaron Copland's manner, while the four piano pieces known as From My Diary (1937-1940) far surpass in harmonic and gestural complexity anything to be found in American neoclassic works of the period.

The 1930s were a time of compositional struggle for Sessions and of readjustment to America after 8 years spent in Europe. Returning in 1933, he immediately began teaching at Princeton, moving to Berkeley in 1945, then back to Princeton in 1953. After he retired from Princeton in 1964, he taught at the Juilliard School in New York until his death in 1985.

The later years brought noticeable changes in Sessions' music. While the pieces of the 1930s and 1940s were produced slowly and sporadically, the works of the 1950s and 1960s came in fair profusion. Six Symphonies, two Piano Concertos, and a Mass were written between 1957 and 1968. The harmonic complexity of the middle years proceeds quite inevitably through the "diatonic atonality" of the Second String Quartet (1951) to a chromaticism reminiscent of Arnold Schoenberg, beginning with the Idyll of Theocritus (1956). He also wrote a String Quartet (1958), Psalm 140 for Soprano and Orchestra (1963), a total of ten symphonies, the Concerto for Chamber Orchestra (1970), and Five Pieces for Piano (1974). The affinity with Schoenberg is seen especially in the later orchestral works, with their motivic elaboration, contrapuntal density, long-breathed lines, and kaleidoscopic play of instrumental color.

Sessions' music has been called difficult, but for those familiar with the more advanced 20th-century works it poses no problems. It is consistently serious in tone; even the most gently lyrical moments are internally too complex to be considered "light" or "charming." But the complexity has expressive force and is entirely appropriate to the scope and grandeur of design typical of his large-scale works.

Sessions was held in high regard by his contemporaries and students. He received countless honors and many commissions. Of his several books and articles Harmonic Practice (1951) and three collections of lecture-essays, of which The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener (1950), Questions about Music(1970), and Roger Sessions on Music are the most significant. He won a Pulitzer Prize for one of his concertos in 1981.

Further Reading

Posthumously, The Correspondence of Roger Sessions by Roger Sessions (edited by Andrea Olmstead) was released in 1992. There is no full biography of Sessions, but considerable information is in several background works: Gerald Abraham, A Hundred Years of Music (1938; 3d ed. 1964); David Ewen, World of 20th Century Music (1968); and H. H. Stuckenschmidt, Twentieth Century Music (1969).

• Period: Modern (1910-1949)
• Country: USA
• Born: December 28, 1896 in Brooklyn, NY
• Died: March 16, 1985 in Princeton, NJ
• Genres: Chamber Music, Choral Music, Concerto, Keyboard Music, Miscellaneous Music, Orchestral Music, Symphony

Biography

One of America's musical icons, Roger Sessions had an incalculable influence on the compositional landscape of the twentieth century. A composer of rare accomplishment, deeply passionate, he attained a level of craftsmanship which nearly 75 years of work honed into profound knowledge and skill. In addition, the accomplishments of his numerous students, including such luminaries as Milton Babbitt and David Diamond, mark Sessions as a teacher of no common stature.

Born in Brooklyn during the last years of the nineteenth century, Sessions was an early bloomer. By the age of 14, he had already composed a complete opera, and entered Harvard University, where he studied music with Edward Burlingame Hill. Following graduation from Harvard in 1914, Sessions enrolled for further studies at Yale with Horatio Parker (who also counted Charles Ives among his pupils). Accepting a position at Smith College in Massachusetts, Sessions worked privately with Ernest Bloch in New York, and when Bloch was invited to become director of the newly formed Cleveland Institute of Music, Sessions went along as his assistant, remaining there until 1925.

From 1925 to 1933 Sessions lived and worked in Europe, first in Florence, then later in Rome and Berlin. During these years the musical establishment began to take notice, and Sessions scored a marked success with his Suite from the Black Maskers in 1928, while his First Symphony had been performed to lukewarm response in Boston the previous season. Sessions' earliest music had been written in a lush, chromatic style. By the time of the Black Maskers, however, he had begun to favor a leaner, rather neo-Classical language.

Following his return to the States in 1933 Sessions accepted teaching positions at a number of American institutions including Boston University 1933-1935, Princeton 1935-1945, Berkeley 1945-1951, Princeton again from 1953-1965, and Juilliard from 1967 on. Beginning with the important Violin Concerto of 1935, Sessions' music became increasingly complex, and during the 1950s he adopted serial compositional techniques, though he used them with great flexibility, always suiting the techniques to match his own highly unique compositional voice -- see, for instance, the remarkable Third Symphony of 1957. Sessions was awarded a special Pulitzer citation for lifetime achievement in 1974, and in 1982 received an actual Pulitzer Prize for his magnificent Concerto for Orchestra. No further works appeared after this remarkable musical achievement, and Sessions died in 1985 at the age of 88. ~ Blair Johnston, All Music Guide

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