Short answers, pulled from the story.
Roger Sessions was known as a composer, teacher, and writer who worked across three distinct musical phases: neoclassical composition, dense chromatic harmony, and twelve-tone serialism. He won two Pulitzer Prizes and taught at Princeton University, the University of California Berkeley, and the Juilliard School.
Roger Sessions was born on the 28th of December, 1896, in Brooklyn, New York. He died on the 16th of March, 1985, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of eighty-eight.
Sessions taught at Smith College, Princeton University (from 1936), the University of California Berkeley (1945-1953), and the Juilliard School (1966-1983). He was also Bloch Professor at Berkeley in 1966-67 and delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1968-69.
Sessions won two Pulitzer Prizes. A special Pulitzer in 1974 cited "his life's work as a distinguished American composer." In 1982 he won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Concerto for Orchestra, first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on the 23rd of October, 1981.
Sessions began using serial techniques with his Sonata for Solo Violin in 1953, shaped by the twelve-tone system of Arnold Schoenberg, but he did not apply the method strictly. He typically used pairs of unordered complementary hexachords to provide harmonic cohesion, and sometimes used the row to supply melodic themes while composing the surrounding parts freely.
Montezuma is a three-act opera with a libretto by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese. Sessions worked on it for more than two decades, completing the orchestration in 1963.