Roger Sessions

• 1. Introduction

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  Roger Sessions was born on the 28th of December, 1896, in Brooklyn, New York. His mother, Ruth Huntington Sessions, was a direct descendant of Samuel Huntington, a signatory of the Declaration of Independence. That genealogical link to the founding era sat in curious contrast with the musical territory Sessions would eventually claim. Over the course of his long career, he moved steadily away from every inherited convention he had started with.

  At the age of fourteen, he enrolled at Harvard University to study music. The seven decades that followed took him through three distinct artistic languages: neoclassical, then chromatically dense, then fully twelve-tone serial. He counted Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann among his friends. His opera Montezuma, with a libretto by Giuseppe Antonio Borgese, occupied him for more than two decades. What kind of compositional patience shapes a life like that?

• 2. A Prodigy's Education

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  The Harvard Musical Review published Sessions's earliest critical writing. He wrote for it first and later served as its editor. He graduated from Harvard at eighteen, then studied at Yale University under Horatio Parker and Ernest Bloch. From there he took a teaching post at Smith College.

  In June 1920, Sessions married Barbara Foster. He traveled with her through Europe in his mid-twenties and early thirties. That sojourn produced most of his first major compositions. One exception was The Black Maskers, incidental music for a play, composed in part in Cleveland in 1923; it later became an orchestral suite. Sessions returned to the United States in 1933. He carried back a body of new work and a musical language already shifting toward greater complexity. His marriage to Barbara Foster would end in September 1936.

• 3. Teaching Across America

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  Princeton University became Sessions's academic base in 1936. That autumn he married Sarah Elizabeth Franck, in November, two months after his first marriage had ended. Their son, John Porter Sessions, was born in 1938, and their daughter, Elizabeth Phelps Sessions, arrived in 1940. John went on to become a professional cellist.

  Sessions taught at Princeton until 1945, then moved to the University of California, Berkeley, remaining through 1953. He returned to Princeton and stayed until his retirement in 1965. In 1961 he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He served as Bloch Professor at Berkeley in 1966-67 and delivered the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1968-69. The Juilliard appointment ran from 1966 through 1983. In those seventeen years, Sessions completed three of his nine symphonies, among other works.

• 4. Three Musical Lives

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  Sessions's works up to about 1930 are broadly neoclassical, favoring clarity and formal control. Those written between 1930 and 1945 remain tonal but grow significantly more complex in their harmony. From 1946 onwards, the music is atonal.

  Schoenberg's twelve-tone system shaped Sessions's thinking in those later decades, but Sessions adapted rather than adopted it. Beginning with his Sonata for Solo Violin in 1953, his music became serial. Even there he was selective. In the Violin Sonata, only the first movement and the trio of the scherzo employ a twelve-tone row strictly. The remaining passages use a scalar-constructed dissonant style instead.

  His typical serial method involved pairs of unordered complementary hexachords. These provided harmonic cohesion without locking every melodic note into a fixed sequence. He might also use the row to supply the main melodic themes, composing the remaining voices without constraint. His Violin Concerto, completed in 1935, belongs to the transitional phase, when Sessions's harmony was growing denser but serialism was still years away.

• 5. Recognition and Late Works

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  The MacDowell Colony awarded Sessions the Edward MacDowell Medal in 1968 for outstanding contribution to the arts. In 1974 he received a special Pulitzer Prize. The citation described him as a distinguished American composer whose entire life's work merited the honor. It was an unusual acknowledgment: a Pulitzer for a career rather than a single composition.

  The Ninth Symphony, dated October 1978, was commissioned by the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra and Frederik Prausnitz. That orchestra gave the world premiere on the 17th of January, 1980, conducted by Christopher Keene. The Sixth Symphony had a longer wait. Completed in 1966, it received its first full performance on the 4th of March, 1977. The Juilliard Orchestra performed it in New York City, more than a decade after Sessions had written it.

  His Concerto for Orchestra was first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on the 23rd of October, 1981. The following year it earned him the annual Pulitzer Prize for Music.

  The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener appeared from Princeton University Press in 1950, republished in 1958. Sessions followed it with Harmonic Practice in 1951 and Reflections on the Music Life in the United States in 1956. Questions About Music appeared in 1970. A collected essays volume, edited by Edward T. Cone, came from Princeton University Press in 1979. Sessions died on the 16th of March, 1985, in Princeton, New Jersey, at the age of eighty-eight. His catalogue stretches from Chorale Preludes of 1924 to the incomplete Duo for Violin and Violoncello of 1981.