Sessions, Roger (EN)

Sessions Roger Huntington, *28 December 1896 New York, †16 March 1985 Princeton, American composer, teacher, and musical writer. Considered a child prodigy, at the age of fourteen, he enrolled at Harvard University, graduating four years later, in 1915. During his studies, he started collaborating with the Harvard Musical Review, where he published texts about music and was an editor. In 1916–17, he continued his education at Yale University, where he studied composition under H. Parker. However, the greatest influence on him was E. Bloch, whom he met in 1919 in New York. In 1917–21 Sessions taught at Smith College, and in 1921–25 he was an assistant to E. Bloch at the Cleveland Institute. In 1925–33, he stayed in Europe, in Paris, Florence, Rome and Berlin. He then established contacts with the most outstanding representatives of the European music scene, such as O. Klemperer, A. Berg, I. Strawiński, and S. Kusewicki. Together with A. Copland, they initiated a series of concerts presenting works by the young generation of American composers, which took place in New York in 1928–31 under the name “Copland-Sessions Concerts” (two concerts per season). In 1933, shortly after Hitler came to power, he returned to the USA.

From 1934 to 1942, he served as president of the American section of the International Society of Contemporary Music, during which time he taught at the Malkin Conservatory, Dalcroze School, and Douglass College. In 1936, he began teaching composition at Princeton University, from 1945 to 1953, he taught at the University of California at Berkeley, then returned to Princeton and remained there until his retirement in 1965. From 1966 to 1969, he taught at Berkeley and Harvard, and in 1966–83, he taught composition at the Juilliard School of Music in New York. His students included, among others: M. Babbitt, P. Maxwell-Davies, C. Nancarrow, F. Rzewski, and J. Adams. Sessions received various awards for his artistic and teaching activities, including an honorary doctorate from fourteen universities and two Pulitzer Prizes – for lifetime achievement (1974) and for the Concerto for Orchestra (1982). He published four books, numerous articles, and essays on contemporary music theory.

Sessions is considered one of the most important American composers of the 20^th century. The cultivation of traditional genres, such as sonata, quartet, quintet, instrumental concert, and symphony, resulted in the composer’s music being associated with the neoclassical trend, while the style of his work evolved. Attention to the formal structure of subsequent works went hand in hand with the gradual modernisation of the harmonic language. His music also does not lack deep expression. The extended tonality and centre harmonics of Sessions’s early works transitioned into full chromatic, free atonality in the 1930s and 1940s; at the beginning of the 1950s, the composer adopted and adapted elements of the dodecaphonic technique, although not treated in an orthodox manner. Sessions created much of his oeuvre after he turned fifty. He composed then six of the nine symphonies, a piano quintet, Piano Sonatas No. 2, and No. 3, as well as the opera Montezuma, on which he worked for 25 years, and which is considered his magnum opus.

The figure of E. Bloch, and later his stay in Paris and contact with the neoclassical trend and the European musical environment, had a considerable influence on Sessions’s work. Sessions’s music from the 1920s, including The Black Maskers suite, which is still immensely popular, combines a traditional approach to the architecture of the work with the pursuit of new tonal and harmonic solutions. Already then, the typical features of Sessions’s style were present: long phrases, dense polyphonic and contrapuntal textures, a significant presence of the lyrical element, colourful orchestration, and dissonance of sound. In the Violin Concerto written in 1935, Sessions created an expressive language with a much greater share of chromaticism than before, compounding technical difficulties. Sessions developed the tendency to use a fully atonal harmonic language in subsequent works from the 1930s and 1940s: String Quartet No. 1, Pages from a Diary piano suite, Piano Sonata No. 2, and Symphony No. 2. In the 1950s, he began to incorporate the dodecaphonic technique, with the series treated as high-pitched, thematic material, combined with more freely treated musical material. Sessions’s first dodecaphonic composition is the Violin Sonata; this technique is also present, among others, in Piano Sonata No. 3 and 6 Pieces for cello, late symphonies (No. 6–No. 9) and the opera Montezuma with a libretto by A. Borgese, inspired by the music of various cultures (including Mexican folk music, Verdi’s operas, contemporary experiments in using voice and verbal text, in which the creator uses three languages: Spanish, Latin and the Aztec language). In Sessions’s later works, connections with serialism give way to expressive and sonic values ​​(cantata When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom’d, Concerto for Orchestra).

Sessions was an influential figure in American musical life. For over 50 years, he conducted continuous teaching activities, his works were commissioned by the most important US music institutions, and he was also friends with leading figures of the American artistic scene, including A. Schoenberg and T. Mann. Nevertheless, the composer’s music, considered quite difficult due to its dense texture, did not easily find its way to the audience. The first recording of all the composer’s symphonies was made only in the 1990s. The Roger Sessions Society has been operating in the USA since 1988, promoting the composer’s achievements.

Literature: A. Imbrie The Symphonies of Roger Sessions, “Tempo” no. 103, 1972; Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, ed. E. T. Cone, Princeton 1979; An Appreciation: Roger Sessions, 1896–1985, “Kent Quarterly” no. 5/2, 1986 (whole number devoted to Sessions); E. Carter Roger Sessions: a Commemorative Tribute, “Tempo” 1986 no. 156, pp. 4–6, A. Olmstead Roger Sessions and his Music, Ann Arbor 1985 (includes a bibliography, discography and a list of Sessions’s works); A. Olmstead Conversations with Roger Sessions, Boston 1987; A. Olmstead The Correspondence of Roger Sessions, Boston 1992; Z. Skowron Nowa muzyka amerykańska, Kraków 1995; F. Prausnitz Roger Sessions. How a „Difficult” Composer Got That Way, Oxford 2002, T. Preuss Brechts ‘Lukullus’ und seine Vertonungen durch Paul Dessau und Roger Sessions: Werk und Ideologie, Würzburg 2007, A. Olmstead Roger Sessions: a Biography, New York, 2008.