Roger Huntington Sessions (December 28, 1896 – March 16, 1985) was an American composer, teacher, and writer about music. He began his career using a style that borrowed ideas from earlier music periods, but over time he developed a style with more complex harmonies and a type of music called postromanticism. Eventually, he used a method called twelve-tone serialism, which was taught at the Second Viennese School. His friendship with Arnold Schoenberg influenced his work, but he adapted the method to create his own style. He used rows to form main melodies, while writing other parts without strict rules.

Life

Roger Sessions was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family with roots in the American Revolution. His mother, Ruth Huntington Sessions, was a direct descendant of Samuel Huntington, one of the people who signed the Declaration of Independence. Roger studied music at Harvard University beginning at age 14. There, he wrote for and later became the editor of the Harvard Musical Review. He graduated at age 18 and then studied at Yale University under Horatio Parker and Ernest Bloch before teaching at Smith College. Most of his major compositions, except for his incidental music to the play The Black Maskers, which he composed in part in Cleveland in 1923, were created while he was traveling in Europe with his first wife during his mid-20s and early 30s.

In 1933, he returned to the United States and taught at Princeton University starting in 1936. He later moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1945 to 1953, and then returned to Princeton, teaching there until his retirement in 1965. In 1961, he was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences. He was named Bloch Professor at Berkeley from 1966 to 1967 and gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1968–69. He continued to teach part-time at the Juilliard School from 1966 until 1983.

Roger Sessions was a friend of Arnold Schoenberg and Thomas Mann. In 1968, he was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contributions to the arts by the MacDowell Colony. In 1974, he received a special Pulitzer Prize for his lifetime achievements as a composer. In 1982, he won the annual Pulitzer Prize for Music for his Concerto for Orchestra, first performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra on October 23, 1981.

Roger married Barbara Foster in June 1920. They divorced in September 1936. He married Sarah Elizabeth Franck in November 1936. They had two children: John Porter Sessions (1938–2014) and Elizabeth Phelps Sessions (born 1940). John Sessions became a professional cellist. Roger Sessions died at the age of 88 in Princeton, New Jersey.

Style

The composer's works written before 1930 are mostly based on classical music styles. From 1930 to 1945, his music uses tonal structures but includes complex harmonies. After 1946, his works become atonal and use serial techniques, though not always following the Viennese twelve-tone method. For example, only the first movement and the trio of the scherzo in the Violin Sonata strictly use a twelve-tone row, while other sections use a dissonant style built from scales. Sessions typically used a row to organize the full range of chromatic notes and maintain consistency in motifs and intervals, which were already present in his earlier works. However, he used the rows flexibly, often pairing unordered complementary hexachords to create harmonic elements without controlling the order of individual notes in melodies. Alternatively, he sometimes used the row to shape melodic themes while freely composing other parts.

Major works

Some works had their first official performance many years after they were completed. The Sixth Symphony (1966) was first performed completely on March 4, 1977, by the Juilliard Orchestra in New York City.

The Ninth Symphony (1978), asked to create by the Syracuse Symphony Orchestra and Frederik Prausnitz, was first performed on January 17, 1980, by the same orchestra with Christopher Keene conducting.

Writings

• Sessions, Roger. Harmonic Practice. Published in New York by Harcourt, Brace in 1951. Library of Congress Control Number (LCCN) 51-8476.
• Also by Roger Sessions: Reflections on the Music Life in the United States. Published in New York by Merlin Press in 1956. LCCN 56-12976.
• Also by Roger Sessions: The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener. Published in Princeton, New Jersey by Princeton University Press in 1950. Republished in 1958.
• Also by Roger Sessions: Questions About Music. Originally published in Cambridge by Harvard University Press in 1970. Reprinted in New York by Norton in 1971. ISBN 0-674-74350-4.
• Also by Roger Sessions, edited by Edward T. Cone: Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays. Published in Princeton by Princeton University Press in 1979. ISBN numbers: 0-691-09126-9 (hardcover) and 0-691-10074-8 (paperback).

Notable students

• Biography portal
• Classical music portal
• List of music students by teacher: R to S
• Roger Sessions