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Roger Sessions

From HitStory, the pop encyclopedia of School of Rock · Artist

Roger Sessions was born in 1896 in Brooklyn and died in 1985 in Princeton. He was an American composer, teacher and writer on music. He began at Harvard at the age of fourteen, then studied with Horatio Parker and Ernest Bloch at Yale and taught at Smith College. He wrote his first major works mainly during a stay in Europe. An exception is the incidental music for The Black Maskers from 1923.

Music and breakthrough

His style changed over the course of his life. Until about 1930 he wrote in a more or less neoclassical manner. Between 1930 and 1945 his music became tonal but harmonically complex. From 1946 he wrote atonally and, beginning with the Solo Violin Sonata from 1953, serially. His friendship with Arnold Schoenberg influenced him, but he adapted the technique: he used rows for the melodic themes and wrote the remaining parts freely.

Influence

Sessions was also an influential teacher, including at Princeton, Berkeley and the Juilliard School. He wrote books such as Harmonic Practice in 1951 and The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener. He was friends with Schoenberg and Thomas Mann. In 1974 he received a special Pulitzer Prize for his life's work, and in 1982 the Pulitzer Prize for music for his Concerto for Orchestra, performed in 1981 by the Boston Symphony Orchestra. He belongs to the American composers who linked the postwar avant-garde to tradition in a voice of their own.

Listening

Listening tip. Listen to the first minutes of his Concerto for Orchestra and notice how the motifs are passed between different instruments, even when the sound is sharp and dissonant.

Discography

Studio albums

In School of Rock

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Categories: Artists