Roger Sessions
Portrait of Sessions byHarold Weston (c. 1920s)
Born	(1896-12-28)December 28, 1896 New York, New York, U.S.
Died	March 6, 1985(1985-03-06) (aged 88) Princeton, New Jersey, U.S.
Education	Harvard University,Yale University
Occupations	Composer teacher music critic
Spouses	Barbara Foster (1899–1980) ​ ​ (m. 1920; div. 1936)​ Sarah Elizabeth Frank ​ ​ (m. 1936)​
Children	2

Roger Huntington Sessions (December 28, 1896 – March 16, 1985) was an Americancomposer, teacher, and writer on music. He had started his career writing in aneoclassical style, but gradually moved towards complex harmonies andpostromanticism, and finally thetwelve-tone serialism of theSecond Viennese School. Sessions's friendship withArnold Schoenberg influenced him, but he modified his technique to a unique style involvingrows to supply melodic themes, while composing subsidiary parts freely.

Sessions was born inBrooklyn, New York, to a family that could trace its roots back to theAmerican Revolution. His mother,Ruth Huntington Sessions, was a direct descendant ofSamuel Huntington, a signatory of theDeclaration of Independence.^[1] Roger studied music atHarvard University from the age of 14. There he wrote for and subsequently edited theHarvard Musical Review. Graduating at age 18, he went on to study atYale University underHoratio Parker andErnest Bloch before teaching atSmith College. With the exception, mostly, of hisincidental music to the playThe Black Maskers, composed in part in Cleveland in 1923, his first major compositions came while he was traveling Europe with his first wife in his mid-twenties and early thirties.^[2]

Returning to the United States in 1933, he taught first atPrinceton University (from 1936), moved to theUniversity of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1945 to 1953, and then returned to Princeton until retiring in 1965. He was elected a Fellow of theAmerican Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1961.^[3] He was appointed Bloch Professor at Berkeley (1966–67), and gave theCharles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1968–69. He continued to teach on a part-time basis at theJuilliard School from 1966 until 1983.^[4]

He was a friend of bothArnold Schoenberg andThomas Mann.^[5]

In 1968 Sessions was awarded the Edward MacDowell Medal for outstanding contribution to the arts by theMacDowell Colony. Sessions won aspecial Pulitzer Prize in 1974 citing "his life's work as a distinguished American composer."^[6] In 1982 he won the annualPulitzer Prize for Music for hisConcerto for Orchestra, first performed by theBoston Symphony Orchestra on October 23, 1981.^[7]

Sessions 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) andElizabeth Phelps Sessions (born 1940). John Sessions became a professional cellist. Roger Sessions died at the age of 88 inPrinceton, New Jersey.

His works written up to 1930 or so are more or lessneoclassical in style. Those written between 1930 and 1945 are more or lesstonal but harmonically complex. The works from 1946 onwards are atonal and, beginning with the Solo Violin Sonata of 1953,serial although not consistently employing Viennesetwelve-tone technique. Only the first movement and the trio of the scherzo of the Violin Sonata, for example, employ a twelve-tone row strictly, the rest employing a scalar-constructed dissonant style.^[8] Sessions's usual method was to use a row to control the full chromaticism and motivic-intervallic cohesion that already marks his music from before 1953. He treated his rows with great freedom, however, typically using pairs of unordered complementary hexachords to provide “harmonic” aspects without determining note-by-note melodic succession, or conversely using the row to supply melodic thematic material while freely composing the subsidiary parts.^[9]

Some works received their first professional performance many years after completion. The Sixth Symphony (1966) was given its first complete performance on March 4, 1977, by the Juilliard Orchestra in New York City.^[15]

The Ninth Symphony (1978), commissioned by theSyracuse Symphony Orchestra andFrederik Prausnitz, was premiered on January 17, 1980, by the same orchestra conducted byChristopher Keene.^[16]

• Sessions, Roger.Harmonic Practice. New York: Harcourt, Brace. 1951.LCCN 51-8476.
• —.Reflections on the Music Life in the United States. New York: Merlin Press. 1956.LCCN 56-12976.
• —.The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, Listener. Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press. 1950, republished 1958.
• —.Questions About Music. Cambridge: Harvard University Press. 1970, reprinted New York: Norton, 1971.ISBN 0-674-74350-4.
• —.Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, edited byEdward T. Cone. Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1979.ISBN 0-691-09126-9 (cloth)ISBN 0-691-10074-8 (pbk)

• List of music students by teacher: R to S#Roger Sessions

• Anon. (June 1977). "News Section".Tempo. New Series (121):47–50.JSTOR 944497.(subscription required)
• Davis, Peter G. (March 8, 1982). "Montezuma's Revenge".New York. pp. 89–90.
• Henahan, Donal (February 21, 1982)."Juilliard Gives SessionsMontezuma".The New York Times. RetrievedNovember 30, 2011.
• Laufer, Edward C. (Autumn–Winter 1965). "Roger Sessions:Montezuma".Perspectives of New Music.4 (1):95–108.doi:10.2307/832530.JSTOR 832530.
• Morgan, Robert P. (1991).Twentieth-Century Music. New York: W. W. Norton.
• Olmstead, Andrea (September 1980). "Roger Sessions's 9th Symphony".Tempo. New Series (133/134):79–81.ISSN 0040-2982.JSTOR 945459.(subscription required)
• Olmstead, Andrea (2001). "Sessions, Roger (Huntington)". InStanley Sadie;John Tyrrell (eds.).The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians (2nd ed.). London: Macmillan.
• Olmstead, Andrea (2008).Roger Sessions: A Biography. New York: Routledge.ISBN 978-0-415-97713-5.ISBN 978-0-415-97714-2 (pbk.)ISBN 978-0-203-93147-9 (ebook)
• Prausnitz, Frederik (2002).Roger Sessions: How a "Difficult" Composer Got That Way. Oxford and New York: Oxford University Press.ISBN 0-19-510892-2.

• Imbrie, Andrew (1972). "The Symphonies of Roger Sessions".Tempo. New Series (103). Cambridge University Press:24–32.doi:10.1017/S0040298200057119.ISSN 0040-2982.JSTOR 943951.S2CID 143928780.
• Olmstead, Andrea.Conversations with Roger Sessions. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1987.ISBN 1-55553-010-9.
• Olmstead, Andrea.The Correspondence of Roger Sessions. Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1992.ISBN 1-55553-122-9.

• Roger Sessions' page at Theodore Presser Company
• The Roger Sessions Society
• Andrea Olmstead, contains a discography
• Andrea Olmstead papers, 1970–2013 Music Division, The New York Public Library. Olmstead's papers include correspondence with Sessions, transcripts of interviews with Sessions, and other records of Olmstead's Sessions research.
• The Seymour Shifrin Papers at Irving S. Gilmore Music Library, Yale University Shifrin's papers include two MSS by Roger Sessions
• Roger Sessions atLibrary of Congress, with 161 library catalog records

• Classical music navigational boxes
• 1896 births
• 1985 deaths
• 20th-century American classical composers
• Twelve-tone and serial composers
• American electronic musicians
• Harvard University alumni
• Kent School alumni
• American opera composers
• American male opera composers
• Princeton University faculty
• Pulitzer Prize for Music winners
• Pulitzer Prize Special Citations and Awards winners
• Pupils of Edward Burlingame Hill
• Pupils of Ernest Bloch
• Pupils of Horatio Parker
• Smith College faculty
• University of California, Berkeley alumni
• Yale School of Music alumni
• Black Mountain College faculty
• Fellows of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences
• 20th-century American musicologists
• 20th-century American male composers

• Articles with short description
• Short description is different from Wikidata
• Use mdy dates from February 2021
• Articles with hCards
• Pages containing links to subscription-only content