Arts and Letters

Everyone who came to know Roger Huntington Sessions and to admire his music was always deeply impressed by his integrity as man and musician. For us his high moral stand revealed itself in every aspect of his mature life: in his music, in his teaching, in his essays, in his moments of light-hearted humor in social gatherings. This quality has been evident to me ever since I heard his First Symphony performed by the Boston Symphony Orchestra in 1927. In a 1940 review of an entire concert of his music, I wrote: "His devotion to the purest tradition of his art is such as to eliminate all non-musical, literary elements. Among the latter he would probably include the trivialities of folklore and the cultivation of personality by the indulgence in formulae that give a trademark to music. This concert [I continued] was a clear demonstration that Sessions, during his whole life as a composer, has shunned the easy effect and the immediate appeal, has fought to keep his music honest, serious, and conscientious to the limit of his power. Slowly over the years he has developed his own style. His development has been by conquest and mastery of the whole art rather than by the cultivation of personal mannerism.'' Although I wrote this 45 years ago, I still have substantially the same opinion today, but now have a much broader and more enthusiastic view since eight more symphonies, much other music, and many essays and books have been written.

In one of them Roger states his aim in composing was "to help build a really new and better inner world," because for him, as for many, modernism in the early part of this century was born of this optimistic, noble revolutionary intention. I don't think Roger ever lost his firm belief in this aim and it seems to have carried him through many years of neglect, years that brought great changes of all sorts that affected our musical life greatly, but which never seem to have shaken his fundamental convictions that, at present, seem almost to have come from another time. Indeed Roger can perhaps be considered one of the very last composers to have formed his outlook in the pre-first-world-war time and to have held to the standards of that period—as did Stravinsky, Bartok, and Schoenberg. Roger was younger than they, and the terrifying issues that have confronted those of us younger than he were also very vital to him. As he wrote: "Fascism… is only the logical conclusion, as it is certainly the result, of what one might all too easily regard as the dominating tendencies of our time. Its ultimate horror is not the fact that it is cruel beyond all conception, but the fact that from beginning to end it is phoney. It is an almost inevitable product of a culture which contains so much that is phoney as does that of prewar Europe and America… it is the final enthronement, by terror and blood, of all that is spurious in contemporary life, and the attempt to make of spuriousness itself the basic principle of the future…. Our hour is at hand, and either we must begin to live seriously as heirs of a great civilization, or we must, in refusing this role, face destruction.

"What does this mean," Roger continued, "in terms applicable to musical life?... American musical life is convention-ridden as has been that of no other modern nation. The prevalent attitude towards music… is that of the late nineteenth century. Our standards are largely external ones. We demand music that, whether 'programmatic' or not, is evocative rather than inwardly expressive, or professes a 'nationalism' which we conceive in terms of association or recurrent mannerisms rather than of traditions created by mature and significant works…. Our musical life is propaganda-ridden. This is, of course, partly an inevitable result of the situation which made 'American music,' as such, a cause to be promoted. The result has been to a very large extent to place emphasis on 'personalities,' 'tendencies,' a 'movement,' rather than on music itself, which seems at times almost to be relegated to the status of a byproduct." He follows these angry words with this recommendation: Composers "must learn to write music which has been a real, important, primary experience to them. Music so produced will vary in quality, as individuals vary; it will vary in style and form, with the immense variety of America itself. But it will embody the authentic accents and gestures of American individuals. And what other Americanism do we want, or can we demand, in our music?"

Roger was an unusually gifted and widely read man, as could have been foreseen when, at the age of 14, he was admitted to Harvard, having already composed an opera. His staunch adherence to high principles probably was a result of his old New England background, which for a number of generations had centered around Hadley, Massachusetts, although he himself was born in 1896 in Brooklyn, where his branch of the family had moved. At Harvard, he was already up-to-date and could play the score of the very recently composed Elektra by Strauss on the piano practically by heart, so he told me. In fact, it seems that this early familiarity with such elaborate scores must have set a standard of orchestral composing for him—one that made great demands on players and conductors—which he maintained throughout his life. He retained this standard, even when such virtuosity became so expensive to rehearse that it was nearly impossible to find the time for it, except for already known works, whose success was assured. The young Roger soon exhausted what he could get from the Harvard music department and began to study privately with Ernest Bloch, the Swiss composer who had just come to America. Bloch soon realized how gifted his young pupil was and asked him to join him as an assistant at the Cleveland Institute, where he had been invited to teach. A little later, Roger, having received the Rome Prize (this was in the early Twenties), started a long stay abroad, going from Rome to Florence to France—where he showed his First Symphony to Nadia Boulanger, who was impressed with it enough to persuade Koussevitzky to conduct it in Boston—and then finally to Berlin, which he left when the threat of Nazism began to be taken seriously. Arriving in New York without a job, but with a reputation already established among young progressives, he taught privately for a while in Miriam Gideon's apartment. Fairly soon he began his long university teaching career, first at Princeton, then for a few years at Berkeley, returning to Princeton where he died last summer at the age of 89. During the last two decades he also taught at the Juilliard School, where we were colleagues. Certainly he was one of the leading teachers of his time, as the presence of so many of his former students in the Institute proves: Milton Babbitt, David Diamond, Miriam Gideon, Vivian Fine, Ross Lee Finney, Andrew Imbrie, Leon Kirchner, Donald Martino, Hugo Weisgall, and the many more who received Institute grants. As Roger was a rather inactive member of this institution, these choices were made entirely by his colleagues.

Throughout his long stretch of university teaching, Roger often expressed his dissatisfaction with academic life in his essays and to his friends. Dismayed by the tendency to formularize so prevalent among his professorial colleagues, he wrote many articles attacking efforts of musicians like Hindemith to systematize musical composition. It was the natural result of his belief in the importance of intuition, which he always sought to develop in his students. In fact he often complained of students whose approach was too intellectual, claiming to prefer teaching in a music school like Juilliard because students there had living contact with performed music. But as a committed teacher, he was always surrounded by a group of very loyal students, who did what they could to make his music known. For during most of his life he made little effort to promote himself or his music, yet his reputation was high among musicians, and commissions kept coming his way. Eight of his nine symphonies and many of his other orchestral and chamber works were written on commission, yet, like many such works by others, they suffered the fate of receiving few if any performances after the first, even though well received. They represent a large, opulent world of varied expression, highly imaginative and moving and often very timely, as was his oratorio on Whitman's When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd, dedicated to the memory of Martin Luther King and Robert F. Kennedy.

Both his operas, The Trial of Lucullus, based on the play of Brecht, and Montezuma, deal with the hollowness of military success and its disastrous results. In 1964 I was fortunate enough to be a composer-in- residence in Berlin at the same time that Roger was, when Montezuma was given its first performances by the Deutsche Oper, and I was deeply impressed by it. It made an even greater impression on me a few years later in Boston, and later in a performance by students at the Juilliard School. This time, Montezuma was so severely criticized by the press that it is doubtful that it will be revived in the near future. Roger has had hostile reviews in New York newspapers for many years, to such an extent that even his obituary was used as an opportunity to attack him on the ground of the very academicism that he inveighed against in his essays.

Perhaps part of the reason for this hostility is that his works, being quite elaborate, need very carefully prepared and committed performances, which they have seldom received. Music that is really new often takes quite a number of performances before musicians understand fully its meaning and expression and are then able to communicate this to an audience. This also explains, perhaps, that while no other American has written such a large body of excellent music, Roger did not receive a Pulitzer Prize until he was 85, with Concerto for Orchestra, to the great embarrassment of many of us who won ours before he did.

Roger's symphonic and operatic music has hardly ever had the good fortune that his beautiful piano works have had. These have been marvelously performed and recorded by many, including his pupil Robert Helps, and make it evident to anyone who listens what a master Roger is. These recordings should have convinced critics and conductors long ago about his other works. When Roger was a young man, the musical world was much more on the lookout for the remarkable qualities his works show, and these would have attracted serious musicians to devote whatever effort was necessary to bring them before the public in a convincing way. Now that performers and conductors are so busy flying from one engagement to another they have little time to study new scores. Public relations and publicizable gimmickry tend to control the tastes not only of the public but of musicians and critics. Fortunately Roger stuck to his last to the very end of his life, and those of us who share his idealism believe, as he must have, that his works will shortly be given the chance they deserve, because of their exceptional power and beauty.