Customer Reviews

Roger Sessions: How a "Difficult" Composer Got That Way

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This book describes how an early 20th century American musician followed his 'inner ear' into 12-tone composition. Along the way the author paints a unique picture of American and European music history. Since 12-tone is traditionally viewed as a formal composition procedure - where the composer works with arbitrarily-chosen elements to develop using specific procedures (retrograde, inversion, etc.), it is important to see how someone who rejected formalisms in general ended up following his 'inner ear' to 12-tone music while still maintaining his 'voice' as a composer. Sessions has himself written on the importance of the listener educating his ear. This book shows how the composer followed his own dictum.

I would recommend this book to anyone interested in a view of early/mid-twentieth century music that is influenced but not dominated by Schoenberg and is students. I would add the comment that it quite possibly points a way forward beyond the minimalism which seems to have succeeded this direction in composition.