Customer Reviews

Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays

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Roger Sessions had a reputation as a "difficult" composer, branded as an elitist, atonalist, and worse, an "intellectual" composer with no room for emotion in music. The essays, however, tell a slightly different story. His is an essentially Romantic nature, one which vibrates to what he called the "imponderables" of music and who had little use for analysis after the fact, except as a technical help for composers. Among the essays, you will find gems on where the power of music lies (perhaps the best speculation on this topic I've read), the current state of the musical public, a massive dose of common sense in the new vs. traditional music debates, portraits of five composers, all from a deeply cultured and incisive mind. I think even people who dislike Sessions's music will find much to admire in this collection. It may, ideally, lead people to Sessions's music itself.