Roger Sessions

Roger Huntington Sessions (December 28, 1896 – March 16, 1985) was an American composer, teacher, and writer on music. He had started his career writing in a neoclassical style, but gradually moved towards complex harmonies and postromanticism, and finally the twelve-tone serialism of the Second Viennese School. Sessions’s friendship with Arnold Schoenberg influenced him, but he modified his technique to a unique style involving rows to supply melodic themes, while composing subsidiary parts freely. Life Sessions was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family that could trace its roots back to the American Revolution. His mother was Ruth Huntington Sessions. Roger studied music at Harvard University from the age of 14. There he wrote for and subsequently edited the Harvard Musical Review. Graduating at age 18, he went on to study at Yale University under Horatio Parker and Ernest Bloch before teaching at Smith College. With the exception, mostly, of his incidental music to the play The 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. Returning to the United Sta