Roger Sessions began his teaching career at age 20, winning his first job at Smith College. The Black Maskers, one of Sessions’ most often-heard works, was composed in 1923 for a performance at Smith College, and revised as an orchestral suite in 1928.

In 1934, Sessions began teaching at Princeton University, where he worked for 12 years before moving to the University of California at Berkeley. In addition to completing his violin concerto, his compositions from this period in New Jersey include his first string quartet, piano set From My Diary, violin-piano duo and much of his second symphony.

The bulk of Sessions’ music was written between the ages of 50 and 75. Over time, Sessions’ harmonic language had become increasingly chromatic. In 1953, as he began work on the Sonata for Violin, Sessions fully embraced 12-tone music. For most of the next 30 years, Sessions composed in a free application of this system, of which he had once been profoundly suspicious.

Sessions returned to Princeton University in 1954, where he taught until his retirement in 1965. By that time, he was widely esteemed as a teacher of composition who could free the individuality of each student and build compositional technique without imposing his own style.

Both Edward T. Cone and Peter Maxwell Davies, other composers featured in the 2010–11 New Jersey Roots Festival, studied with Sessions at Princeton.

LEARN MORE:

Visit the Roger Sessions Society website, where you can read more about Sessions’ life and work.