Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays

Roger Sessions

Published by Princeton University Press 1979

Roger Sessions on Music

Collected Essays

Roger Sessions
Edited by: Edward T. Cone

Volume 1608 in the series Princeton Legacy Library

https://doi.org/10.1515/9781400871056

Overview
Contents

About this book

Over the past fifty years Roger Sessions has developed, in articles, lectures, and addresses, various themes that reflect the stages of his own musical and intellectual growth. These themes form the basis of the present collection of essays. Many of the essays deal with specific problems that musicians, especially composers, have faced during the past five decades: problems related to new musical styles and techniques, to the position of composers in society, to their responsibilities as teachers, to their role during the period of the world wars, to the mutual reactions of composer and audience, and to the basic questions of musical form and expression. The collection also includes a set of critical essays on such seminal figures as Bloch, Schoenberg, and Stravinsky.

Roger Sessions is the composer of a recently recorded cantata on Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in the Dooryard Bloom'd" as well as numerous other works. He is the author of The Musical Experience of Composer, Performer, and Listener (Princeton).

Originally published in 1979.

The Princeton Legacy Library uses the latest print-on-demand technology to again make available previously out-of-print books from the distinguished backlist of Princeton University Press. These editions preserve the original texts of these important books while presenting them in durable paperback and hardcover editions. The goal of the Princeton Legacy Library is to vastly increase access to the rich scholarly heritage found in the thousands of books published by Princeton University Press since its founding in 1905.

Topics

Frontmatter Publicly Available Download PDF	i
Contents Publicly Available Download PDF	v
Editor's Note Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	vii
Preface Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	ix
I. The Composer's Craft
The Composer and His Message [1939] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	3
Music in Crisis [1933] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	27
The New Musical Horizon [1937] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	45
Song and Pattern in Music Today [1956] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	53
Problems and Issues Facing the Composer Today [1960] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	71
Style and "Styles" in Music [1961] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	88
II. The Composer and His Audience
Art, Freedom, and the Individual [957] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	105
Composer and Critic [1934] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	120
America Moves to the Avant-Scene [1937] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	123
To Revitalize Opera [1938] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	137
The Scope of Music Criticism [1947] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	146
Music in a Business Economy [1948] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	157
How a "Difficult" Composer Gets That Way [1950] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	169
III. Education and Training
Music and the Crisis of the Arts [1954] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	175
New Vistas in Musical Education [1934] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	187
The Composer in the University [1949] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	193
What Can Be Taught? [1967] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	204
IV. The Limits of Theory
Heinrich Schenker's Contribution [1935] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	231
Hindemith on Theory [1937] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	241
Exposition by Krenek [1938] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	249
Escape by Theory [1938] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	256
The Function of Theory [1938] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	263
V. Music and the World Confiict
Music and Nationalism [1933] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	271
Vienna—Vale, Ave [1938] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	282
On the American Future [1940] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	288
American Music and the Crisis [1940] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	295
No More Business-as-Usual [1942] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	304
Artists and This War [1942] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	313
Europe Comes to America [1945] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	319
VI. Five Composers
Ernest Bloch [1927] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	329
On Oedipus Rex [1928] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	339
Hindemith's Mathis der Maler [1934] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	347
Schoenberg in the United States [1944, revised 1972] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	353
Some Notes on Schoenberg and the "Method of Composing with Twelve Tones" [1952] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	370
Thoughts on Stravinsky [1957] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	376
In Memoriam Igor Stravinsky [1971] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	386
In Memoriam Luigi Dallapiccola [1975] Requires Authentication Unlicensed Licensed Download PDF	387