Composer for Titans

Says Brooklyn's Aaron Copland of Brooklyn's Roger Sessions: "He writes his music for titans." Mainly for that reason, Composer Sessions, 64, enjoys a doubtful distinction in contemporary music: he is more often seen than heard. To make "the music as well known as the name," Northwestern University and the Fromm Music Foundation last week sponsored the first "retrospective one-man exhibition" of Sessions' works. In three days the audience heard ten compositions--or more than half of Sessions' lifetime output.

The most immediately appealing work on the program was also one of the earliest--Suite from "The Black Maskers," written as accompaniment to Leonid Andreyev's drama when Sessions was 26, and cast as an orchestral suite five years later. A dissonant, vigorous work full of shrilly chattering string passages and raucously braying brasses, it gives the effect, as do many of Sessions' works, of the familiar tilted intriguingly out of plumb. Also included in the Northwestern program: the String Quartet No. 2 (1951), a serenely flowing, moderately dissonant work that rarely raises its voice above a grey, enervated note of despair; the Concerto for Piano and Orchestra (1956), whose stabbing, fragmented salvos of sound hit the listener like an icy shower.

Rarest item on the program was Sessions' 72-minute, one-act opera, The Trial of Lucullus, with a libretto originally written as a radio play by Germany's Bertolt Brecht. The unrelievedly dissonant work has to do with the plea of the Roman general Lucullus, for admission to the Elysian fields before a jury of citizens. Although it had several appealing orchestral passages and at least one rousing chorus, the opera for the most part is in what Sessions calls his "linear and severe" mood, with many of the vocal parts written in droning monotone.

Even Sessions' admirers are hard put to define him. He has never belonged to any single school, has always avoided "preoccupation with detail" in favor of "the broad phrase." Although his output has increased in recent years as he has "acquired vocabulary," it is still surprisingly small for a man who turned to music as early as he did. The son of a Brooklyn lawyer, Sessions was working on his first opera when he was 13, became a Harvard freshman at 14 and a composition student of Horatio Parker at Yale when he was 18. He began to break free from tradition in 1921, when he became an instructor in theory at the Cleveland Institute, where he worked under Ernest Bloch. Since then, Composer Sessions, now teaching at Princeton, has sent forth from his classroom some of the most promising names in U.S. music--Leon Kirchner, David Diamond, Andrew Imbrie, Milton Babbitt.

Performers still shy away from his difficult music (at least one famed violinist flatly refused to play the premiere of his Violin Concerto), and most audiences still listen to him with polite perplexity. But Sessions would have it no other way. "A composer," says he, "doesn't sit down at his desk and say, 'I'm going to communicate this morning.'

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