Roger Sessions - Life

Life

Sessions was born in Brooklyn, New York, to a family that could trace its roots back to the American revolution. His mother, Ruth Huntington Sessions, was a direct descendent of Samuel Huntington, a signer of the Declaration of Independence. 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. His first major compositions came while he was travelling Europe with his wife in his mid-twenties and early thirties.

Returning to the United States in 1933, he taught first at Princeton University (from 1936), moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1945 to 1953, and then returned to Princeton until retiring in 1965. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1961. He was appointed Bloch Professor at Berkeley (1966–67), and gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1968–69. He continued to teach on a part-time basis at the Juilliard School from 1966 until 1983.

His notable students include John Adams, Milton Babbitt, Jack Behrens, Elmer Bernstein, Robert Cogan, Robert Black, Edward T. Cone, Sir Peter Maxwell Davies, David Del Tredici, Ross Lee Finney, Alan Fletcher, Carlton Gamer, Steven Gellman, Miriam Gideon, John Harbison, Walter Hekster, Robert Helps, Andrew Imbrie, Earl Kim, Fred Lerdahl, Leon Kirchner, David Lewin, William Mayer, Conlon Nancarrow, Roger Nixon, Will Ogdon, Claire Polin, Einojuhani Rautavaara, William Schimmel, Richard St. Clair, Roland Trogan, George Tsontakis, John Veale, Henry Weinberg, Peter Westergaard, Rolv Yttrehus and Ellen Taaffe Zwilich.

He died at the age of 88 in Princeton, New Jersey.