Institute for Studies In American Music Conservatory of Music, Brooklyn College of the City University of New York NEWSLETTER
Volume XXXIII	No. 1 Fall 2003
Inside This Issue: Music of Williamsburg by Carol J. Oja The Germania Musical Society by Nancy Newman Music of Carl Ruggles by Stephen Slottow Scorsese's Narratives of Blues Discovery: Review by Ray Allen Eric Porter's What is This Thing Called Jazz?: Review by Salim Washington Roger Sessions and Arthur Berger: Review by Anton Vishio Sondheim's Bounce: Review by Gayle Sherwood and Jeffrey Magee Home	Composing Difficult By Anton Vishio The visitor to the Brooklyn Botanic Garden who strolls along its Celebrity Path, which honors “famous Brooklynites,” will encounter the names of several musicians immortalized in its leafy frames. Not surprisingly, the strength of the borough connection for each varies considerably, and few inscribed there are likely to have a more tenuous connection than Roger Sessions. As described by Frederik Prausnitz in Roger Sessions: How a “Difficult” Composer Got That Way (Oxford University Press, 2002; $45.00), the first substantial discussion of the composer since his death in 1985, Sessions was born in 1896 on Brooklyn’s Washington Avenue, not far from the future birthplace of Aaron Copland. He stayed long enough to attend his first orchestral concert at the nearby Brooklyn Academy of Music, stealing the show by conducting along with Walter Damrosch from his mother’s lap. However, before the budding musician’s fourth birthday, deteriorating economic circumstances forced the Sessions family to move back to his mother’s ancestral home in western Massachusetts. There Sessions acquired his sense of belonging and depth of roots; even after a career spent at Princeton, Berkeley, and Juilliard, the elderly composer could still proclaim, “I am a New England gentleman!” Yet for all his pedigree Sessions was a cosmopolitan at heart, one who felt “most at home abroad.” He spent most of 1925 to 1933 in Europe, and witnessed firsthand the rise of ominous forms of nationalism. This led him to be suspicious of the calls for an indigenously “American” music that he confronted upon his return to the United States. Prausnitz captures the irony of Sessions’s alienation by recalling Theodore Spencer’s remark: “you have no idea how lonely one feels in this country, if one’s ancestors arrived here in the seventeenth century.” Sessions would go on to forge many of his closest musical relationships with refugees from the world he had known before the war. Prausnitz provides a richly drawn account of Sessions’s early life. One detail with contemporary resonance concerns his opposition to the First World War, which led to his being investigated afterwards as a “draft dodger and seditious pacifist.” Sessions’s tenure on the faculty of the Cleveland Institute of Music also receives special emphasis, especially the period following the termination of his teacher, Ernest Bloch, in 1925. Other than a discussion of Sessions’s opera Montezuma, Prausnitz’s account of the composer’s productive later years feels rushed by comparison; three of the late symphonies are dispensed with in a single paragraph. The book’s subtitle, taken from a 1950 New York Times article written by Sessions, challenges the reader with the word most often used to describe the composer’s music, “difficult.” Prausnitz is a noted conductor and longtime champion of Sessions’s music, and he largely succeeds in conveying the different ingredients of the composer’s musical thought. He wisely parcels out the musical arguments into three chapters, separated by biographical material. Yet in the end the attempt to pin down the composer’s “difficulty” proves elusive. The complexity with which Sessions’s music was seemingly born, as Alfredo Casella famously described it, arose from the struggle he had in forming his own musical language—a struggle that finally paid off when “at age 57 [he] became a prolific composer.” It is unfortunate to have to note that a book as important as this, published by a major press, has received a less than satisfactory editing. Most of the large number of misprints are minor, but their cumulative effect is troubling. Arthur Berger’s memoir, Reflections of an American Composer (University of California Press, 2002; $44.95) touches on many of the composer’s impressively manifold contributions to contemporary American musical life—certainly many more than its title would suggest. In fact, Berger’s career as a composer often lurks in the background in his reminiscences of life as a music critic for several papers in Boston and New York, an educator who helped to form the music department at Brandeis University, an editor for the periodical Perspectives of New Music, and the author of the first major study of Copland’s music as well as seminal articles on music theory. His activity in all these potentially incompatible occupations gives his commentary a special weight. Few composers, for instance, are likely to admit to paying much attention to what music critics have to say today, but Berger reads them as an important gauge of the changing status of concert music in contemporary culture. Berger is himself skeptical of certain musical developments, particularly of works that adopt an explicitly political stance. His opinions are grounded in a personal struggle to reconcile a leftist orientation with a commitment to a challenging, independent art. Nevertheless, his memoir is not merely critical in nature; it includes a treasure chest of stories about many figures with whom Berger closely interacted, including Stravinsky, Virgil Thomson, and the artist Robert Motherwell, whose collage dedicated to the composer adorns the book’s cover. Throughout his career, Berger, who died this past October at the age of ninety-one, was concerned with what he termed the “musical surface.” Part of what the term meant to him is revealed by a comment he once made, with considerable relish, that “[musical] space is one of my passions.” Not surprisingly, this works its way into his Reflections through an imaginative consideration of Stravinsky’s unique ways of voicing a chord; readers familiar with Berger’s Copland book may recall a similar discussion. Perhaps the best way to experience Berger’s engagement with spaces and surfaces is through his own compositions. Fortunately, a major new recording by pianist Geoffrey Burleson, Arthur Berger: Complete Works for Solo Piano (Centaur CRC2593, 2002), makes this a pleasurable task. Berger’s piano music runs the length of his career, spanning just over sixty years. We might begin a brief tour of Berger’s approach to the creation of a distinctive chordal layout by listening to the shortest work, For Luise, written in 1991, which in five seconds of frenetic activity assembles a chord that spans nearly five octaves, and then holds it for the listener to savor. Next we might turn to the Partita, from 1947, and listen for the delectably precise construction of the first measure, or the wide spacing of the chords at the end of its Aria. Finally we could sample the considerably knottier Five Pieces for Piano, from 1969, and hear the constantly shifting texture, seemingly utilizing all registers of the keyboard at once, as an abstract frieze only gradually revealed. Burleson proves an excellent guide, sensitive to Berger’s distinctive nuances. —Anton Vishio Queens College, CUNY