The works of the American composer Roger Huntington Sessions (1896-1985) are characterized by a dense chromaticism of an expressive and individual character. He was also an influential teacher.

Roger Sessions was born December 28, 1896, in Brooklyn, New York. He entered Harvard at the age of 14. Later he studied music under Horatio Parker at Yale and Ernest Bloch at the Cleveland Institute of Music (1919-1922) and then stayed on at the institute as Bloch's assistant. Sessions' first major orchestral work, The Black Maskers (1923), is usually heard today in its form as a suite. It remains the best introduction to his music by virtue of its accessibility: the warmth and color of the orchestral writing and the rhythmic ingenuity create an immediacy of excitement not characteristic of his later style; at the same time, he is in command of every compositional detail.

In following Sessions' development, one realizes that his music...