The Idiom Is Advanced

Roger Sessions, a serious, shiny-pated New Englander of 53 who teaches at the University of California, is ranked by other U.S. composers as one of the most serious and most original of them all. But his music is seldom heard. And when it is, few concertgoers have liked it. Critics generally call it "cerebral" and "difficult."

Sessions thinks he knows why: "insufficient familiarity." Last week Carnegie Hall concertgoers got their first big, but apparently still insufficient, earful of Sessions' music. The New York Philharmonic-Symphony played his Symphony No. 2, first performed in San Francisco three years ago (TIME, Jan. 27, 1947).

A few in the placid audience just couldn't take it. As Dimitri Mitropoulos flailed the orchestra through the first movement, sharp, hard and dissonant, they got up and walked out. The survivors were rewarded. The slow movement was just as uncompromising, but more elegiac, occasionally reminding them of melody. The final movement, like the first, was a rouser.

When the 25-minute work jolted to an abrupt stop, the audience gave Sessions a polite hand. The critics bit their tongues and tensed their cheeks. The Herald Tribune's Francis D. Perkins cautiously admired the scoring as "remarkable in its hues and timbres," but warned his readers that "the harmonic idiom ... is of the type sometimes described as advanced." Wrote the New York Times's Olin Downes: "For us it is a painfully studied and artificial piece of writing [but] this may be a mistaken estimate of the work."

If more familiarity was what listeners needed, they would have the chance to get it. As the winner of a Naumburg Musical Foundation award, Symphony No. 2 is to be recorded by Columbia this week.

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