Symphony No. 4 (Sessions)

The Symphony No. 4 of Roger Sessions was composed in 1958.[1]

It has three movements:

  1. Burlesque
  2. Elegy[2]
  3. Pastorale[3]

It was commissioned by the Minneapolis Symphony Orchestra for the Minnesota Centennial, and premiered by the Minnesota Orchestra conducted by Antal Doráti [4] on January 2, 1960.[5]

The second movement's basically slow tempo is interrupted twice by faster episodes. This movement was intended as an elegy for the composer's brother, John, who died in 1948.[6] The finale, also slow, increases in intensity towards its close.[7] Andrea Olmstead describes all of Sessions's symphonies as "serious" and "funereal".[8]

Discography
  • Roger Sessions: Symphony No. 4, Symphony No. 5, Rhapsody for Orchestra. Columbus Symphony Orchestra, Christian Badea, cond. Recorded April 6, 1986, at the Ohio Theatre, Columbus Ohio. LP recording, 1 disc: digital, stereo, 12 in. New World NW 345-1; CD recording, 1 disc: digital, stereo, 4¾ in. New World NW 345-2. New York: Recorded Anthology of American Music, 1987.
gollark: Not really.
gollark: i.e. the physical processes involved in the brain do not actually work the same if you swap all the atoms for... identical atoms.
gollark: Anyway, if you actually *did* end up breaking consciousness if you swapped out half the atoms in your brain at once, and this was externally verifiable because the conscious thing complained, that would probably have some weird implications. Specifically, that the physical processes involved somehow notice this.
gollark: I mean, apart from the fact that it wasn't livable in the intervening distance, which might be bad in specifically the house case.
gollark: If I build an *identical* house in the same place, with all the same contents, somehow, I don't care that much.

References
  1. The last page of the score as published is signed with the date of completion.
  2. Opening of Elegy is quoted as example 6 in Imbrie. Imbrie, Andrew (1972). "The Symphonies of Roger Sessions". Tempo. New Series (103): 24–32. ISSN 0040-2982. JSTOR 943951. OCLC 1767255.
  3. Marks Music Corporation 1963 score.
  4. Helm, Everett (May 1960). "Reports from Abroad". Musical Times. Musical Times Publications Ltd. 101 (1407): 316–7. ISSN 0027-4666. OCLC 53165808.
  5. "Roger Sessions: Compositions". Retrieved 23 May 2009.
  6. Prausnitz (2002), Roger Sessions: How a "Difficult" Composer Got That Way at Google Books; p. 281; Steinberg, Choral Masterworks at Google Books, p. 253.
  7. Badea's recording on New World; Marks Music score.
  8. Olmstead, Andrea (2012). Roger Sessions: A Biography, p.356. Routledge. ISBN 9781135868925.

Further reading
  • Imbrie, Andrew (1972). "The Symphonies of Roger Sessions". Tempo (new series), no. 103 (December): 24–32.
  • Stern, Howard Gordon (2001). "Techniques of Formal Articulation and Association in the "Pastorale" of Roger Sessions' Symphony No. 4 and Cantata alla luna". PhD diss. Waltham: Brandeis University. ISBN 9780493142173.


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