TTL's post in defense of Sessions - while it is less "polished" than the first gets far closer to the heart of musical conversation and idea. There are specifics - moments, ideas and forms - and there is, though a bit scattered through the post - a description of the underlying reasons for the work's appeal to one particular listener. Before going on to reply, which necessarily involves disagreement in this case, it seems appropriate to point out how much more information is contained in TTL's second post than the first. The first could have been about anyone, or anything. The second can only be about Roger Sessions, and a particular reaction to it. And it is this individuality which is one of the hallmarks of what separates are music in any genre from mere entertainment. - - - But there is still the reply itself. Robert Schumann wrote that the average composer was expected to master the revealed forms, the talent extend them, and "only to the genius to range freely." He was criticising Lachner at the time, though he made similar remarks in other contexts. By this standard - or any varient, what TT and SS are presenting is a case for "Sessions the talent". Using ideas well, coming up with an unusual ending for a symphony, having use of intervals that pleases. All, even if everyone of them were granted, do not add up to an important, or even outstanding, composer. TTL writes that I am slamming him for being more eloquent in words than in notes, but that *is* what being a composer is about. A performance given a work because it stands for the "right" version of artistic ideas that the composer has articulated is generally a performance wasted. But this gets away from an important artistic question - the question of means and ends. While atonality or 12 tone music or highly dissonant extended tonality are not things to be for or against, deciding to use them in a work is something a composer can be criticised for - if that decision comes at the expense of the works intended aims. Similarly a composer's decision not to use these techniques can be criticised if their end can only be achieved by their use. It is here that Sessions desire to write dissonant and complex music often gets in his other stated desire - to write music which fits in the concert repertory of Beethoven and Brahms. It is not that it can't be done - nor that it ought not to be done, but that the way he did it fails to convince. TT praises the ending of the 7th symphony - but what an awful lot we must go through to get there, how many swings through the material which do not add anything, how many occasions when all was used when a flute would have been better. More over it is one thing to fit on an ending which is not expected, it is another to have logic pack a punch and create an ending which is both unexpected, and yet totally logical. Consider the ending of the first movement of Beethoven's 8th symphony. Originally he writes the ending ff. However, this would have been wrong - because the ending must act as a long range balance to the forte opening - and is at the end of a long coda, rather than closing a recapitulation. The strong closure chord of a recapitulation is to restabilise the tonic which the transition from the exposition to the development destabilised and affirm the tonic cadence. The end of the coda is thematically driven, and hence requires a thematic closure. Interesting ending ideas- whether Payne's reconstruction of Elgar or Wagner's tacked on revisions to Flying Dutchman - are less powerful than ideas which are implicit in the structure of the music, and which are carefully woven into the fabric. Consider two potent examples - the ending of Berg's Violin Concerto, where the vocal nature of the chorale usage is reaffirmed by having the violin join the chorous, and the opening section of Beethoven's 9th symphony where he uses the low strings playing in the manner of a recitative to set up the entrance of the voices. - - - TTL writes with disdain about being romantically enthused. How unfortunate, and how strange when dealing with a composer who stated that he wrote rhapsodically, not once, but many times! Romance is from the Romanesque - that part of Europe still warmed by the embers of Rome even after its death. The Romance languages are those which possess as their basis the classical antinquity, but altered and recast by being used in rougher ages, more in touch with the power of nature and barbarity. A "Romance" is a narrative. To be enthused is to have "the god enter" one. What other mode for describing a symphony of the traditional type is there? The failure here is exactly with Sessions "sense of temporality". His proportions are traditional, his materials end up having far too little energy, for all their accidentals, or are simply not played out thoroughly. Thorough going construction means not using obvious goal tones when more interesting resolutions are available, plodding through rather standardly proprotioned periods when the phrases still have ample room for expansion. If SS and TT like Brahms with wrong notes, there's no arguing with taste, but what a waste of resources - or conversely what an over use of spice when it is not particulary required. The sonic surface itself may well appeal to them - and it appeals to some others as well - but it is off putting to many others. In such circumstances, absent some powerful underlying musical idea, it is hard to make a case that a composer should become central to our musical life, which is, exactly, the argument that Porter and others have made. The difference between having nice intervals, and creating cyclical modal vocabularies whose tension creates the harmonic nature of the work is the difference between a Roger Sessions violin concerto, and one by Alban Berg... Stirling