Ed Zubrow wrote:

>Walter Meyers [Meyer, please!]:
>
>>Hindemith and Sessions both wrote music to Whitman's "When Lilacs Last in
>>Dooryard Bloomed".  While I believe the Hindemith setting is better known,
>>I prefer listening to the Sessions.
>
>I don't know the Sessions, but love the Hindemith.  What are some of the
>reasons you prefer the Sessions?  Also, could you, or others help me gain
>better "access" to Sessions music.  Mostly all I've heard are symphonies
>and I really had trouble with them.  Any ideas much appreciated since I
>know he is an important American composer and I would like to come to
>better grips with him.

Gulp!  I was afraid someone would ask me that, especially as I find
it very difficult to explain why I like certain music.  To add to my
embarrassment, I just discovered that I don't have a recording of the
Hindemith *Lilacs*!  I think there was a Robert Shaw recording that I
asked Serenade Records, when they had a store across the street from my
office, to hold for me when it came out, but apprently I didn't buy it
then or any other version later.  I guess that, after hearing it, elsewhere
I just didn't care enough to buy it.  Maybe I'd feel different today.

About four years ago, on another list, I permitted myself the following
comments on a thread as to whether Sessions was a "rhapsodic composer":

   I'm not sure what a "rhapsodic composer" would be ....The New Grove
   devotes a column to the heading "Rhapsody", which identifies certain
   works, beginning w/ the ancient Greeks' epics through the first
   musical works to be so designated (Tomaslek's six for piano about
   1803), and continues that

      "The rhapsody had no regular form and was not confined to any
      particular medium.  Early examples are restrained in character,
      but free fantasias of an epic heroic or national character were
      later often given the title, and...its utterance became more
      ebullient and high-flown and its emotion more uncontrolled."

      "[E]motion, more uncontrolled": maybe that's the key.  I'd said
      [previously that] I'd appreciated the music [i.e., Sessions'
      music] cerebrally more than emotionally.

   Of course the plane on which I appreciate the music may not correspond
   to the attitude of the composer when he composed it.  What a composer
   produced w/ uncontrolled emotion may nevertheless be appreciated
   by me because of what I can only describe as my intellectual
   unravelling (even if only partial) of its abstraction.  It's a
   process I enjoy but it's different from my appreciation of Bartok's
   Concerto for Orchestra or either Prokoffiev Violin Concerto.

   i [just] listened to Sessions' "When Lilacs Last in Dooryard Bloom'd".
   Reading the text while hearing the music gave me an appreciation
   for the text that I never had before.  Hearing the music for the
   first time, and conscious of the subject that inspired it, I can
   see how it was the product of "emotion more uncontrolled".  But
   the level on which I appreciated the music was much more on the
   intellectual, and minimally on the emotional, level, as compared
   w/ my appreciation of Britten's War Requiem, where the intellectual
   might almost be outweighed by the emotional.  (I wish I'd thought
   of some better adjectives to use!)

And elsewhere I remarked:

   Incidentally, I didn't intend any of the foregoing to constitute
   the faint praise that frequently damns.  I highly recommend this
   work.  It's on New World Records NW-296-2 and features Ozawa
   conducting the Boston Symphony w/ Esther Hinds, soprano; Florence
   Quivar, mezzo; Dominic Cossa, baritone and the Tanglewood Festival
   Chorus, conducted by John Oliver.

Walter Meyer