As Roger Sessions reaches his 81st year, he deserves as much recognition as we can give, certainly more than he has had. Yet his enterprise, however misunderstood or isolated, is no cause for lament; his achievement is cause for rejoicing, and he is still going. It seems like he is and always has been fifty, a middle-life sort of person, who had an uncanny foreknowledge of his life span and paced himself accordingly (as many artists have). He also has the artist's toughness, blindness, paitience, and ability to forge weaknesses into strengths. Much is written about his craftsmanship and solidity, but I hear more the abundance and sublime willfulness, Dionysian qualities, as characterizing his music and the development of his style. His music at its best is ecstatic, able to take flight. He has always proceeded in purely musical terms, and even his teaching has been antiacademic at its core.

Why the work of one composer survives and another doesn't remains a little mysterious. I myself incline on the whole to a Darwinian view of musical posterity: it is quality that chiefly determines the survival of the fittest, and some process of natural selection upon this criterion that ensures that the best are sorted out in the end. (If one throws in the other bit of evolutionist jargon—adaptation to one's environment—the limits to pursuing this metaphor become obvious). But temperamentally I distrust the endless discovery of Unjustly Neglected Composers. When the writer Mr. X is spoken of as ‘the persuasive advocate for’ composer Mr. Y, the phrase itself suggests the lawyer doing too good a job, and that the client so skilfully defended is in fact guilty—of lack of distinction anyway, if not lack of talent. There are so many Justly Neglected Composers. Every now and then, though, you make a discovery that upsets the comfortable applecart of this non-revisionist view of musical evolution.

These words come from a letter written by the Russian poet and author Boris Pasternak in late January 1917, addressed to his student friend Konstantin Loks. When Pasternak wrote the letter nearly eight years had elapsed since he abandoned music—he had meanwhile read philosophy at Moscow University before graduating in 1913 and embarking on a professional career in literature. Later on in life Pasternak was to write two autobiographies, Safe Conduct (1931) and An Essay in Autobiography (1957), in which he devoted generous space to the musical studies of his youth. He described his musical background, his study of composition and piano, and his meetings with Scriabin; he also recounted the circumstances which eventually prompted him to give up music.