American Composers
The "American sound" continues to change, throughout the course of time. Here is a list to some of America's greatest composer.

Roger Sessions (1896-1985)
"The Composer's Composer"

A New Englander by birth, Roger Sessions was an innately gifted youngster who completed an opera at age 13 and began college not long afterwards. He studied with the conservative Horatio Parker at Yale, but then at his own initiative worked with Ernst Bloch in New York. He then spent a number of years in Europe on fellowships, forging lasting relationships with leading composers of the day. Within a few years of returning to the United States in 1933, Sessions took up teaching composition at Princeton University, where he remained until his retirement in 1965, except for an eight-year stretch from 1945 to 1953 at the University of California, Berkeley. He was one of the most influential composition teachers of the century. In addition, he was regarded with veneration by his colleagues, who considered him one of the most important living composers; he wrote only major pieces that aspired to the highest standards, and was one of the most thoughtful and astute observers of the role of composition in the twentieth century. Sessions rejected overt nationalism in his own works, and had so thoroughly developed a style that he was immune from the attractions of the twelve-tone method of composition that swept serious composers around this time. One of his famous bon mots asserts that "The music is God; the twelve-tone system is just parish priest." Given this strength of individual style, it's ironic that his most well known work is the only one that survives from before he went to Europe, and thus before his style was fully formed-the suite from incidental music for The Black Maskers (a play by Andreyeff).

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