Art & Creativity Quote by Roger Sessions

Sessions writes like a composer defending his art against two bad-faith reductions: music as mere decorative pleasure, and music as some private, hermetic system of technique. By insisting that we ask music to "communicate experience", he pulls the whole argument out of the conservatory and back into lived life. "First and last" is doing the heavy lifting here. It’s not a casual preference; it’s a boundary line. Whatever else music might be - formal innovation, intellectual puzzle, sonic experiment - it has to land as something recognizable in the body and mind.

The phrasing is carefully democratic about intensity. Sessions refuses the snob’s hierarchy that treats entertainment as a lesser, almost shameful category. He grants "amusing or entertaining" as a legitimate register of experience, not an apology. At the same time, he keeps the door open for the "vital and profound" without romantic mysticism. The subtext is that profundity isn’t a genre; it’s an effect, earned in the listener through contact with something felt.

Context matters: Sessions came of age as modernism hardened into a battlefield, with audiences trained to hear new music as either elitist noise or moral mission. This line reads as a strategic middle path. He’s not rejecting complexity; he’s arguing that complexity must be in service of communication, not self-congratulation. It’s a composer’s reminder that technique is only persuasive when it carries human weather.