I think that any search for new relations between music and theatre has to start from a negative remark: before setting a new goal, we must be sure to set aside those previously reached. Only after this can we try to shape or to renew a global conception, in a sense comparable to the old ‘Gesamtkunstwerk’, the purpose being that of subsuming music as a part of a more general plan. This is why today we often have the impression that music is not the most important factor in our experiments any more.

Driving north up the Connecticut River on Route 47 from Hadley, Massachusetts, one is led by signs to the local historic site, ‘Forty Acres’, or the Porter-Phelps-Huntington House. During summer months a dollar buys a guided tour of the museum-house built in 1752 and the possessions of six generations of families who lived there. With its deeds and diaries dating from the French and Indian Wars, a 178-year-old grandfather clock which keeps perfect time, former slaves' quarters, a Southern veranda (the ‘Stoop’) looking out onto the River, a secret stair-case, tales of a ghost, antique furniture, and portraits of ancestors who entered the clergy, taught at Harvard, or fought in the Revolution, the House radiates continuity with the past. One of its most famous residents, the Bishop of Central New York, the Rev. Dan Huntington, had a daughter named Ruth who grew up and met her future husband—her second cousin Archibald Sessions—at ‘Forty Acres’. Research on the biography of one of America's foremost composers, their son Roger, leads to ‘Forty Acres’, for he is a direct descendant of these New Englanders.

This discography includes all the gramophone records I have been able to trace which contain music by Roger Sessions and were issued before September 1978 for sale or for broadcast. If there are errors or omissions, I will be grateful to those who will notify me of them via the editor of TEMPO.

The compositions are numbered in alphabetical order. The dates of compositions are approximate: it is often difficult to determine when works by Sessions were begun. Some of the dates include a certain amount of ‘gestation’ and sketching while others may not.

Are they suddenly both seventy? If time flies while art stands still, never was the paradox more positive. Though fruitful years may still attend them, their catalogues are history now, open to flows of reinterpretation—as opposed to mere misinterpretation. I love the music of each, with a need met by quite separate responses. Thus on this anniversary how can I compare them so much as contrast them: they have little in common beyond a grandeur joined to the special madness that forms greatness, which is always incomparable. (By greatness I mean unique, extreme, persuasive and permanent daring—the risk that counts.)

To be America's leading song writer at a time when practically nobody is writing songs may seem on the surface like no great distinction. But to have over a hundred songs in print, many of them sung and recorded by leading artists, is a real achievement. And to have accomplished this with a serene disregard for the fads and trends of the time, with no interest in novelty for its own sake is, to say the least, remarkable. But lest there be any mystery about Ned Rorem or his music, he is the author of some eight volumes of diaries, journals and essays in which his frankness has gained him readers while losing him friends, and his lucid discussions explain as well as possibly could be done the workings of his own musical mind.