Book contents
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Foreword: “The Glowing of Such Fire”—A Tribute to Ralph Kirkpatrick
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One Family
- Part Two Friends, Colleagues, and Other Correspondence
- 2 Nadia Boulanger
- 3 Alexander Mackay-Smith
- 4 Wanda Landowska
- 5 John Challis
- 6 Serge Koussevitzky
- 7 Oliver Strunk
- 8 Roger Sessions
- 9 Harold Spivacke
- 10 Steinway & Sons
- 11 New York Times
- 12 Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge
- 13 John Kirkpatrick
- 14 Alexander Schneider
- 15 Otto Luening
- 16 Donald Boalch
- 17 John Hamilton
- 18 Thornton Wilder
- 19 Lincoln Kirstein
- 20 Arthur Mendel
- 21 Edward Steuremann
- 22 Frank Martin
- 23 Olin Downes
- 24 Albert Fuller
- 25 Elliott Carter
- 26 Quincy Porter
- 27 Vincent Persichetti
- 28 Henry Cowell
- 29 Mel Powell
- 30 Bengt Hambraeus
- 31 Alec Hodson
- 32 Paul Fromm
- 33 Wolfgang Zuckermann
- 34 Kenneth Gilbert
- 35 Mr. and Mrs. George Young
- 36 Colin Tilney
- 37 Oliver Daniel
- 38 Eliot Fisk
- 39 Wilton Dillon
- 40 William Dowd
- 41 Meredith Kirkpatrick
- Afterword: Lessons with Kirkpatrick
- Appendixes
8 - Roger Sessions
from Part Two - Friends, Colleagues, and Other Correspondence
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 05 December 2014
- Frontmatter
- CONTENTS
- Foreword: “The Glowing of Such Fire”—A Tribute to Ralph Kirkpatrick
- Acknowledgments
- Introduction
- Part One Family
- Part Two Friends, Colleagues, and Other Correspondence
- 2 Nadia Boulanger
- 3 Alexander Mackay-Smith
- 4 Wanda Landowska
- 5 John Challis
- 6 Serge Koussevitzky
- 7 Oliver Strunk
- 8 Roger Sessions
- 9 Harold Spivacke
- 10 Steinway & Sons
- 11 New York Times
- 12 Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge
- 13 John Kirkpatrick
- 14 Alexander Schneider
- 15 Otto Luening
- 16 Donald Boalch
- 17 John Hamilton
- 18 Thornton Wilder
- 19 Lincoln Kirstein
- 20 Arthur Mendel
- 21 Edward Steuremann
- 22 Frank Martin
- 23 Olin Downes
- 24 Albert Fuller
- 25 Elliott Carter
- 26 Quincy Porter
- 27 Vincent Persichetti
- 28 Henry Cowell
- 29 Mel Powell
- 30 Bengt Hambraeus
- 31 Alec Hodson
- 32 Paul Fromm
- 33 Wolfgang Zuckermann
- 34 Kenneth Gilbert
- 35 Mr. and Mrs. George Young
- 36 Colin Tilney
- 37 Oliver Daniel
- 38 Eliot Fisk
- 39 Wilton Dillon
- 40 William Dowd
- 41 Meredith Kirkpatrick
- Afterword: Lessons with Kirkpatrick
- Appendixes
Summary
Roger Sessions (1896–1985) was a composer and professor of music at Princeton and at the University of California at Berkeley. Kirkpatrick met him in Paris in 1932 and saw him fairly frequently there. Nadia Boulanger had provided RK with a letter of introduction. Sessions arranged for RK to play the clavichord for a group of his friends and offered suggestions about other concert possibilities. As the letter indicates, he began composing a harpsichord concerto for Kirkpatrick in 1935 while in California but never completed it.
August 17, 1935
Dear Ralph—
I have begun the harpsichord concerto—just the sketches, of course, and thus I hope to do it during the coming year some time. I don't know how soon I shall have something to show you—perhaps by December if you don't come back till then. But I wanted to tell you that I have started thinking about it, and if my composing goes at the rate it has been doing this summer, it will go very quickly. The flood-gates seem to have opened at last. I won't say more than that—but I am really a composer again and incidentally a completely new human being. I hope the concerto will be good. I started it quite without malice aforethought and found myself thinking in terms of the harpsichord as a completely new instrument—not a trace of reminiscence of any music I ever heard on it—Bach or Handel or Poulenc(!?!). So I have material for two movements—a 44 Allegro and a 68 Andante. The orchestra will be small: two flutes, oboe, English horn, two clarinets, bass clarinet, one Fag, one horn, two trumpets, triangle, snare drum, one violin, two violas, one cello, one contrabass.
However, those are plans and of course subject to change. I can't give all my time to it as my symphony has to be completed; and after that I have other big works which I absolutely have to write.
- Type
- Chapter
- Information
- Ralph KirkpatrickLetters of the American Harpsichordist and Scholar, pp. 76 - 77Publisher: Boydell & BrewerPrint publication year: 2014