Pulitzer-Winning Composer Roger H. Sessions Dies at 88

Roger Huntington Sessions, a composer known for his austere and complex work, and winner of the Pulitzer Prize in 1982, has died at age 88.

Sessions, a retired professor at Princeton University, died Saturday at the Medical Center at Princeton after having been in failing health for some time, George Eager, a spokesman for the school, said Sunday.

Sessions was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for his 1981 composition, “Concerto for Orchestra.” In 1974, he had received a special Pulitzer citation “for his life’s work as a distinguished American composer.”

Most of Session’s works--symphonies, operas--were written in a highly chromatic idiom that Sessions described as a “sweeping and cumulative deployment of a sustained musical impulse.”

His work, like much modern music, evoked extremes of criticism and praise. Some called it “craggy” and “granitic,” while others said it “bears the thumbprints of a master.”

His most popular and accessible compositions are probably the orchestral suite “The Black Maskers,” released in 1923, and “First Symphony,” released in 1927.

He was a member of the Princeton faculty from 1935 to 1945, when he moved to the University of California at Berkeley. He returned to Princeton in 1953, becoming the first William Shubael Conant professor of music.