SOURCE: "Schoenberg in the United States," in Roger Sessions on Music: Collected Essays, edited by Edward T. Cone, Princeton University Press, 1972, pp. 353-69.

In the following essay, Sessions surveys Schoenberg's music influenced by American music and culture.

In any survey of Schoenberg's work one fact must be emphasized above all: that no younger composer writes quite the same music as he would have written had Schoenberg's music not existed. The influence of an artist is not, even during his lifetime, confined to his disciples or even to those who have felt the direct impact of his work. It is filtered through to the humblest participant, first in the work of other original artists who have absorbed and reinterpreted it for their own purposes; then through the work of hundreds of lesser individuals, who unconsciously reflect the new tendencies even when they are opposed to them. For genuinely new...