ABSTRACT
Wallingford Riegger was born in Albany, Georgia, in 1885, though his family moved to New York in 1899, and Riegger's music is related more to the big city than to the South. In the famous or infamous Study in Sonority for ten violins, which, appearing in 1929, was the first work of Riegger to create a sensation both of approval and of disapproval, the most traditionally lyrical of all instruments is driven to frenzy by its inability to sing. Like Riegger, Roger Sessions often uses fugal techniques in employing themes serially, so that the thematic significance is immediately apprehensible. The cosmopolitan Sessions has become a New England composer, just as, in the whirlwind of the Second Symphony's first movement, he had become at a deep level American. The traditional basis to Sessions's serialism is perhaps a little modified in his most phases, which opens with a series of works that oppose a single melodic voice to a massed polyphony.
