20th Century American composer Roger Sessions is featured this weekend. The 1949 recording of his Symphony Number 2, which had just won the coveted Walter Naumberg Foundation American Composition Award.

This is the first commercial recording of the work, made shortly after the award was given. It features the New York Philharmonic conducted by Dimitri Mitropolous, and issued by Columbia Records in 1950 as a 10" lp (ML 2120).

If this is your first time, enjoy - if you know this work, welcome back - you may not have heard it in a while.

Some Americana this Thanksgiving Weekend. From the weekly radio series America's Composers featuring the Eastman-Rochester Symphony conducted by Howard Hanson. This episode was the last of the 1953 season and features the music of Roger Sessions, Harl McDonald and George Gershwin, along with an intermission talk by Harl McDonald.

Certainly not ear-bending "Modern Music" by any stretch of the imagination, especially when you consider the program ends with the Porgy & Bess Suite of Gershwin's as arranged by Robert Russell Bennett. But this was what was considered Modern Music at the time in very conservative music circles. And this was as far as many would go as far as music appreciation was concerned. Much of it has been largely forgotten - some of it unjustifiably so and some of it undeserved of the neglect.

But this was the state of mainstream culture in America in 1953.