"We are asked (to put it politely) for whom we are writing..." From his perspective as a composer, Roger Sessions discusses some basic questions raised by the experience of music: what do we mean by "knowing" a piece of music, or "understanding" it? In what ways is the relationship between composer and listener different today from what it was in the past, and what demands can each make on the other?

Music, like all nonverbal arts and certainly like mathematics and some branches of science, has its own dialectic, which is not that of words at all." Mr. Sessions...