* In her recently released biography of Roger Sessions, Andrea Olmstead quotes his birth certificate for a birth time of "7:00 a.m." Previously, I quoted a biography of Sessions by the same author for a birth time of "on the morning ... just in time to be welcomed by daylight."
Sessions had the Sun rising in Capricorn in the 1st house. He was one of the leading American composers of the 20th century, and he was twice awarded the Pulitzer Prize.
WIKIPEDIA BLURB
His first major compositions came while he was travelling Europe with his wife in his mid-twenties and early thirties. Returning to the United States in 1933, he taught first at Princeton University (from 1936), moved to the University of California, Berkeley, where he taught from 1945 to 1953, and then returned to Princeton until retiring in 1965. He was elected a Fellow of the American Academy of Arts and Sciences in 1961. He was appointed Bloch Professor at Berkeley (1966–67), and gave the Charles Eliot Norton Lectures at Harvard University in 1968–69. He continued to teach on a part-time basis at the Juilliard School from 1966 until 1983.
His works written up to 1930 or so are more or less neoclassical in style. Those written between 1930 and 1940 are more or less tonal but harmonically complex. The works from 1946 on are atonal, and beginning with the Solo Violin Sonata of 1953, serial.
Read more from his Wikipedia biography.
NATAL DATA and ASTROLOGY CHART
BIRTH DATA: born Roger Pitkin Sessions, baptised Roger Huntington Sessions, 28 December 1896, 07:00 (7 a.m.) EST (+5), Brooklyn, Kings, New York, USA (40n38, 73w56).
ASC: 1 Capricorn.
RR: AA (from quoted birth certificate).
SOURCE: Sy Scholfield (©) quotes Andrea Olmstead, Roger Sessions: A Biography (New York: Routledge, 2012), p. 29:
"According to his birth certificate, filed January 6, 1897, Roger was born at 7:00 a.m. on December 28th at 417 Washington Ave. . . . The birth certificate listed Roger's name as 'Roger Pitkin Sessions.'"
Previously Scholfield quoted Andrea Olmstead, Roger Sessions and his Music (Ann Arbor, MI: UMI Research Press, 1985), p. 7, which states the date and place and quotes his mother's letter stating that he was born "on the morning ... just in time to be welcomed by daylight."
If you're enjoying these posts, please consider making a donation by Paypal toward the upkeep of this blog and the further acquisition of birth records. Thanks kindly.
Copyright Sy Scholfield. All rights reserved in all media.
Conditions of use: My data collection is the result of thousands of hours of volunteer research work. Links via social media are welcome but my research data must not be distributed commercially and must never be sold by other parties. If I deem you or your company as a business then payment may be required before you publish my research data. Please contact me for details. If all persons concerned make payments then the fees remain modest for all concerned. The publication of my research data is always done with acknowledgment that I retain copyright over my collection. Use of my data is available in fairness to anybody who follows the conditions of use, so exclusive rights to publication are never granted. Attribution to "Sy Scholfield" as the collector must be given and a hyperlink or URL for this blog should be included in source notes. Please provide me with a complimentary copy of any book, software, app, etcetera, or the URL of any website in which you publish my research data. Thank you for supporting astro-data collecting.
* Wilfred Thesiger had vagabond Jupiter in the 9th on his MC and ruling his Sagittarian 12th house, translating into a life of nomadic exploration: he crossed parts of Arabia by foot and camel, and trudged through the marshlands of southern Iraq. His Sun is all but unaspected in literary, travel-loving and multi-cultural Gemini; he wrote various travel books including Arabian Sands (1959) and The Marsh Arabs (1964). Photographic Neptune in accumulative Cancer is square its ruler Moon in pioneering Aries: Thesiger donated his vast and original collection of 23,000 negatives to the Pitt Rivers Museum, Oxford.
