Excerpt from "In Defense of Song: The Contribution of Roger Sessions" by Edward T. Cone:

In a single richly suggestive word, "song," Sessions sums up all the factors - melodic, harmonic, rhythmic, textural, dynamic, articulative - that contribute to what I have called musical line: "Each one of these various aspects derives its functions from the total and indivisible musical flow - the song... [M]usic can be genuinely organized only on this integral basis, and...an attempt to organize its so-called elements as separate factors is, at the very best, to pursue abstraction, and, at the worst, to confuse genuine order with something which is essentially chaotic."1 Analysis, whose functions as a valuable tool for the training of composer and performer Sessions has so well explicated and demonstrated, is now all too often called on to justify and to further this essentially unmusical, or at best nonmusical, pursuit of abstraction. Herein lies the explanation for the increasing doubt of the general usefulness of the discipline that Sessions has lately evidenced.2 For the creation and analysis of art are two distinct activites, confused at the artist's peril. "...[A]nalysis cannot reveal anything whatever except the structural aspects of a completed work...Discoveries after the fact are necessarily verbalized in terms of preexistent contexts; it hears forward, as it were, in terms of the contexts.3