Just the facts, Johnny

... as Boulez ... became a cultural icon in both Europe and America, principally through his conducting, I became increasingly troubled by ... his dismissive attitude toward American music. Only Elliott Carter, the grand paterfamilias of American modernism, managed to squeeze through the infinitesimally small needle’s eye of Boulezian approval.
JOHN ADAMS, "John Adams on Boulez, a Composer Worth Wresting With", New York Times 26 November 2019 (italics mine).
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Some may say that the only troubling aspect of Boulez's "dismissive attitude toward American music" is that this attitude was well justified by the sorry state of American music in the 1970s.  Be that as it may, the concert program below shows that Carter was not the only American composer whose music Boulez liked enough to perform it during his tenure as Music Director of the New York Philharmonic.  One such American composer was Carter's good friend Roger Sessions whose Third Symphony was given its first New York performance by Boulez in March of 1976.  A few  years after leaving New York for Paris, Boulez said: "I personally would like to see more Sessions works performed [in Europe] as I did in New York"[1].

I do not reproach John Adams for including a certifiably false statement in his review of the recently published collection of Boulez's lectures.  Adams is a composer, not a musicologist or journalist.  The blame belongs to the editorial staff at (what's left of) the once respectable newspapers.  Having by now transformed journalism into a tool for Stalinist-Maoist re-education of the public, these corrupt and incompetent motherfuckers would rather count Greta Thunberg's pubic hair than make an effort to give their readers a truthful (or at least unbiased) account of anything, let alone of something as insignificant to most readers as the recent past of art music in America.

If Grandma had a dick ...

Roger Sessions (seated right) in 1959, with
Douglas Moore (seated left) and (standing left to right)
Aaron Copland, Elliott Carter,
Wallingford Riegger, William Schuman,
Walter Piston

That's what history is: the story of everything that needn't have been like that.
CLIVE JAMES, Cultural Amnesia.

If Grandma had a dick, she would have been Grandpa.
A sober response to metaphysical speculations about counterfactuals and possible worlds.
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This is as sentimental as Clive James ever allowed himself to feel on the printed page: A memorable turn of phrase infused with longing for a world where human decisions and subsequent actions - which is what history is ultimately about - are not subject to the tyranny of causal determinism.  Alas, so far causal determinism is the only coherent perspective on how the world works, and it tells us that everything happens exactly as it has to, if often not as we wish it had.  The latter may give rise to feelings of regret, but to elevate such feelings to the status of 'ontological detectors' of how things might have been is sentimental daydreaming at best.

When the Russians were especially enthusiastic...

Roger Sessions and Jean Martinon

The Russians I met ... were familiar with some American scores, and were especially enthusiastic about those of [Roger] Sessions.
ELLIOTT CARTER [1]
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These days no-one is especially enthusiastic about the symphonies of Roger Sessions.  Not even a little enthusiastic.  Too abstruse for some, too old-fashioned for others, Sessions' symphonies have been confined for decades to the dark and musty basement of music history where they pass time swapping tales of former glory with the symphonies of Dittersdorf, Spohr, Ries, Onslow, Kalliwoda, Wilms, Reinecke, Rubinstein, and other now almost completely forgotten composers.

Those who missed the train...

... the most interesting American symphonist is the subtle and introspective Roger Sessions.
The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians

Now I know how Schumann must have felt when he first heard the music of Brahms.
Arnold Schoenberg to his pupil Leon Kirchner after listening to a recording of Roger Sessions' Piano Sonata No.2. (Andrea Olmstead, Roger Sessions: A Biography, Routledge, 2008)

The greatest symphonist since Mahler.
Lighton Kerner, The Village Voice

Everybody loves Roger Sessions except the public.
Donal Henahan, New York Times (Roger Sessions' obituary, March 18, 1985)

He always has been an accomplished technician rather than a very original composer.
Harold C. Schonberg, New York Times (March 5, 1976).

[The music] has almost everything but individuality ... and there is little in this score that rises above eclectic academism.
Harold C. Schonberg's 1968 New York Times review of the premiere of Sessions' 8th Symphony (performed by the New York Philharmonic under William Steinberg).
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According to some of the above critical opinions, the complete disappearance of Roger Sessions' orchestral music from public performances should be seen as a proof that the music lacks aesthetic merits required for long-term survival even on the fringes of the standard repertoire.  According to others, it should be seen as a depressing fate of art music in the age ruled by populist demands for instant intelligibility and gratification.
     You can decide for yourself by listening to Sessions' Symphony No.7, recorded live (in stereo) at the October 5, 1967 concert of the Chicago Symphony conducted by Jean Martinon.