One should not be misled by the notion of Sessions' String Quartet No. 1 (1936) as being in E minor: Like almost all of the composer's mature works, the quartet is full of intense chromaticism only loosely bound to any underlying tonal scheme. The First Quartet was written during a time of personal and professional turmoil in Sessions' life. 1936 found Sessions living in Reno, Nevada in a successful bid to establish legal residency there (thereby enabling him to obtain a divorce from his estranged wife). In addition, the stresses surrounding the on-again, off-again premiere of the composer's Violin Concerto were beginning to take a toll on him. His finances were also in a perilous state.

The first movement, Tempo moderato, is laid out in three parallel sections, each containing the same three distinct themes. While these themes are varied to a degree in each of the three sections, they never lose their fundamental rhythmic identity. The first of the themes, for example, is an extended melody built on a repeated rhythmic unit (dotted half note, two-eighth-note anacrusis). The Quartet's Adagio, invested with much more tonal stability than the other movements (it is firmly in B minor), is interrupted briefly by a sassy scherzo. In sharp contrast to the main body of the movement, this scherzo section is tonally quite ambiguous; as a result, a real resolution is felt upon the return of the Adagio music.

Sessions normally avoided composing in rigid standard forms; his sonata forms, for example, are highly individual, full of unexpected, adventuresome twists and turns. However, the Vivace molto finale of the First Quartet is one of the most traditional sonata forms found anywhere in the composer's output; the two themes are distinct, and development and recapitulation sections occur in the proper places. Sessions employs this stylized form as a scaffolding for music of uncompromising intensity, as though to suggest that a less sturdy, unproven vessel might not have held up against its power.

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