Ned Rorem, prize-winning composer and author, dies at 99
7 min readBy Associated Press
NEW YORK: Ned Rorem, the prolific Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning musician recognized for his huge output of compositions and for his barbed and generally scandalous prose, died Friday at 99.
The information was confirmed by a publicist for his longtime music writer, Boosey & Hawkes, who stated he died of pure causes at his residence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The good-looking, energetic artist produced a thousand-work catalog starting from symphonies and operas to solo instrumental, chamber and vocal music, along with 16 books. He additionally contributed to the rating for the Al Pacino-starring movie “Panic in Needle Park.”
Time journal as soon as referred to as Rorem “the world’s best composer of art songs,” and he was notable for his lots of of compositions for the solo human voice. The poet and librettist J.D. McClatchy, writing in The Paris Review, described him as “an untortured artist and dashing narcissist.”
His music was principally tonal, although very a lot fashionable, and Rorem didn’t hesitate to goal his printed phrases at different outstanding contemporaries who espoused the dissonant avant-garde, like Pierre Boulez.
“If Russia had Stalin and Germany had Hitler, France still has Pierre Boulez,” Rorem as soon as wrote.
He had a fundamental motto for songwriting: “Write gracefully for the voice — that is, make the voice line as seen on paper have the arched flow which singers like to interpret.”
Rorem received the 1976 Pulitzer for his “Air Music: Ten Etudes for Orchestra.” The 1989 Grammy for excellent orchestral recording went to The Atlanta Symphony for Rorem’s “String Symphony, Sunday Morning, and Eagles.”
His 1962 “Poems of Love and the Rain” is a 17-song cycle set to texts by American poets; the identical textual content is ready twice, in a contrasting method.
Born in Richmond, Indiana, Rorem was the son of C. Rufus Rorem, whose concepts within the Thirties have been the idea for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance policy and who turned to Quaker philosophy, elevating his son as a pacifist.
The youthful Rorem went to day college on the elite University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. By the time he was 10, his piano trainer launched him to Debussy and Ravel, which “changed my life forever,” stated the composer whose music was tinged with French lyricism.
He went on to check on the American Conservatory of Music in Hammond, Indiana, and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, then the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and the Juilliard School in New York.
As a younger composer within the Fifties, he lived overseas for eight years, principally in Paris however with two years in Morocco.
“The Paris Diary” covers his keep there and is full of well-known names of individuals he met — Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, Balthus, Salvador Dali, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Man Ray, and James Baldwin. The late author Janet Flanner referred to as it “worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet.” Rorem himself stated his textual content was “filled with drunkenness, sex, and the talk of my betters.”
His literary self-portrait continued by way of 1985, contained in “The New York Diary,” “The Later Diaries” and “The Nantucket Diary.”
“His essays are composed like scores,” McClatchy as soon as wrote of him. “The same hallmarks we listen for in Rorem’s music will be found in his essays a well: indirection, instinctive grace, intellectual aplomb, a lyrical line.”
Some have been appalled by Rorem’s infamous accounting of his relationships with 4 big-name males in music: Leonard Bernstein, Noel Coward, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson. He additionally outed a couple of others.
But most of his personal life was centered round James Holmes, an organist and choir director with whom he lived for 3 many years in New York City. Holmes died in 1999. An announcement from Boosey & Hawkes stated Rorem died surrounded by family and friends and is survived by six nieces and nephews and eleven grandnieces and grandnephews.
Drawing on his upbringing, Rorem primarily based his “Quaker Reader” — a set of items for organ — on Quaker texts.
As for his non-musical writings, he stated: “My music is a diary no less compromising than my prose. A diary nevertheless differs from a musical composition in that it depicts the moment, the writer’s present mood which, were it inscribed an hour later, could emerge quite otherwise.”
Rorem’s essays on music seem in anthologies titled “Setting the Tone,” “Music from the Inside Out,” and “Music and People.”
“Why do I write music?” he as soon as requested. “Because I want to hear it — it’s as simple as that.”
NEW YORK: Ned Rorem, the prolific Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning musician recognized for his huge output of compositions and for his barbed and generally scandalous prose, died Friday at 99.
The information was confirmed by a publicist for his longtime music writer, Boosey & Hawkes, who stated he died of pure causes at his residence on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The good-looking, energetic artist produced a thousand-work catalog starting from symphonies and operas to solo instrumental, chamber and vocal music, along with 16 books. He additionally contributed to the rating for the Al Pacino-starring movie “Panic in Needle Park.”
Time journal as soon as referred to as Rorem “the world’s best composer of art songs,” and he was notable for his lots of of compositions for the solo human voice. The poet and librettist J.D. McClatchy, writing in The Paris Review, described him as “an untortured artist and dashing narcissist.”
His music was principally tonal, although very a lot fashionable, and Rorem didn’t hesitate to goal his printed phrases at different outstanding contemporaries who espoused the dissonant avant-garde, like Pierre Boulez.
“If Russia had Stalin and Germany had Hitler, France still has Pierre Boulez,” Rorem as soon as wrote.
He had a fundamental motto for songwriting: “Write gracefully for the voice — that is, make the voice line as seen on paper have the arched flow which singers like to interpret.”
Rorem received the 1976 Pulitzer for his “Air Music: Ten Etudes for Orchestra.” The 1989 Grammy for excellent orchestral recording went to The Atlanta Symphony for Rorem’s “String Symphony, Sunday Morning, and Eagles.”
His 1962 “Poems of Love and the Rain” is a 17-song cycle set to texts by American poets; the identical textual content is ready twice, in a contrasting method.
Born in Richmond, Indiana, Rorem was the son of C. Rufus Rorem, whose concepts within the Thirties have been the idea for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance policy and who turned to Quaker philosophy, elevating his son as a pacifist.
The youthful Rorem went to day college on the elite University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. By the time he was 10, his piano trainer launched him to Debussy and Ravel, which “changed my life forever,” stated the composer whose music was tinged with French lyricism.
He went on to check on the American Conservatory of Music in Hammond, Indiana, and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, then the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and the Juilliard School in New York.
As a younger composer within the Fifties, he lived overseas for eight years, principally in Paris however with two years in Morocco.
“The Paris Diary” covers his keep there and is full of well-known names of individuals he met — Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, Balthus, Salvador Dali, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Man Ray, and James Baldwin. The late author Janet Flanner referred to as it “worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet.” Rorem himself stated his textual content was “filled with drunkenness, sex, and the talk of my betters.”
His literary self-portrait continued by way of 1985, contained in “The New York Diary,” “The Later Diaries” and “The Nantucket Diary.”
“His essays are composed like scores,” McClatchy as soon as wrote of him. “The same hallmarks we listen for in Rorem’s music will be found in his essays a well: indirection, instinctive grace, intellectual aplomb, a lyrical line.”
Some have been appalled by Rorem’s infamous accounting of his relationships with 4 big-name males in music: Leonard Bernstein, Noel Coward, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson. He additionally outed a couple of others.
But most of his personal life was centered round James Holmes, an organist and choir director with whom he lived for 3 many years in New York City. Holmes died in 1999. An announcement from Boosey & Hawkes stated Rorem died surrounded by family and friends and is survived by six nieces and nephews and eleven grandnieces and grandnephews.
Drawing on his upbringing, Rorem primarily based his “Quaker Reader” — a set of items for organ — on Quaker texts.
As for his non-musical writings, he stated: “My music is a diary no less compromising than my prose. A diary nevertheless differs from a musical composition in that it depicts the moment, the writer’s present mood which, were it inscribed an hour later, could emerge quite otherwise.”
Rorem’s essays on music seem in anthologies titled “Setting the Tone,” “Music from the Inside Out,” and “Music and People.”
“Why do I write music?” he as soon as requested. “Because I want to hear it — it’s as simple as that.”
