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Ned Miller Rorem (October 23, 1923 – November 18, 2022) was an American composer of contemporary classical music and a writer. Best known for his , which number over 500, Rorem was considered the leading American of his time writing in the genre. Frequently described as a neoromantic composer, he showed limited interest in the emerging modernist aesthetic of his lifetime. As a writer, he kept—and later published—numerous diaries in which he spoke candidly of his exchanges and relationships with many cultural figures of America and France.
Born in Richmond, Indiana, Rorem found an early interest in music, studying with Margaret Bonds and Leo Sowerby. He developed a strong enthusiasm for French music and received mentorship from Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, among others. After two productive years in Morocco, Rorem was hosted by the arts patron Marie-Laure de Noailles in Paris, where he was influenced by the neoclassicist group Les Six, particularly Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud. He returned to America in around 1957, establishing himself as a prominent composer and receiving regular commissions. For the American Bicentennial, he worked on seven different commissions concurrently, among which was , which won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1976.
Much of Rorem's life was spent with his lifelong partner James Holmes, between his apartment in New York and house in Nantucket. From 1980 onwards he taught at the Curtis Institute. He wrote the large-scale song cycle Evidence of Things Not Seen (1997) to 36 texts by 24 writers, for the New York Festival of Song. It is considered by commentators and Rorem himself to be his magnum opus. Much of his later compositions were devoted to concerto and his final major work was the opera Our Town (2006).
Rorem showed an early talent and interest in music, learning piano in his youth with Nuta Rothschild. Though he had other teachers before Rothschild, she was his first to make a lasting impression: she inaugurated his life-long enthusiasm for French music and culture, especially Impressionists such as Claude Debussy and Maurice Ravel. By age 12, Rorem began piano lessons with Margaret Bonds, who helped foster his interest in music composition and introduced him to both American jazz and American classical music by composers such as Charles Tomlinson Griffes and John Alden Carpenter. The music of Igor Stravinsky and songs of Billie Holiday were also particularly impressionable. He began piano study with Belle Tannenbaum in 1938, under whom he learned and performed the first movement of Edvard Grieg's Piano Concerto. Throughout his youth he also studied music theory at the American Conservatory of Music with Leo Sowerby, a well known church music composer of the time. He graduated high school in 1940, around when he began a close friendship with the future-writer Paul Goodman, whose poems he would later set to music. Rorem also found interest in literary activities, having kept a diary since his youth.
Later in 1943 he enrolled in the Juilliard School and studied composition with Bernard Wagenaar. Rorem graduated from Juilliard with a Bachelor of Arts in 1946 and a Master of Music in 1948. While a student he worked as a piano accompanist for performers such as the dancer Martha Graham and the singer Éva Gauthier. Due to his interest in literature he became increasingly interested in composing art songs, and also wrote incidental music, ballet music and music for a puppet show. In 1948, his song The Lordly Hudson on a poem by Goodman won the Music Library Association's published song of the year award. That same year, his orchestral Overture in C won a Gershwin Prize and was premiered by New York Philharmonic under in May 1948. The positive reception of both these compositions was an important milestone in his career as an emerging composer.
On the Fulbright Scholarship, in 1951 Rorem settled in Paris to study with Arthur Honegger, a representative from the Les Six group of neoclassicist music. Unlike most young American musicians in the city, he did not study with Nadia Boulanger, as she opined that her instruction might tarnish his already individual style. He became associated with the wealthy arts patron Marie-Laure de Noailles, at whose mansion he resided. Through her influence, he met with the leading Parisian cultural figures of his time, including other composers of Les Six, Francis Poulenc, Georges Auric and Darius Milhaud. Their proximity solidified the French influence of his style and he set numerous medieval French poems in the 1953 song cycle Poémes pour la paix. Other compositions written in Paris include: Piano Sonata No. 2 (1950); two ballets, Ballet for Jerry (1951) and Dorian Gray (1952); Design for Orchestra (1953); The Poet's Requiem (1955); and Symphony No. 2. A Paris concert in 1953 featured solely Rorem's compositions.
Rorem held his first teaching position at the University of Buffalo from 1959 to 1960, during which he wrote 11 Studies for 11 Players. A few years later he taught composition at the University of Utah from 1965 to 1967. His short tenures were because he believed that "this is the kind of assignment that should not last more than two years as a teacher begins to believe what he says after that long a time and becomes sterile". His compositions of the time included more instrumental music, although songs remained a central aspect of his activities. These songs were largely set to 20th-century American poets, though copyright issues sometimes prevented their immediate publication. Among these was the song cycle for mezzo-soprano and piano, Poems of Love and Rain (1963), written to texts by W. H. Auden, Emily Dickinson, Howard Moss and Theodore Roethke. Premiered by Regina Sarfaty and Rorem at the piano on April 12, 1964, it included two different musicals settings for each of the poems.
Throughout the 1950s and 60s, Rorem struggled with alcoholism. He commented that "The minute a drop of wine touches my lips I begin to be this other person—an infantile regression takes place", though he insisted that he "not be categorized as an alcoholic because he such a puritanical sense of order". Although he scheduled it carefully, he admitted to feeling a strong sense of guilt when drinking, which he considered detrimental to his artistic creativity. Rorem attended Alcoholics Anonymous meetings and used Antabuse, with little success. In late 1967, he became partners with the organist James Roland Holmes; their relationship offered enough stability for Rorem to abandon alcohol completely.
Rorem accepted his third teaching post in 1980 at the Curtis Institute, his alma mater, where he headed the composition department with David Loeb until 2001. His students at Curtis included Daron Hagen and David Horne; outside of Curtis, he taught Roger Briggs. During this time, Rorem's pace of composition did not diminish. He wrote compositions for varied genres, including The Santa Fe Songs (1980) song cycle for baritone and piano quartet and the String Symphony (1985), a recording of which by the Atlanta Symphony Orchestra won the 1989 Grammy Award for Best Orchestral Recording.
In 1993, Rorem wrote the Piano Concerto No. 4 for Left Hand and Orchestra for his Curtis colleague with an injured right hand, Gary Graffman. The following year, his earlier opera Miss Julie was revived at the Manhattan School of Music Opera Theater. For the 1997 New York Festival of Song, Rorem wrote the large-scale song cycle Evidence of Things Not Seen, described as his "masterwork" by Daniel Lewis in the Times. A deeply personal work, the composition included settings of 36 texts by 24 poets, split into three larger sections: "Beginnings" for optimistic and forward-looking songs, "Middles" exploring coming of age and the devastation of war, as well as the final "Ends" that concerns death, particularly Rorem's friends killed by AIDS. With an hour and a half duration, it called for a soprano, mezzo-soprano, tenor, and baritone with piano accompaniment. The music critic Peter G. Davis called it "one of the musically richest, most exquisitely fashioned, most voice-friendly collections of songs", while Rorem himself lauded it as his best work. His partner Holmes died in 1999, after having lived with Rorem for 32 years.
From 2010 onwards, Rorem essentially ceased composing, explaining that "I've kind of said everything I have to say, better than anyone else". Two exceptions were the 2013 song "How Like a Winter", based on Shakespeare's Sonnet 97, as well as his final work, Recalling Nadia, a brief organ piece written in 2014. Regardless, Rorem himself noted that by then he didn't receive commissions, "but then, nobody I know does". His last years were instead spent in the care of his niece, playing piano, doing and walking through Central Park. Rorem died at home in Manhattan on November 18, 2022, at age 99.
Rorem's main interest in the art song is the setting of poetry, rather than the sound of the human voice. Numerous commentators have lauded his abilities in prosody, with Grove Music Online noting that he "sets words with naturalness and clarity, without compromising the range and scope of vocal lines". The vast majority of Rorem's songs are set in English and he has criticized American colleagues who prioritize setting other languages over English. In his early years, he was particularly devoted to the poems of his friend Paul Goodman, and later set many works by Theodore Roethke. Rorem often composed entire cycles to the poetry of a single writer: John Ashbery, Witter Bynner, Demetrios Capetanakis, George Darley, Frank O'Hara, Robert Herrick, Kenneth Koch, Howard Moss, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Walt Whitman, to whom he dedicated three cycles. His few settings in other languages include French poems by Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Jean Daurat, , Henri de Régnier, Pierre de Ronsard, as well as ancient Greek texts by Plato.
Many of Rorem's songs are accompanied by piano, though some have mixed instrumental ensemble or orchestral accompaniment. A pianist himself, his accompaniment parts for the instrument are not completely secondary to the voice and more a "full complement to the melody". They include motives to emphasize textual elements—such as rain and clouds—and are wildly diverse in function, sometimes responding to the voice in counterpoint or simply doubling the vocal line. He sometimes uses the Renaissance-derived ground bass technique of a slow and repeated bassline in the left hand. Reflecting on his piano accompaniments, the writer Bret Johnson describes Rorem's musical hallmarks as "chiming piano, rushing triplets, sumptuous harmonies".
His second full-length opera, Our Town, was written 40 years later on the Our Town by Thornton Wilder. It received a successful 2006 premiere at the Indiana University Opera Theater and was later performed at the Juilliard Opera Center, New York (2008) and the Central City Opera, Denver (2013). The music critic Joshua Barone noted that it is "a tastefully restrained echo of the play's text that has found a home on smaller stages but deserves bigger ones". The play's already small-scale set and condense narrative was matched by Rorem's setting as a chamber opera and Johnson explained that "the economy of resources may well be the key to the opera's mobility and then its success". The work's final monologue-aria from the character Emily Webb is particularly well-regarded and often standard repertoire for soprano singers.
Throughout his career Rorem wrote some six small one-act operas, many of which do not fit squarely into the genre. The first of these was A Childhood Miracle of 1951, which had to wait three years for its premiere in New York 1955. Rorem wrote his own libretto for his 1958 opera based on Chaucer's "The Pardoner's Tale", The Robbers. His 1961 two-act opera The Anniversary was never performed. It included a libretto by Jascha Kessler and was, unusually for Rorem, based on the serialist tone row which he included on the title page. Rorem wrote the one-act Bertha (1968) to a libretto by Kenneth Koch. The same year he wrote the three-act Three Sisters who are Not Sisters (1971), his second collaboration with Stein as the librettist. The 1970s saw his two final short operas: Fables (1971), 5 brief scene based on La Fontaine's Fables; and Hearing (1976) on a libretto by Holmes based on Rorem's song cycles.
Rorem's Symphony No. 1 (1950) is cast in four fairly brief movements: I: Maestoso, II: Andantino, III: Largo, and IV: Allegro; the composer himself noted that it "could easily be called a Suite". The AllMusic critic Blair Sanderson considered it the most lyrical and gentle of his symphonies. His Symphony No. 2 (1956) is cast in 3 movements, I: Broad, Moderate; II: Tranquillo; III: Allegro. They are of highly unequal proportion—the second movement and the third movement combined being less than half the length of the first movement—akin to the structure of Symphony No. 6 by Dmitri Shostakovich. Both the first and second symphonies are infrequently performed; the second in particularly had not been performed since 1959 until, as the composer puts it, "José Serebrier resurrected" it 43 years later. The Third Symphony (1958) is cast in five movements: I: Passacaglia, II: Allegro molto vivace, III: Largo, IV: Andante, V: Allegro molto. It is the best known of Rorem's numbered symphonies, described by Sanderson as "the most fully realized, with resilient rhythms and cogent structures". Hurwitz opines that it should be among the "great American symphonies". Rorem later arranged the Scherzo movement for wind orchestra in 2002.
Among his main piano compositions are three sonatas written in his early years 1948, 1949 and 1954. Barone singles out the "sparking Toccata" third movement from the First Sonata, noting that it is a common encore for pianists. A few months after its publication, Rorem published the Toccata as a separate piece.
Rorem was called "an icon of gay history" by Barone, who cited his confidence and openness towards his sexuality. Barone furthered that although his writings were not central Gay liberation texts, they offered impetus for the movement. Rorem himself frequently commented as to the general unremarkability of both homosexuality and heterosexuality. In an interview with Rorem, the physician and writer Lawrence D. Mass compared Rorem's indifference to the writer William Hoffman—who "is similarly defensive about being called a gay writer"—and contrasted it to Lou Harrison—who is "proud to be a gay composer and interested in talking about what that might mean". Rorem similarly rejected any connection between a composer's music and sexuality, ridiculing the proposal that Schubert's supposed homosexuality had any effect on his music.
A dedicated diarist, Rorem wrote candidly on his and other men's sexuality, describing his relationships with Leonard Bernstein, John Cheever, Noël Coward and Tennessee Williams. Rorem's writings estimate his total romantic and sexual relationships as 3,000. He wrote extensively about music as well, collected the anthologies Music from Inside Out (1967), Music and People (1968), Pure Contraption (1974), Setting the Tone (1983), Settling the Score (1988), and Other Entertainment (1996). In 2005, Rorem was the subject of a documentary film, Ned Rorem: Word And Music, co-directed by James Dowell and John Kolomvakis.
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| +Selected recordings of compositions by Ned Rorem | |||
| 1998 | String Quartet No. 4 | Emerson String Quartet | Deutsche Grammophon UPC 00028947432128} |
| 2000 | Songs of Ned Rorem | Susan Graham (mezzo), Malcolm Martineau (piano) | Erato Records 80222 |
| 2002 | Gotham Ensemble Plays Ned Rorem | Thomas Piercy (clarinet) Rolf Shulte (violin), Judith Olson (piano), Angelina Réaux (soprano), Humbert Lucarelli (oboe), Delores Stevens (piano) | Albany Records TROY520 |
| 2003 | Three Symphonies | José Serebrier (conductor), Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra | Naxos Records 8.559149 |
| 2006 | Songs of Ned Rorem | Charles Bressler (tenor), Phyllis Curtin (soprano), Gianna D'Angelo (soprano), Donald Gramm (bass), Regina Sarfaty (mezzo-soprano), Rorem (piano) | Other Minds Records 1009-2 |
| 2013 | Piano Album I – Six Friends | Carolyn Enger (piano) | Naxos Records 8.559761 |
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