Ned Rorem
Ned Miller Rorem was an American composer of contemporary classical music and a writer. Best known for his art songs, 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 Air Music: Ten Etudes for Orchestra, 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 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 concertante and his final major work was the opera Our Town.
Life and career
1923–1940: Childhood and youth
Ned Miller Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana, US on October 23, 1923. Born to parents of Norwegian descent, he was their second child after his sister Rosemary. His father Clarence Rufus Rorem was a medical economist at Earlham College whose work later inspired the Blue Cross Blue Shield Association, while his mother Gladys Miller Rorem was active in antiwar movements and the Religious Society of Friends. Ned described his background as "upper middle-class, semi-bohemian but with a strong Quaker emphasis". He later explained that his family was more culturally but not religiously Quaker; throughout his life he described himself as a "Quaker atheist". The family moved to Chicago a few months after Rorem's birth, where he attended the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools. Though not musicians themselves, his parents were enthusiastic about the arts, and brought their children to numerous concerts by the famous pianists and dancers.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 also left deep impressions. 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.
1940–1948: Emerging composer
Rorem attended the School of Music of Northwestern University in 1940, studying composition with Alfred Nolte and piano with Harold Van Horne. Under the latter he focused on standard repertoire by Bach, Beethoven and Chopin, but transferred to the Curtis Institute of Music in 1942. There, he studied composition and orchestration under Gian Carlo Menotti and counterpoint under Rosario Scalero. He had numerous compositions premiered, including The 70th Psalm, a choral piece with orchestral accompaniment, and a Piano Sonata for Four Hands. Considering Scalero unprogressive, he left Curtis after a year; his parents disagreed with the decision and ceased providing him a regular allowance. Moving to New York in late 1943, to support himself he took a job as copyist for the composer Virgil Thomson, with whom he also studied orchestration and prosody. Via a mutual friend, he became acquainted with the conductor and composer Leonard Bernstein, and Bernstein introduced him to Aaron Copland. Rorem later attended two of the Tanglewood Music Center's summer sessions to study with Copland. Rorem later remarked in an article of The New York Times: "Well, I took the job with Virgil, became an instant fan of Aaron and Lenny, and for the next 42 years with many an up and a down I've remained staunch friends with all three men. Some weekend!"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.
1949–1957: France and Morocco
Rorem later remarked that the 1940s were formative for charting his future career and by 1950 he was certain of being a composer. With money from the Gershwin Prize, he left for France in early 1949, though spent much of the next two years in Morocco. He was hugely productive in the comparatively quieter Morocco, and produced a variety of compositions in rapid succession. He later explained that "The best influence for a composer is four walls. The light must come from inside. When it comes from outside, the result is postcard music." Among his earliest large-scale works, he wrote the ballet Melos in 1949, and both his Piano Concerto No. 2 and Symphony No. 1 1950. The ballet won the Prix de Biarritz in 1951, while the Symphony was premiered in Vienna in February 1951 by Jonathan Sternberg and the piano concerto in 1954 by Julius Katchen via French Radio. During this period he wrote numerous song cycles dedicated to a single textual source: Flight for Heaven to Robert Herrick; Six Irish Poems to George Darley; Cycle of Holy Songs to biblical texts; and To a Young Girl to W. B. Yeats. He composed his first opera, A Childhood Miracle, to Elliott Stein's libretto based on The Snow-Image, and Other Twice-Told Tales by Nathaniel Hawthorne. Though written in 1951, the opera was not premiered until May 10, 1955, in New York. He later received two further honors: the Lili Boulanger Memorial Fund Award in 1950 and a Fulbright Scholarship in 1951.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 ; two ballets, Ballet for Jerry and Dorian Gray ; Design for Orchestra ; The Poet's Requiem ; and Symphony No. 2. A Paris concert in 1953 featured solely Rorem's compositions.
1957–1973: Return to the US
Rorem returned to the US in either 1957 or 1958 to further pursue composition. By now, his music had attracted the attention of several important American musicians and ensembles, and most of his compositions from the 1960s onwards were commissions. In 1959, the Philadelphia Orchestra under Eugene Ormandy premiered Rorem's Eagles, a Whitman-inspired and dreamlike tone poem. His Symphony No. 3 was premiered by Bernstein and the New York Philharmonic in 1959 to critical praise; the New York Herald Tribune's music editor Jay S. Harrison called it "lavish, luscious, and luxe". Conversely, his first full-length opera, Miss Julie, was not well received at its 1965 premiere at the New York City Opera. Rorem received commissions from organizations such as the Elizabeth Sprague Coolidge Foundation, Ford Foundation and Koussevitzky Foundation among others. By this time, he was established as a neoromantic composer, who largely rejected a strict application of modernist techniques or emerging genres such as electroacoustic music.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, 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 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.