Ned Rorem

Ned Miller Rorem (October 23, 1923 – November 18, 2022) 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.

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 (Quakers).

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 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.

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 (1943), 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.

He 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.

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, where his students included Daron Hagen and Jennifer Higdon.

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 concertante and his final major work was the opera Our Town (2006).