Ned Rorem will not go away. For decades, he has been an elegant anomaly among American composers, adhering to an austerely lyrical Franco-American style that went out of fashion sometime during the Eisenhower Administration. He came of age in the nineteen-forties, when a young composer could go to Paris, dash off a bundle of unaffectedly beautiful songs, and get written up in the weeklies alongside Norman Mailer and Montgomery Clift. Rorem was among the last American artists to pull off a plausible Parisian exile, and when he came back, in 1957, he found that composers were being hailed not for the excellence of their craft but for the extravagance of their theories. Time passed, and Rorem kept writing. The high-powered modernists who dismissed him as irrelevant became irrelevant themselves. Now he is celebrating his eightieth birthday, and, just as the man himself looks twenty years younger than he is, the music is sounding peculiarly fresh. Nothing in his thousand-work catalogue radiates genius, but the career gives off a kind of accidental grandeur—accidental because Rorem has famously disavowed the grand gesture in composition.
The oddity of Rorem’s career is that ever since he made his literary début, in 1966, with “Paris Diary,” he has been known more for his writing than for his music. The writing has an insolence and a swagger that the music lacks. The spectacular self-absorption of the diaries—“A stranger asks, ‘Are you Ned Rorem?’ I answer, ‘No,’ adding, however, that I’ve heard of and would like to meet him’”—made the young Rorem famous for being famous in his mind. He was, at the same time, a pioneer of modern gay culture, speaking freely and fearlessly of his desires. The musical essays and reviews hold up better; they may not be quite as deft as those of his mentor Virgil Thomson, but they are less often egregiously wrong. (After rereading Rorem’s superb appreciations of Benjamin Britten, I turned to Thomson on “Peter Grimes”: “not a piece of any unusual flavor or distinction.”) The “Ned Rorem Reader,” a recent compilation from Yale University Press, can stand beside Berlioz’s “Memoirs,” Debussy’s “Monsieur Croche the Dilettante-Hater,” and Morton Feldman’s “Give My Regards to Eighth Street” as one of the wisest and wittiest composer books ever published.
Rorem the composer is a more reticent being. He has his heart-on-sleeve moments, but more often he speaks in shy, gentlemanly phrases. Melancholy lurks in even the brightest corners of the music—a melancholy that has surfaced more strongly in Rorem’s recent writing, in particular his diary “Lies,” which recounts the final illness of his partner, the organist and composer James Holmes. Would we pay less attention to Rorem if he did not have such a way with words? Perhaps, but it is also possible that Rorem would never have acquired a literary reputation if he had not made his name in music first. As usual, he says it best: “I am a composer who also writes, not a writer who also composes.”
The songs are a given; it’s the instrumental music that is in danger of being overlooked. In the last decade, Rorem has written three string quartets that rival any modern American efforts in the form. All are made of short movements in succession; most of Rorem’s longer instrumental pieces follow this pattern. The individual movements sound like genre studies or cast-off sketches, but they coalesce into unexpectedly gripping narratives. The Fourth Quartet, which the Emerson Quartet recently played at Zankel Hall, includes a once-in-a-lifetime movement called “Self Portrait,” in which the cello holds forth in a rambling, halting chant while the three other strings play frigid chords around it. It’s like a less innocent version of Ives’s “The Unanswered Question,” a work in which solo voices ring out against a background of unchanging, oblivious strings. Here, oblivion appears to encroach on the protagonist and eventually stamp out all embers of emotion.
Rorem’s writing for orchestra is equally impressive. He capitalizes on his reputation for understatement by saving huge sonorities for significant occasions; as a result, his rare musical outbursts seem not so much theatrical as visceral, as if they were blows sustained in real time. The thirteen-minute tone poem “Eagles” unleashes a welter of sound, but the clean, treble-heavy orchestration never thumps in place or plods along; it simply lifts off, like the birds of the title. The recent Cello Concerto nods several times to favorite predecessors—pealing, dissonant fanfares recall Messiaen; a kind of slide show of contrasting chords brings back the Interview Scene in Britten’s “Billy Budd”—but it also includes three extended songs without words which could have been composed only by Rorem, each one sadder, lonelier, kindlier than the next. There are many first-rate pieces of this kind—the Third Symphony, the Violin Concerto, “Lions,” “Sunday Morning,” the Piano Concerto in Six Movements—but it is a rare day that you hear any of them in the composer’s home town of New York.
A paradox haunts Rorem’s career. He insists that he has no interest in making “Major Statements,” yet he has always longed to be taken seriously—to have major statements made about him. He has grumbled many times in print over the genuflections rendered toward an atonal showman such as Elliott Carter, who happens to be celebrating his ninety-fifth birthday this year (and looks eighty). Indeed, Carter has benefitted from a version of the intentional fallacy, according to which any music that is complex in design is automatically held to be complex in effect. Rorem’s scores seem, by comparison, modest and naïve, but this description applies only to their surface, and not to their emotional or psychological import. Rorem resembles such latter-day figurative painters as Fairfield Porter and Jane Freilicher, who followed the onslaught of Abstract Expressionism with landscapes and still-lifes. Their deceptively conventional images conceal large, ambiguous worlds of feeling.
The recent diaries of Rorem are painful to read, not because the author is indulging the old exhibitionism but because he is exposing losses suffered by his ego. One entry shocked me: he notes that for nearly a year he heard nothing from the Beaux Arts Trio about his work “Spring Music,” which he had been commissioned to write for them. It’s one thing not to get a phone call returned—but a half-hour composition? Rorem may have a famous name, but he works down in the trenches with the thousand American composers who labor more for love than for fame, and never for money. Notably, his eightieth-birthday celebrations are unfolding not at Lincoln Center but at smaller venues like the Miller Theatre, Merkin Hall, and the 92nd Street Y and at music-loving churches such as St. Thomas and St. John the Baptist. (Likewise, Rorem’s music has tended to thrive on independent labels; among the best current releases are “Bright Music” and the three symphonies, on Naxos; “Evidence of Things Not Seen,” on New World; “Eagles,” on Albany; and “War Scenes,” on Phoenix.) If Rorem has been frozen out of the pretentious marketplace of neue Musik, he has the satisfaction of seeing his music prosper in communities for which it fills an immediate need. He is following Britten’s great injunction: “Our job is to be useful, and to the living.”
To read Rorem’s writing is to feel the agony and the bravery of composing in America. Anyone who writes music for a living is a hero, and Rorem is more heroic than most, because he has compromised so little of what he holds dear. His prose will outlast the sneering of his critics, and his music is too mysteriously sweet to die away. To him should go the final word: “The frustration of being nonexistent keeps us awake
His Masterpiece May Be Himself, Remade as Fiction
The New York Times
Published: October 26, 2003
by Johanna Keller
Ezra Pound, Paul Bowles and Gerard Manley Hopkins are among the few writers who have also been known as composers. The composers Hector Berlioz and Robert Schumann were also fluent prose writers. But arguably no one has been as acclaimed in both endeavors as Ned Rorem, whose 80th birthday, last Thursday, is being celebrated in numerous concerts around New York and elsewhere. Mr. Rorem's 17 books include 6 tell-all diaries, a memoir and collections of essays. He has composed some 500 songs, 3 symphonies, concertos and chamber works.
Johanna Keller, a visiting professor of journalism at Syracuse University, met recently with four of Mr. Rorem's literary and musical colleagues at the office of The New York Times to discuss his place in the worlds of American music and letters. Phyllis Curtin, a soprano, met Mr. Rorem in 1946, when they were students at Tanglewood in Lenox, Mass., and she sang premieres of many of his songs. Edmund White, a novelist, wrote the preface to "Lies," Mr. Rorem's most recent diary, published in 2000. J. D. McClatchy (known to friends as Sandy), a poet and the editor of The Yale Review, is writing a libretto for a new Rorem opera based on Thornton Wilder's "Our Town." And Daron Hagen, a composer, was one of Mr. Rorem's first students at the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia, in 1981.
JOHANNA KELLER Songs are at the center of Ned Rorem's work, and he has often said that if he didn't have to write music for money, he would write only songs. Nevertheless, he won a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his orchestral suite "Air Music," and he has composed four symphonies, numerous concertos and chamber works. Where do the instrumental works fit in?
PHYLLIS CURTIN To me, even the instrumental works seem to follow a text, as if something of what makes him write in a literary manner is there.
EDMUND WHITE I was listening to a recording of the symphonies and found them beautifully orchestrated. But it sounded like movie music. I didn't like it very much at first. It seemed episodic in a way that when you listen to a ballet score, you think, "Oh, yeah, that's where Petrouchka re-enters."
DARON HAGEN Well, I served as Ned's copyist for five or six years after I left his studio, and I got to know the pieces internally by copying the parts. This year he has two large works coming out, a cello concerto and a flute concerto. Structurally, both have a kind of extended fascination with cells, juxtaposed in an almost Calderian way. It's similar to the way he crafts those wonderful sentences.
J. D. McCLATCHY I disagree about the symphonies. I really like them. They are like music of the 50's, admittedly with a period sound to them. Maybe because I'm a writer, I pay more attention to song texts than I should. But when it's nonvocal, I can listen to the music and find myself . . .
WHITE Swept away.
McCLATCHY Absolutely. When Ned's writing without words, there's a sense of freedom that's not so confined to the emotional argument of a particular poem.
KELLER Sandy, you're embarking on an opera project, writing a libretto on "Our Town."
McCLATCHY This is the first time that the estate has allowed the play to be used for an opera. In fact, Thornton Wilder himself refused Aaron Copland's request to make an opera out of it, which seems in retrospect a grievous loss. I think Ned is the ideal person to undertake this music, not least because I see him in the tradition of Copland.
KELLER There are composers and writers gifted in the lyric and not the dramatic. Does that apply to Ned's other seven operas? "Miss Julie" never seemed to find its place.
HAGEN Six of the seven are chamber operas, and they do get performed a lot according to his publisher, Boosey & Hawkes. The problem is that in the opera world there's a virgin complex. Once a piece is out there, it's very hard to convince companies to do revivals, even if you're Ned Rorem. The first production of "Miss Julie" met with mixed reviews. That can just kill you for years. But opera is long.
KELLER Ned survived tonality's dark age, particularly those decades, from the 50's through the 80's, characterized by the hegemony of the "serial killers," as Ned calls them. Now that there has been an undeniable return to tonal music, is he vindicated?
HAGEN During my lessons with him 20 years ago and in lessons with other pupils I overheard, he never spoke about tonality or serialism as something you should do or not do. I was always profoundly respectful of the fact that Ned never changed what he did. The music that he wrote when he was a kid was just like the music he's writing now. Only now it's better.
CURTIN Fads come and go. Ned has simply cultivated his garden all these years. This was my 40th year at Tanglewood, and it was fascinating to see that serialism and 12-tone music — all that was very exciting once, but much of it has gone away.
KELLER As a prose writer, Ned had a succès de scandale in 1966 with the publication of "The Paris Diary." In it, he recounted eight years as the adored Adonis of 1950's Parisian salons. The book sent shock waves through the world of letters, although Ned considered the uproar more on account of his narcissism than his libertine sexuality. Have his diaries had an enduring influence in gay literature?
WHITE It was certainly a very self-dramatizing kind of writing. It's unusual to have the thoughts of a beautiful person, because most of them are just happy to be beautiful, and they don't have to bother with writing. As to their continuing influence, so much is dependent on the vagaries of publishing. But they go on.
McCLATCHY In the age of Oprah Winfrey, everybody confesses. Whereas when "The Paris Diary" appeared, that kind of intimate and sometimes salacious self-revelation was rare.
KELLER Ned has written that "the hero of my diaries is a fictional man." And Edmund, you've observed that Rorem is "an open book but a closed life."
WHITE In fact, we know nothing about Ned's thoughts or his experiences.
McCLATCHY Ned Rorem is, quote, a character, unquote, in his own diaries. He's created a character whom he continues to write about the way Byron did.
KELLER So we come to the subject of Ned's complicated character: acerbic, narcissistic, vulnerable, charming and completely candid — or is that pretense? The last diary, ironically titled "Lies," was for me his most revealing memoir by far. Brutally forthright, he wrote about the slow decline and death from AIDS of his partner, James Holmes.
WHITE The most terrible thing about AIDS is that it destroys the relationship, no matter how loving, between the two partners and eats away at the character of the person who's dying. Nobody has AIDS and is noble. That's why all these melodramatic, kitschy plays about AIDS are such lies. Ned told the truth. Maybe the diary is the best form for talking about AIDS, because it shows the quotidian pain, the shifts, the struggles, the reconciliations, the hopes, the dashed hopes. Everything is there.
McCLATCHY That's the only time Ned was really himself with others. He was so vulnerable, so stricken, so quiet, even, in his own way. It was the first time he seemed like someone I hadn't read about already.
KELLER The same period of loss also brought about an equally brilliant work, the evening-long song cycle "Evidence of Things Not Seen." Ned seemed to reveal a more profound seriousness beneath the glittering surface of his charm, his wit.
McCLATCHY Everything he wrote after Jim's death — the music and the texts — well, there was something changed about him that confronted him with a sense of vulnerability and mortality. Perhaps he'd been hiding before under all of this bravado or acerbity. Some of that veneer has been stripped off.
HAGEN I see him fairly frequently. The person that I saw the night that Jim passed away was very private, quiet, shy, intelligent, highly self-protective. It has been a worthy project to spend an entire life putting out a strong offense as the best defense — that is to say, in works of art, the creation of an enormous identity through the serial publishing of the diaries.
KELLER It has often occurred to me that the diaries are a kind of inoculation against discovery by others. The diaries, perhaps, are a kind of armor that, by revealing the self, actually protects the self.
CURTIN There is one word that comes to my mind about Ned, which is "shy."
WHITE He has a hard time meeting your eye. He's always trying to live up to a certain high level of intellectual discourse, of constant paradox, of nonacademic intellectuality, as though he's playing to an audience that no longer exists, of people like Jean Cocteau and Marie-Laure de Noailles. That's as powerful a motor in his personality as his desire to inoculate criticism by anticipating it.
CURTIN This summer we had an all-Ned concert at Tanglewood. Someone told him to come onstage afterward through a door in the lobby. Well, the music ended, the applause began, and Ned raced down the aisle, jumped up on a chair in the front row and leapt up onto the stage. I mean leapt.
McCLATCHY He likes celebrity. He would like the idea of people sitting around a table talking about him. But for all his concern with an image of himself in the world, what's most remarkable is that he's kept at what you'd call the inner task. Often in the rush of celebrity, artists fritter away their talent by losing themselves in the world. But he's always made a space around him in which he can get his work done. Few people have worked as hard.
HAGEN About 10 years ago I wrote Ned a letter from Yaddo that described a doomed love affair, writer's block, gossip and all sorts of nonsense. I got this beautiful little postcard back just saying: "Dear Daron: Colette said no one expects you to be happy. Just get your work done. Love, Ned." I put it up in my studio, and I got back to work.
CURTIN That says Ned, doesn't it?
KELLER Early on Ned wrote, "The most discouraging thing I can conceive of is that people should say on hearing of my death, `It's too bad he didn't leave a masterpiece to make his disappearance a tragedy instead of a farce.' " So what's the Rorem masterpiece?
HAGEN I don't think it's fair to say. The ennobling thing about Ned is that he can't get to sleep at night and can't wait to get up in the morning because today might be the day he writes the masterpiece. As depressed as he professes he is, he constantly creates things.
WHITE His masterpiece is his artistic personality. He's an extremely acute observer and a master of paradox, which is very French. He was able to import French culture while remaining a thoroughly American figure. In an era of dumbing-down and slipping standards, he really does stand for something.
McCLATCHY
I agree with you, except that after an author's death, that personality fades and the achievement lasts.
HAGEN Ned is all about leaving the documents. He's acutely aware that what's left of us as oral history will burn away in a trice.
WHITE Some people are born old and others stay young. Ned's always been our young man. The idea of his being 80 is preposterous, but it doesn't deny the fact that, as Phyllis said, he's still leaping up onto the stage.
SARATOGA SPRINGS -- The increasing longevity of humans has advantages for composers. Because the music world gets obsessed with birthdays and anniversaries, composers who make it to age 70 and beyond can expect tribute concerts at least every five years, and heightened attention to their music in general. Performers and audiences are led to think, "There's a living master in our midst -- we best pay attention."
