Ned Rorem
d. 18 November 2022, New York, New York
Short Biography:
Ned Rorem, hailed as “the world’s best composer of art songs” (Time magazine), is celebrated for his immense catalog of musical compositions as well as his acclaimed body of literary writing, including five volumes of diaries and collections of lectures and criticism. a Pulitzer Prize and GRAMMY Award—includes three symphonies, four piano concertos, and an array of other orchestral works; music for numerous combinations of chamber forces; ten operas; choral works of every description; ballets and other music for the theater; and literally hundreds of songs and cycles.
During his lifetime, Rorem was honored with a Fulbright Fellowship (1951), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1957), and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1968). He received the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award in 1971 for his book Critical Affairs, A Composer's Journal, in 1975 for The Final Diary, and in 1992 for an article on American opera in Opera News. His orchestral suite Air Music won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize in music. The Atlanta Symphony recording of the String Symphony, Sunday Morning, and Eagles received a Grammy Award for Outstanding Orchestral Recording in 1989. In 1998 he was named Composer of the Year by Musical America. He served as President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 2000-2003. In 2001 he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Des Lettres by France for his contribution to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance. In 2003 he was awarded the Gold Medal in Music, for an entire body of work, by the Academy of Arts and Letters; and also received ASCAP’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Rorem’s music was commissioned by many of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including the Ford Foundation (Poems of Love and the Rain, 1962), Lincoln Center Foundation (Sun, 1965); Koussevitzky Foundation (Letters from Paris, 1966); Atlanta Symphony (String Symphony, 1985); Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Goodbye My Fancy, 1990); Carnegie Hall (Spring Music, 1991); the New York Philharmonic (Concerto for English Horn and Orchestra, 1993); and the Philadelphia Orchestra (Flute Concerto, 2002). Rorem's final opera, Our Town, a setting of Thorton Wilder’s acclaimed play, premiered at the Indiana University Jacob's School of Music in 2006. Among the distinguished conductors who performed his music were Bernstein, Masur, Mehta, Mitropoulos, Ormandy, Previn, Reiner, Slatkin, Steinberg, and Stokowski.
The Ned Rorem Archives are at the Library of Congress, Music Division, Washington DC.
Ned Rorem is published by Boosey & Hawkes.
— September 2023
This biography can be reproduced free of charge in concert programs with the following credit:
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
Long Biography:
Ned Rorem, hailed by Time magazine as "the world's best composer of art songs," is celebrated for his immense catalog of musical compositions as well as his acclaimed body of literary work, including five volumes of diaries and collections of lectures and criticism. Winner of a Pulitzer Prize and GRAMMY Award, Rorem composed three symphonies, four piano concertos, and an array of other orchestral works; music for numerous combinations of chamber forces; 10 operas; choral works of every description; ballets and other music for the theater; and literally hundreds of songs and cycles.
In addition to a Pulitzer Prize, awarded in 1976 for his suite Air Music, Rorem had been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship (1951), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1957), and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1968). He was a three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award; in 1998 he was chosen Composer of the Year by Musical America. The Atlanta Symphony recording of the String Symphony, Sunday Morning, and Eagles received a Grammy Award for Outstanding Orchestral Recording in 1989. He served as President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters from 2000-2003. In 2001 he was named a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Arts et Des Lettres by France for his contribution to the enrichment of the French cultural inheritance. In 2003 he was awarded the Gold Medal in Music, for an entire body of work, by the Academy of Arts and Letters; and also received ASCAP’s Lifetime Achievement Award.
Rorem’s music was commissioned by many of the world’s most prestigious institutions, including the Ford Foundation (Poems of Love and the Rain, 1962), Lincoln Center Foundation (Sun, 1965); Koussevitzky Foundation (Letters from Paris, 1966); Atlanta Symphony (String Symphony, 1985); Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Goodbye My Fancy, 1990); Carnegie Hall (Spring Music, 1991); the New York Philharmonic (Concerto for English Horn and Orchestra, 1993); and the Philadelphia Orchestra (Flute Concerto, 2002). Rorem's final opera, Our Town, a setting of Thorton Wilder’s acclaimed play, premiered at the Indiana University Jacob's School of Music in 2006. Among the distinguished conductors who performed his music were Bernstein, Masur, Mehta, Mitropoulos, Ormandy, Previn, Reiner, Slatkin, Steinberg, and Stokowski.
Rorem’s catalog of art songs includes more than 500 works. His magnum opus was Evidence of Things Not Seen, an evening-length song cycle for four singers and piano that premiered at Carnegie Hall with the New York Festival of Song in 1998. New York magazine called the work "one of the musically richest, most exquisitely fashioned, most voice-friendly collections of songs I have ever heard by any American composer." Chamber Music magazine deemed it "a masterpiece."
Rorem's final opera, Our Town, a setting of Thorton Wilder’s acclaimed play that h completed with librettist J.D. McClatchy, premiered at the Indiana University Jacob's School of Music in 2006 and has enjoyed subsequent performances with the Lake George Opera and Aspen Music Theater Center, North Carolina School of the Arts, the Juilliard School, and the Guildhall School of Music.
His publication, Facing the Night: A Diary (1999-2005) and Musical Writings, chronicles Rorem's dark journey after the death of 32 year companion, Jim Holmes. In his diary, Lies, (published by Counterpoint Press in 2000) Rorem said: "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. I don't believe that composers notate their moods, they don't tell the music where to go - it leads them....Why do I write music? Because I want to hear it - it's simple as that. Others may have more talent, more sense of duty. But I compose just from necessity, and no one else is making what I need."
Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana on October 23, 1923. As a child he moved to Chicago with his family; by the age of ten his piano teacher had introduced him to Debussy and Ravel, an experience which "changed my life forever," according to the composer. At seventeen he entered the Music School of Northwestern University, two years later receiving a scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He studied composition under Bernard Wagenaar at Juilliard, taking his B.A. in 1946 and his M.A. degree (along with the $1,000 George Gershwin Memorial Prize in composition) in 1948. In New York he worked as Virgil Thomson's copyist in return for $20 a week and orchestration lessons. He studied on fellowship at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood in the summers of 1946 and 1947; in 1948 his song The Lordly Hudson was voted the best published song of that year by the Music Library Association.
In 1949 Rorem moved to France, and lived there until 1958. His years as a young composer among the leading figures of the artistic and social milieu of post-war Europe are absorbingly portrayed in The Paris Diary and The New York Diary, 1951–1961 (reissued by Da Capo, 1998). He lived the rest of his life in New York City.
The Ned Rorem Archives are at the Library of Congress, Music Division, Washington DC.
Ned Rorem is published by Boosey & Hawkes.
— September 2023
This biography can be reproduced free of charge in concert programs with the following credit:
Reprinted by kind permission of Boosey & Hawkes.
