Ned Rorem, composer and diarist, has died at the age of 99. To commemorate his life and career, we revisit an article Philip Kennicott (a fellow Pulitzer Prize winner) wrote for Gramophone's April 2021 issue. (And we also offer a special Apple Music playlist of essential listening - scroll down.)

Ned Rorem began his 1994 memoir with a dichotomy: ‘I very early understood that the universe is divided between two aesthetics: French and German. Everything is either French or German.’ He is one of America’s most productive composers, as well as one of the country’s most elegant belletrists, author of widely admired diaries, erudite essays, cogent reviews, revelatory letters and the deeply touching memoir Knowing When to Stop. He is too fine a writer to pretend that French and German are hard and inviolable categories – Webern, a miniaturist and master of sonority, was Austrian, while the arch-intellectual Boulez was French. Throughout his book, and arguably in his music, which is as rigorously structured as it is sensuous, Rorem revels in slippage and contradiction between his categories: ‘Gay is French, straight is German (unless it’s the other way around),’ he wrote.

Rorem, says Rorem, is French, which is an ideal, almost a religion. Early in his career, he spent the better part of a decade largely in France, from 1949 to 1958, circulating in the social milieu of Cocteau and Poulenc. He also studied for a period with Virgil Thomson in New York and with Honegger in Paris. He attributed his musical development to the careful study of French scores, especially Debussy and Ravel, more than to the influence of any of the composers with whom he apprenticed. Although he has written three symphonies, several concertos and two full-length operas, he remains best known for his songs, and almost every one of them sounds French – if, by that, one means precise, nuanced, and grounded in colouristic harmonic extrapolations from the musical world of Debussy, Fauré, Hahn, Ravel and Les Six.

Rorem was born in 1923 in Richmond, Indiana, and spent his youth in Chicago. He is a Quaker, a pacifist, and fundamentally cosmopolitan in his music and his abundance of writings. His first songs began appearing in the mid-1940s, and in 1948 ‘The Lordly Hudson’ (1947) was recognised as the best song of the year by the Music Library Association. It is now a staple of American song programmes, as are many of the early songs – such as ‘Early in the Morning’ and ‘Rain in Spring’ – included on a recording made in 1962-63 with soprano Phyllis Curtin, bass-baritone Donald Gramm and other great mid-century singers, with the composer at the piano. That disc, since reissued after a long absence, introduced him to American audiences. Subsequent artists, including Susan Graham, have kept him before new generations of listeners and artists. No respectable American singer doesn’t have at least a few of his songs in their repertoire.

The early songs, with their eclectic and often cerebral poetry, their intimacy and refinement, as well as Rorem’s diaries, which began appearing in 1966, helped establish his reputation and, for decades, with seeming adamantine fixity. At a time when composers who worked in the serial and atonal camp exercised considerable influence over the critical establishment, Rorem’s focus on song seemed inexplicably odd and retardataire, as was his tendency to write for the parlour and express delicate sentiments in mostly tonal language. And then there are his writings, in which he was open about his sexuality at a time when it was still possible to be arrested in many states for same-sex relations. 

Even in the rarefied milieu of New York, where Rorem lived when he wasn’t on the island of Nantucket, Massachusetts, he swam against the currents. He has found much to admire in composers like Marc Blitzstein and George Gershwin (‘I’ve just listened nonstop to fifty-three songs by George and Ira Gershwin, and the effect is no less exhilarating than if the songs had been by Robert Schumann or Charles Ives’), but has never written music for a mass audience, for Broadway or for the ever hungry maw of the pop industry. He admires Copland and Thomson (‘the father and mother of American music’), and he is every bit as American a composer as they are, but his music has remained worldly, urban, sophisticated, with only occasional and often elliptical reference to the American musical vernacular.

By his mid-sixties, he was tired of the critical pigeonholing: is Rorem a writer who also composes, or a composer who also writes? Are the songs his only essential music, or is he comfortable with longer-form works? In his later diaries – including Lies, which covers the years 1986-99, including the height of the Aids crisis (the disease claimed his longtime partner James Holmes in 1999) – he sounds often tired, even defeated. And then he kept going, composing and writing, which was very much a boon to American music and culture. New generations of Americans can’t be bothered with the old condescension towards Rorem – the finicky miniaturist who slept with ‘four Time magazine covers’ – and are now rediscovering his larger oeuvre, including his powerful and affecting 1958 Third Symphony, an envoi to France, and tone poems such as Eagles (1958) and the orchestral suite Air Music (1974), which won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1976. In 2005, he finished his second full-length opera, Our Town, based on the beloved Thornton Wilder play.

Rorem has said he conceives all music vocally: ‘Whatever my music is written for – tuba, tambourine, tubular bells – it is always the singer within me crying to get out.’ But there’s nothing limiting in that. Indeed, his concertante works often sound like conversations, with the soloist interacting not with the massed forces of the orchestra, but with other instrumentalists on a near equal footing. He has also composed significant song-cycles for solo and multiple voices (including the 1997 Evidence of Things Not Seen), which function as complex, evening-length works. The large-scale works tend to have lots of smaller parts – shorter movements of four and five minutes. But these aren’t scattered musical pensées, or random, fragmentary compendia. Motivic and thematic frugality is as essential to his music as overt theatricality and emotional candor.

The composer is also a critic, of both his own work and, for decades, the work of others. He has asked fellow critics to seek out not the originality but the individuality in an artist. He is also sceptical of the idea that composers grow and change over the years. Some do, perhaps, but most, he has argued, possess, nurture and finesse a quantum of talent and ideas for a lifetime. Listen to musical bookends of his career – the early songs and later works, including the three concertos (for flute, cello, percussion) he wrote in 2002-03 – and you hear a consistency of musical invention and artistry, always precise, concise and clear.

Rorem has always said he is a composer who also writes, not a writer who also composes. For many years, praise for his writing often came with backhanded insinuations about his music. But as Rorem approaches the age of 100 his music is showing the greater cultural resilience. Rorem’s diaries document a vanishing world – now entirely vanished. Their candour and honesty will likely be bad for his reputation in an age as self-conscious about politics and identity as ours. But his music is not so encumbered, it thrives and gains new champions, and it spans an enormous arc of time. Audiences will be rediscovering it with delight for generations to come.

See also Andrew Farach-Colton's 90th-birthday tribute from October 2013, with recommended listening