Happy 85th birthday, Ned Rorem
On Thursday, Ned Rorem, America’s greatest creator of art song and one of the finest of living composers, turned 85. Yet unlike five years ago at his last significant birthday, there are few national performances of his works, even in leading music cities, marking the occasion.
Friday night there will be a chamber program at the Church of St. Matthew and St. Timothy on W. 84th Street in New York. Soprano Mary Wilson will perform Songs Old and New Nov. 1 with the IRIS Orchestra in Germantown, Tennessee. Later in the month, the Eleven Studies for Eleven Players will be heard in Urbana, Illinois, and Our Town will be mounted by the Raylynmor Opera in Peterborough, New Hampshire. In January Evelyn Glennie will perform the Mallet Concerto, a work written for her, in Germany.
Still, considering Rorem’s reputation and achievements, the lack of attention is striking. Not that the composer is eager to attend any events. “I hate to travel,” said Rorem recently, speaking from his Manhattan apartment. “Even for a world premiere, I hate to travel. The older I get the more I hate the taxis and the waiting around at the airport.”
Composer, author and diarist, at 85, Rorem speaks a bit more slowly but remains as sharp, witty and opinionated in conversation as the preternaturally handsome young American who took Paris by storm in the 1950s.
“I can’t remember what I’m working on now,” he says. “I have a touch of Alzheimers.”
“Really?”
“No, but it seems that way.”
“I’m okay,” he says. “I complain a lot and I’m tired all the time. But everyone says I look good. And I think about sex every minute. How about you?”
The relative neglect of Rorem on his 85th birthday is all he more perplexing considering how active he has been in recent years. His operatic setting of Our Town was premiered in Bloomington in 2006, and encored at the Juilliard School in New York, receiving glowing reviews. Rorem takes pride in the fact that he managed to live long enough to get the rights to Thornton Wilder’s celebrated play, besting Copland and Leonard Bernstein.
And he has hardly been resting on his laurels, with such recent works as the Mallet Concerto, Four Prayers for Flute and Piano, and others. “I think I’m supposed to be writing a Saxophone Concerto for Marsalis. That will be my next piece. Got any ideas?”
Five years ago on his 80th , Rorem was withering about the state of American culture and the music industry. He cites the even more drastic decline in numbers of critics and space devoted to classical music at newspapers, the reduction of which in the last two years has only accelerated.
“There are a few good critics but they don’t get around very much,” said Rorem. “I haven’t counted them, but for pop music there’s about 150 in America. For opera and symphonic music there are about fifteen. There’s a few in New York, at New York magazine for example and at the Times, but fewer and fewer.
“The world is general is becoming de-cultured. Perhaps there never was an audience for the ‘best things.'”
He also remains acerbic about the conservative programming of most orchestras and musical organizations, with the emphasis on Beethoven, Tchaikovsky, Rachmaninoff and populist crossover even in New York. “The general public couldn’t care at all about what you and I are interested in, in other words, serious contemporary music.”
“I would think that performers would get sick of all of that. The same thing over and over and over,” Rorem says of the concerto and symphonic barnburners. “But of course 150 years ago the only music that was played was contemporary music.”
Rorem has a novel theory that newspapers and critics shaped the county’s musical conservatism in the early 20th century, entrenching a certain Eurocentric repertory because that’s what newspaper people believed their audience wanted to hear and read about. “The general public avoids contemporary music. But of course now most contemporary musc is comparatively listenable. It’s a twentieth century thing.”
Not that all modern styles are to his personal taste. “I don’t rush out to hear Elliott Carter. I don’t know what other people hear in him. Because he’s difficult, therefore he’s good.”
Rorem prefers composers who, like himself, tend to write in a tonally centered, more lucid and communicative style. “Mark [Adamo] has a certain gift. So does Corigliano. Corigliano’s the real thing. He can do anything.”
David Diamond is a composer Rorem believes remains underrated, and, somewhat surprisingly, says Diamond’s song-writing influenced his own emphasis on vocal music. “As a person he was difficult, but he was very disciplined and very well organized,” says Rorem of Diamond. “They’re not all great but certainly twenty songs of David Diamond’s are as good as anyone’s in history. I miss him. I think about him quite often.”
Rorem is writing less now and orchestrating a few songs, but says his greatest motivation remains a fee. “I like to be commissioned to do things. But If someone asked me to do a guitar concerto, I would turn them down. I like the money, but . . . .”
“Left to my own devices, I would only write vocal music and probably just small pieces for voice and piano. But, of course, there’s no money in that.”
Rorem’s works span the genres, with three underrated symphonies, five string quartets, concertos for several instruments, from piano, cello, and violin to percussion and English horn, and his many individual songs. But perhaps his greatest legacy is the late cycles Aftermath and Evidence of Things Not Seen. The latter, a sprawling 90-minute epic of 36 settings for multiple voices, was premiered in Chicago a decade ago and still seems like Rorem’s valedictory summing up of his art and his life.
“If I died now, I think Evidence of Things Not Seen is a pretty good piece,” he says with typical understatement of his own music. “I think the opera Our Town is a good piece too. It moves me and I’m seldom moved by my own music.
“I’ve written everything. And I think technically everything I’ve done is pretty good. Like the string quartets. But I guess I’d like to be remembered for my vocal music.”
His art often conveys a strong, philosophically centered sense of morality but Rorem remains an agnostic. “I was raised a Quaker. But my mother and father became Quakers, not so much for the God part of it but for the pacifist part of it. My mother’s younger brother was killed in the first world war and she never got over it.
“I don’t believe in God. There is no God. But I believe in pacifism and good works.”
Rorem’s witty, compulsively readable diaries have seen their last imstallment, as he says he has no desire to write prose anymore and besides his typewriter is broken. The composer also has no desire to learn how to use a computer. “I don’t feel I’m missing anything.” He asks if any writers still use typewriters and is told, probably very few because with a computer, you can write, edit and revise more quickly and easily. Rorem thinks for a moment and says, “But maybe that’s not good.”
He takes heart from the fact that he shares a birthday with Franz Liszt and Sara Bernhardt. And though he is scathing about the media and the crassness of so much domestic pop culture, he believes that today’s American composers stand head and shoulders over their international counterparts.
“Even with all the vulgarity and despite everything, artistically I think America is the most interesting country in the world today,” says Rorem. “It’s certainly more interesting than France or Germany. “I can’t really name you any composers in Europe that I find interesting. But I could name a dozen American composers I find of interest. I couldn’t even name any European composers I find uninteresting.”
9 Responses to “Happy 85th birthday, Ned Rorem”
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Fri Oct 24, 2008
at 3:21 am
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Posted Oct 24, 2008 at 5:19 am by Absinthe Hartley-Fonda
Well done, Rorem, that’s because none of we Europeans is uninteresting. And you look amazing at 80-plus – better than many men half your age – I would certainly do you.
An interesting European
Posted Oct 24, 2008 at 6:48 am by Thom Sleeper
Excellent – thank you!
Posted Oct 25, 2008 at 12:05 am by annev
This just makes me sad. The “interesting European” proves Rorem’s point. We are de-culturing at a rapid rate when one reads an article with a bit of intellectual content and all he can do is pass on some crass sexual cliche. I love classical music with all my heart and soul. But as I grow older I notice that each day that passes there are fewer and fewer kindred spirits to share in this joy. When I was a girl I thought I would never be ready to die. But now I understand that part of aging is accepting that the world isn’t made for your kind anymore.
Posted Oct 26, 2008 at 10:48 pm by Sibille
“The world is general is becoming de-cultured. Perhaps there never was an audience for the ‘best things.’”
..and than he can not name any composers in Europe that [he] finds interesting…
I am a non-musician-European and, yes!, I can now name one American contemporary composer I find uninteresting. And I could name a dozen American composers that are more interesting than any of Mr. Rorem’s “buddies”.
Posted Oct 27, 2008 at 5:21 am by steve
I would agree. I think there are always
interesting composers coming out everywhere
in the world. I hope the world still stays
open-minded and nice to each other, and
learn from each other.
The part where he finds other composers
uninteresting… is a bit un-positive.
We couldn’t see the entire world, and
we wouldn’t know all the gems.
Time will judge a masterpiece.
People, maybe… but time will.
Egyptian pyramids were discovered
much later….
We are mere humans, and 65 million of
existence on earth is a mere dust.
So much to learn, from each other…
Posted Oct 27, 2008 at 7:00 am by Tom McEachern
Happy Birthday. We’re so much richer because of you and the joy you’ve brought us. Thank you, and God bless.
Posted Oct 27, 2008 at 9:05 am by ned rorem at 85 and other odds and ends | daily observations
[…] South Florida Classical Review, a new blog to me, interviewed Rorem, in advance of a couple of celebratory concerts in New York. […]
Posted Oct 27, 2008 at 9:18 am by Robert Berger
With all due respect to Rorem, he is rather out of touch with what is actually going on in Classical music today,both in the US and Europe.
In fact, there is greater diversity of repertoire being performed today than ever before in the history of classical music.
Certain standard works are still popular, but there is absolutely no lack of new music today, and there are many composers now who can’t say that their music is being neglected, even if SOME concertgoers are resistant to new music.
And those who lament that”All music in the past was new” ignore the fact that we just have an infinitely wider variety of classical music available to us now, and that in the past,concerts etc were far less common than today, and that there were only a tiny fraction of all the orchestras and opera companies etc which exist today. The classical music scene today is infinitely richer and more diverse than in the past.
Posted Oct 27, 2008 at 1:11 pm by Rorem Speaks « The Gathering Note
[…] of Arts Journal comes a nice piece in the South Florida Classical Review. Not that all modern styles are to his personal taste. “I don’t rush out to hear Elliott […]