Rorem Ned Rorem

Ned Rorem (October 23, 1923 – November 18, 2022) is an American composer and diarist. He won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1976 for his Air Music: Ten Etudes for Orchestra.

Life

Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana in 1923 as the son and second child of C. (Clarence) Rufus Rorem (1894-1988) and his wife, the former Gladys W. Miller, born in Illinois. They met and married in South Dakota in 1920, where Rufus Rorem was working for Goodyear Rubber. Ned Rorem had an older sister Rosemary.

Their paternal grandfather, Ole John Rorem, was an immigrant from Norway; their paternal grandmother, the former Sinnie Thompson, was born in Iowa, as their father was.

Rorem's father was a medical economist and worked for the Committee on the Costs of Medical Care in Washington, DC. His ideas and 1930 study contributed to the development of the later combined Blue Cross and Blue Shield medical insurance plans.^{[citation needed]} The family moved to Chicago, where by 1942 the father worked for the American Hospital Association. Rorem showed an early interest in and talent for music. He received his early education at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools and the American Conservatory of Music. He studied at Northwestern University before attending the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and the Juilliard School in New York City. Rorem was raised as a Quaker and refers to this in interviews in relation to his piece A Quaker Reader, which is based on Quaker texts.

In 1966 he published The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem, which – together with his later diaries – has brought him some notoriety. He is open about his and other men's sexuality, describing his relationships with Leonard Bernstein, Noël Coward, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson, and outing several others. Rorem also had a short affair with writer John Cheever.

Rorem has written extensively about music as well. These essays are collected in the anthologies Setting the Tone, Music from the Inside Out, and Music and People. His prose is much admired, not least for its barbed observations about such prominent musicians as composer and conductor Pierre Boulez. Rorem has composed in a chromatic tonal idiom throughout his career, and he is not hesitant to attack the orthodoxies of the avant-garde.

His notable students include Jonathan Bailey Holland, Daron Hagen, and David Horne.