American composer, diarist and music teacher, called “the world’s best composer of art songs” by Time magazine, who won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1976 for his “Air Music: Ten Etudes for Orchestra.” Rorem also received a Fulbright Fellowship in 1951, two Guggenheim fellowships, a Grammy, an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters 1968, and the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award 1971 for his book Critical Affairs.
Rorem moved to Chicago as a child with his Quaker parents. His father was a co-founder of Blue Cross and his mother espoused pacifist causes. By age ten his piano teacher had him playing Debussy and Ravel changing his life forever. In 1936 while in Europe for three months he kept a diary. At 14 he entered the Music School of Northwestern University, two years later receiving a scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He studied composition at Juilliard receiving his BA in 1946 and his MA along with the $1,000 George Gershwin Memorial Prize in composition in 1948. He also studied on a fellowship at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood with Aaron Copland in the summers of 1946-1947. Working as a copyist for Virgil Thomson he earned $20 a week and received orchestration lessons.
Rorem traveled to Morocco in 1948, moved to France in 1949 and remained there until 1957. An avid diarist, he wrote daily since September 1945 and published books based on his daily observations, including The Paris Diary (1966), Later Diaries 1951–1972 (1974) and The Nantucket Diary of Ned Rorem, 1973–1985 (1987). In them he is always candid, and 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 wrote extensively about music as well. These essays are collected in the anthologies Music from Inside Out (1967), Music and People (1968), Pure Contraption (1974), Setting the Tone (1983), Settling the Score (1988), and Other Entertainment (1996).
Rorem composed three symphonies, three piano concertos, six operas, many orchestral, chamber, choral, theater, and vocal works, and was a former faculty member of University of Buffalo, University of Utah, Curtis Institute and the Santa Fe Chamber Music Festival. Many of today’s best composers have learned composition from Rorem. His notable students included Daron Hagen and David Horne. Although he published 15 books he called himself a composer who happens to write.
Ned Rorem lived with his life-partner, organist, choral conductor and musicologist James Roland Holmes (1939–1999) since 1967. He had homes in New York City and Nantucket, Massachusetts. Rorem died at his Manhattan home on 18 November 2022 at the age of 99.
Link to Wikipedia biography