Prizewinning composer and writer
‘World’s best composer of art songs’: Time
• Ned Rorem, the prolific Pulitzer- and Grammy-winning musician known for his vast output of compositions and for his barbed and sometimes scandalous prose, has died at age
99.
The news was confirmed by a publicist for his longtime music publisher, Boosey & Hawkes, who said he died of natural causes on Nov. 18 at his home on Manhattan’s Upper West Side.
The handsome, energetic artist produced a 1,000-work catalogue ranging from symphonies and operas to solo instrumental, chamber and vocal music, in addition to 16 books. He also contributed to the score for the Al Pacino-starring film Panic in Needle Park.
Time magazine once called Rorem “the world’s best composer of art songs,” and he was notable for his hundreds of compositions for the solo human voice. The poet and librettist J.D. Mcclatchy, writing in The Paris Review, described him as “an untortured artist and dashing narcissist.”
His music was mostly tonal, though very much modern, and Rorem didn’t hesitate to aim his printed words at other prominent contemporaries who espoused the dissonant avantgarde, like Pierre Boulez.
“If Russia had Stalin and Germany had Hitler, France still has Pierre Boulez,” Rorem once wrote.
He had a basic motto for songwriting: “Write gracefully for the voice — that is, make the voice line as seen on paper have the arched flow which singers like to interpret.”
Rorem won the 1976 Pulitzer for his Air Music: Ten Etudes for Orchestra. The 1989 Grammy for outstanding orchestral recording went to The Atlanta Symphony for Rorem’s String Symphony, Sunday Morning, and Eagles
His 1962 Poems of Love and the Rain is a 17-song cycle set to texts by American poets; the same text is set twice, in a contrasting way.
Born in Richmond, Indiana, Rorem was the son of C. Rufus Rorem, whose ideas in the 1930s were the basis for the Blue Cross and Blue Shield insurance plans and who turned to Quaker philosophy, raising his son as a pacifist.
Rorem’s essays on music appear in anthologies titled Setting the Tone, Music from the Inside Out, and Music and People.
“Why do I write music?” he once asked. “Because I want to hear it — it’s as simple as that.”