Pulitzer winner’s notes and scandals

Prolific Pulitzer and Grammy winner Ned Rorem, known for his vast output and barbed and scandalous prose, has died at 99.

His music publisher Boosey & Hawkes said he died of natural causes at his Manhattan home.

He created a thousandwork catalogue from symphonies and operas to solo instrumental, chamber and vocal music, and 16 books.

Poet and librettist JD McClatchy, in The Paris Review, described him as “an untortured artist and dashing narcissist”.

His music was mostly tonal, though modern, and Rorem did not hesitate to aim his printed words at contemporaries who espoused the dissonant avant-garde, such as Pierre Boulez.

“If Russia had Stalin and Germany had Hitler, France still has Pierre Boulez,” Rorem once wrote.

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.

From 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.

Young Rorem went to the elite University of Chicago Laboratory Schools.

At 10, his piano teacher introduced him to Debussy and Ravel, which “changed my life forever”, he said.

He went on to study at the American Conservatory of Music in Hammond, Indiana, and Northwestern University in Evanston, Illinois, then the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and the Juilliard School in New York.

In the 1950s, he lived abroad for eight years, mostly in Paris.

The Paris Diary covers his stay and is filled with the names he met – Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, Balthus, Dali, Paul Bowles, John Cage, Man Ray, and James Baldwin.

Writer Janet Flanner called it “worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet”.

Rorem himself said his text was “filled with drunkenness, sex, and the talk of my betters”.

His literary self-portrait continued through 1985, contained in The New York Diary, The Later Diaries and The Nantucket Diary.

Some were appalled by his notorious accounting of his relationships with four big-name men in music: Leonard Bernstein, Noel Coward, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson.

He also outed a few others.

But most of his private life was centred around James Holmes, an organist and choir director with whom he lived for three decades in New York. Holmes died in 1999.

Boosey & Hawkes said Rorem died surrounded by friends and family.

PROLIFIC: Ned Rorem, the 1976 winner of the Pulitzer for Music and a 1989 Grammy.