© 2003 Jim Newman

Words and music are inextricably linked for Ned Rorem. Time Magazine has called him “the world’s best composer of art songs,” yet his musical and literary ventures extend far beyond that specialized field. Rorem has composed
three symphonies, four piano concertos and an array of orchestral works, chamber music, six operas, choral works of every description, ballets and other music for the theater, and hundreds of songs and cycles. He is the author of fifteen books, including five volumes of diaries. Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana in 1923, the son of Gladys Miller, a civil rights activist, and Rufus Rorem, the medical economist whose work led to the creation of Blue Cross. He studied composition at the Juilliard School and
received his M.A. degree (along with the $1,000 George Gershwin Memorial Prize in composition) in 1948. In New York he worked as Virgil Thomson’s copyist in return for $20 a week and orchestration lessons. He studied on fellowship at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood in the summers of 1946 and 1947.

In 1949 Rorem moved to France, where he lived until 1958. His years as a young composer among the leading artistic and social figures of post-war Europe are absorbingly portrayed in The Paris Diary and The New York Diary, 1951-1961. He currently lives in New York City and Nantucket. Among his many commissions are those from the Lincoln Center Foundation, the Koussevitzky Foundation, and from Carnegie Hall. His orchestral suite Air Music won the 1976 Pulitzer Prize in music. In January of 2000 he was elected president of the American Academy of Arts and Letters.