NED ROREM LIVES!

posted by James Reel

Last week, embroiled in radio fundraising, I didn’t have a chance to note the 85th birthday of Ned Rorem, one of America’s finest composers but a fellow perhaps better known as a sometimes disturbingly frank diarist. It’s Elliott Carter who’s getting all the attention these days because he’s turning 100, and because he’s long been the American poster boy for the Modernist establishment. But frankly, Rorem’s music is the more attractive and, yes, meaningful, if you go to the trouble to hear it. (It does require some effort; I’m not aware of any Tucson performances of Rorem’s music this season, and we have precious little of his music in the KUAT-FM library.)

Frank Oteri wrote a good overview of Rorem’s chamber music for the latest issue of Chamber Music America’s magazine, but that is not yet online. Right now, you can read a good interview with Rorem here, courtesy of the South Florida Classical Review. The author is Lawrence A. Johnson, a fellow I tried to hire as my successor as classical music critic at the Arizona Daily Star more than 10 years ago. Larry had other fish to fry, though. Turns out he got fried by his Florida newspaper not long ago—he is one of the latest of many classical critics to get dumped by America’s increasingly irrelevant daily newspapers. I’m glad he has an online outlet for his work.