Word: rorem
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Books: Composer Ned Rorem's tart autobiography...
...scholarship to the Curtis Institute of Music in Philadelphia gave Rorem entry into the company of the other wunderkinder and their mentors who, from the 1940s on, would do much to define what serious American music was all about: Aaron Copland, Leonard Bernstein, Virgil Thomson, Marc Blitzstein, Lukas Foss, Samuel Barber, John Cage. Rorem's feelings of admiration, doubt, jealousy and gratefulness for these figures inspire the sharpest sketches in a book crammed with sharp sketches. On two composers who straddled the concert stage and Broadway: "Lenny Bernstein would never have been quite what he was without the firm example...
...best memoirs tell us not only where and with whom the author has spent his time in the past but also what kind of person he has become in the process. On the first count, Ned Rorem's Knowing When to Stop (Simon & Schuster; 607 pages; $30) is the scintillating chronicle of how a gifted, remarkable, good- looking young man from the Midwest grew into a leading American composer, one of our finest craftsmen of art songs. On the second count, the book is profoundly exasperating...
Describing his Quaker parents and Chicago boyhood, Rorem vividly evokes a vanished time when certain American middle-class families combined strong moral convictions with cultural avidity and a surprising broadmindedness. In the budding composer, these tendencies took more extreme forms than were typical: he was a lifelong pacifist, revealed a precocious appreciation of modern music (Stravinsky) and poetry (T.S. Eliot), and -- beginning at age 14 -- fearlessly cruised the local park for anonymous sex with...
...Rorem's new oratorio, based on texts by Poe, Longfellow, Twain, Crane, Melville, Whitman, Emma Lazarus and Sidney Lanier, is one of four premieres this season for the prolific composer, and it too treads familiar ground. Best known for his art songs and his candid, elegantly written diaries recounting his life and loves in Paris, New York and elsewhere, the composer, 61, has long been a conservative voice in American music. He speaks in a basically breezy 1940s tonality, which is leavened by a few more recent technical advances. In An American Oratorio, Rorem's style works effectively with gentle...