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One
man's opinion
The 79-year-old composer-writer Ned Rorem
– who will help jump-start this year's Other Minds fest –
is as outspoken and passionate as ever about the world around him.
By Derk
Richardson
NED ROREM
CALLING himself "an old fuddy-duddy conservative"
is akin to John Ashcroft declaring himself a queer, pot-smoking
peacenik. The 79-year-old composer, renowned for his mastery of
the art song, first scandalized highbrow cultural circles in 1966
with his sexually candid and canny Paris Diary and continued
rocking the boat with further revelatory writings, such as boasts
of carnal relations with 3,000 men between 1938 and 1968, including
his "Time covers": Leonard Bernstein, Tennessee Williams,
Noel Coward, and John Cheever.
Yet there he
was on the phone from his New York apartment last week, using language
you'd be hard pressed to find applied autobiographically in any
of his 15 books, the most recent of which is the 2001 anthology
A Ned Rorem Reader. But Rorem, whose words (in conversation
with Other Minds Festival artistic director Charles Amirkhanian)
and music (the West Coast premiere of his 1997 song cycle Evidence
of Things Not Seen) will be featured on the opening night of
the ninth Other Minds Festival, deliberately casts himself as cultural
curmudgeon. He's quietly passionate on the subject of musical ignorance
and willing to name names, too: "The upper-class intelligentsia,"
he said, "who know all about visual art of the past and the
present, for example, and know all about literature of the past
and the present – if they know about music, they might know
Vivaldi, and if you ask them to name a living composer, they might
say Bob Dylan." And he elaborates on his opinion that America
is getting more philistine by the minute, railing softly against
the Bush administration's rapidly diminishing financial support
for the arts and bemoaning school children's lack of exposure to
serious music.
"I'm conservative
in the true sense of the word," Rorem argued, although he distances
himself from some of the term's connotations. "I'm certainly
not conservative or fuddy-duddy in many ways. I'm very, very left
wing politically. I'm gay without any apologies, I'm a pacifist,
and I'm an atheist, and I'm very convinced of all those things."
Rorem was born
in Indiana on Oct. 23, 1923, raised in Chicago, and educated at
Northwestern University, the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, and
the Juilliard School. He spent an especially formative decade, 1949
to 1958, living in France. Nearing his 80th year, he now lives a
quieter life than that chronicled in such mordant diary entries
as "New York Baths" and "Mescaline in the Poconos."
"I don't carouse any more. I don't drink, and I don't smoke,
and I haven't for over 30 years," he said. "But I still
think about sex all the time."
Rorem also stands
by his pacifism. He was admittedly shaken by the attacks of 9/11
and asked himself, why go on? It was a question he'd confronted
in 1999, after the death of his partner of three decades, Jim Holmes
(chronicled with disquieting frankness in Lies: A Diary 1986-1999).
His struggle to cope with the devastating personal loss inspired
the song cycle Another Sleep. In response to 9/11 he composed
Aftermath.
"I already
had a commission to write a piece for voice and three instruments,"
he explained. "But after that [9/11] happened, my first reaction
was, Well, what difference does anything make? Then about a week
later I said, It makes all the difference, and I wrote one of the
best pieces I've ever written. I was suddenly able to choose texts
that I thought were appropriate to the situation – antiwar
poems and prose, and texts about love. I made a cycle of about 10
or 12 pieces on very good literature, from Shakespeare to Muriel
Rukeyser and some American poets and Borges from Argentina."
Antiwar themes
also run through the 90-minute Evidence of Things Not Seen,
which addresses coming of age and death, as well as what he calls
the wistful optimism and disappointments of love, through texts
by Auden, Whitman, Wordsworth, Frost, Dickinson, Colette, Paul Goodman,
and Kipling, among others. "I was raised a Quaker," Rorem
said. "We were taught that there is no alternative to peace,
and whether I'm right or wrong, I'm not ashamed of that."
But it is neither
his sexuality nor his politics that got Rorem booked as part of
an Other Minds program that also includes a tribute to the late
Lou Harrison, and the usual long list of iconoclastic composers
and performers. It's his music. Ironically, though, Rorem's music
may be among the least avant-garde ever highlighted at an Other
Minds Festival. He has written symphonies, operas, and concertos
and is best known for his approximately 400 songs; Time magazine
called him "the world's best composer of art songs."
Writing in the
New York Times, Anthony Tommasini described his work by noting
"elegant style" typically marked by "lucid, tonally
grounded yet pungent harmonies, with vocal lines that are singable
even when challenging and with a lyrical sensibility that pays equal
homage to Poulenc and Billie Holiday."
Artistic director
Amirkhanian acknowledges that Rorem's music doesn't fit the festival's
ostensibly radical profile. But the former KPFA-FM music director
has long championed Rorem's compositions.
"To me,
Ned was the most successful composer setting English-language poetry
to music," Amirkhanian explained. "The guy knew how to
write for the piano, and he captured the feeling and thrust of each
poem. He knows harmony so well. He knows just which button to push
and which screw to turn, and suddenly you're melting. He could do
that because he wasn't a 12-tone composer who had only one mood
to convey. He retained key signatures, he modulated, he did things
like the old guys did."
Because he didn't
follow in lockstep down the Schoenberg path into serialism and dissonance
with other late-20th-century composers (whom he calls "the
serial killers"), Rorem assured himself of outsider status
in modern music. Although he likes to say he was "too lazy
to write the kind of music that those people were writing,"
his fidelity to melody and tonality was obviously heartfelt.
"I think
it took courage to do what Ned did, which was to endure incredible
ridicule for decades now and to have the confidence to abide by
his own vision," Amirkhanian noted. "So he's a maverick
to me, he's a guy that didn't cave."
Whenever he's
given the opportunity, Rorem protests not his plight but that of
all living composers of what he calls "serious" music.
"We're in the first period in history ever – ever –
in which performance takes precedence over what is performed,"
he said. "In the past, sort of up until Rachmaninov, the composer
and the performer were the same person, and they played their own
music. Today, Itzhak Perlman lives across the street from me, and
he makes in one evening what I make in a year, and he does it by
playing Mendelssohn and Beethoven and all that nonsense."
Given that plaint,
and the reiteration in his interviews and copious writings of an
abiding fear of anonymity, one might presume Rorem has been on a
lifelong pursuit of elusive fame. But as recently as three years
ago he had neither a publicist nor a Web site (he has both now).
And his intimacy with celebrities and familiarity with celebrity
have imbued him with a certain ambivalence. In an essay on Truman
Capote, he describes how the author of Other Voices, Other Rooms
and In Cold Blood turned his back on writing (while advertising
himself as the greatest author since Proust) and vanished into the
spotlight. In another, on Edith Piaf and Billie Holiday,
he laments how they "both perished, early and accidentally,
in the icy light of abject stardom."
What Rorem wants,
he told the Los Angeles Times in 1994, is just "some
posterity." It seems assured – by the Pulitzer Prize he
won in 1976 for the orchestral suite Air Music and by all
of the upcoming 80th-birthday hoopla, including a performance of
his Sunday Morning by the San Francisco Symphony during its
just-announced 2003-04 season.
"This business
of being 80 is something that happens to other people but not to
oneself," Rorem said. "I'm bemused by it all, but I'm
not horrified. But posterity does make a difference to me, because
for most people, after the last person that knew them dies, there's
no record of them at all. When you do die, your notion of what the
world is dies with you, so in a sense, nobody is outlived."
Ned Rorem
appears in conversation with Charles Amirkhanian Wed/5, 7 p.m.,
before the 8 p.m. performance of his Evidence of Things Not Seen
and an excerpt from The Open Road, plus Lou Harrison's King David's
Lament for Jonathan, Palace of Fine Arts Theatre, 3301 Lyon. S.F.
Other Minds Festival 9 runs through Sat/8. Single tickets
are $15-$26, four-day passes are $45-$88. For schedule information
see Music listings. For more information call (415) 273-1659 or
go to www.otherminds.org.
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