Ned Rorem declared, "Anyone can be drunk, anyone can be in love, anyone can waste time and weep, but only I can pen my songs in the remaining years or minutes." Equally notable in his capacities as author and musician, he drew attention through both his creative output and his distinctive character. He portrayed himself as an intensely diatonic composer whose musical idiom reflected the imprint of French impressionists Debussy and Ravel. Vertical extensions—achieved through modality, polymodality, and chord modifications—typically defined his harmonic language within a fundamentally tonal structure. Certain compositions feature fresh explorations of song cycle design; Poems of Love and Rain, to cite one instance, sets eight separate poems and then repeats them in reverse sequence with new contrasting settings. Passages of harmonic and rhythmic intricacy stand beside sections of poise and calm throughout many of his works.
Born the younger of two children to Clarence Rufus Rorem, a co-founder of the Blue Cross, and Gladys Miller Rorem, a peace activist, he soon relocated with the family to Chicago. There he commenced piano lessons and encountered live performances by Josef Hofmann, Sergey Rachmaninov, and the Ballets Russes. An initial instructor introduced him to Debussy and the impressionists, while later mentors acquainted him with American modernists such as Griffes and John Alden Carpenter along with Billie Holiday’s blues; through these influences he acquired the skill of notating the brief melodies he had begun to create.
Having completed high school at sixteen, he already appeared as soloist in a concerto with the American Concerto Orchestra. He spent a short interval studying music theory under Leo Sowerby at the American Conservatory before enrolling at Northwestern University, where his primary focus became the absorption of piano literature. In 1943 a scholarship took him to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia for counterpoint instruction with Rosario Scalero and training in musical-dramatic forms with Gian Carlo Menotti. After one year he transferred to New York City, serving as Virgil Thomson’s copyist for twenty dollars weekly together with composition lessons, and he also functioned as rehearsal pianist for Martha Graham and Eva Gauthier. He subsequently attended Juilliard, earning a bachelor’s degree in 1946 and a master’s in 1948, while spending two summers at Tanglewood under Aaron Copland.
A grant enabled travel to France, yet an intended three-month sojourn extended to twelve years. The opening segment of that period was passed chiefly in Morocco at a friend’s residence, supplying the calm needed to produce roughly twenty large-scale compositions. Additional distinctions arrived, among them the Lili Boulanger Award in 1950 and a Fulbright Fellowship the next year. Rorem then proceeded to Paris for study with Honegger and, through the Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles, joined a circle that encompassed Jean Cocteau, Francis Poulenc, and Georges Auric. During these years he also composed several candid diaries that appeared a decade afterward, eliciting widespread surprise and fascination.
Returning to New York in 1958, he occupied teaching posts at the University of Buffalo from 1959 to 1960, the University of Utah from 1965 to 1966, and the Curtis Institute from 1980 to 1986. He functioned chiefly as composer rather than instructor and gained broad recognition as a contemporary master of the art song. Recognition included a Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for Air Music, two Guggenheim Fellowships, and commissions from leading orchestras; he further received Musical America’s Composer of the Year award in 1998 and the ASCAP Lifetime Achievement Award in 2003. Composition continued into the twenty-first century, yielding the opera Our Town in 2005, Four Sonnets of Shakespeare for tenor Andrew Kennedy in 2008, and the organ piece Recalling Nadia in 2014. Rorem died at his Manhattan residence on November 18, 2022, aged 99.
