![]() Born to parents of Norwegian descent, he was their second child after his sister Rosemary. ![]() Ned Miller Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana, US on October 23, 1923. Rorem maintained a life-long interest in the French Impressionist composers Claude Debussy (left) and Maurice Ravel (right) Much of his later compositions were devoted to concertante and his final major work was the opera Our Town (2006). ![]() It is considered by commentators and Rorem himself to be his magnum opus. He wrote the large-scale song cycle Evidence of Things Not Seen (1997) to 36 texts by 24 writers, for the New York Festival of Song. From 1980 onwards he taught at the Curtis Institute, where his students included Daron Hagen and Jennifer Higdon. Much of Rorem's life was spent with his lifelong partner James Holmes, between his apartment in New York and house in Nantucket. For the American Bicentennial, he worked on seven different commissions concurrently, among which was Air Music: Ten Etudes for Orchestra, which won a Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1976. He returned to America in around 1957, establishing himself as a prominent composer and receiving regular commissions. After two productive years in Morocco, Rorem was hosted by the arts patron Marie-Laure de Noailles in Paris, where he was influenced by the neoclassicist group Les Six, particularly Francis Poulenc and Darius Milhaud. He developed a strong enthusiasm for French music and received mentorship from Aaron Copland and Virgil Thomson, among others. ![]() As a writer, he kept-and later published-numerous diaries in which he spoke candidly of his exchanges and relationships with many cultural figures of America and France.īorn in Richmond, Indiana, Rorem found an early interest in music, studying with Margaret Bonds and Leo Sowerby. Frequently described as a neoromantic composer, he showed limited interest in the emerging modernist aesthetic of his lifetime. Best known for his art songs, which number over 500, Rorem was considered the leading American of his time writing in the genre. Ned Miller Rorem (Octo– November 18, 2022) was an American composer of contemporary classical music and a writer. ![]()
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