Composer Ned Rorem in 1953 in Paris, the place he lived for practically a decade and wrote his notorious Paris Diary.

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Composer Ned Rorem in 1953 in Paris, the place he lived for practically a decade and wrote his notorious Paris Diary.

Provided by the artist

American composer Ned Rorem has died at age 99. The Pulitzer Prize winner was greatest identified for his artwork songs — and his controversial diaries. Rorem died Friday morning at his dwelling in Manhattan. His writer, Boosey & Hawkes, confirmed his loss of life from pure causes to NPR.

Ned Rorem was quietly defiant, in additional methods than one. The first was via the music he selected to put in writing. While he did compose symphonies, concertos and operas — the sorts of items that can win you a Pulitzer — his status rests on his huge physique of greater than 500 artwork songs.

The track “The Lordly Hudson” gained Ned Rorem his first award. The composer acquired an early begin with a scholarship to check at Philadelphia’s prestigious Curtis Institute of Music when he was simply 19. Then got here a Fulbright, then a Guggenheim and, in 1976, the Pulitzer for his orchestral work Air Music: Ten Etudes for Orchestra.

Air Music was an exception when it got here to the composer’s musical language — one thing that marked one other little bit of defiance on Rorem’s half. In basic, he held on to a conservative strategy at a time when the prevailing type was tutorial and atonal “serial music” through which practitioners did away with conventional tonality and favored collection of notes that had been meant to appear unfamiliar.

And as Rorem instructed NPR in 2003 together with his typical wit, his defiance meant no one paid any consideration to him.

“When the serial killers came along, a lot of very tonal composers defected to the other camp, and they wrote what was being written in those days,” he stated. ” A few still do. But some defected, and came back. I felt like the prodigal son’s older brother — I’d always been a good boy.”

Lots of people noticed issues fairly otherwise when it got here to issues non-musical. In truth, Rorem was “licentious” and “highly indiscreet,” within the words of The New Yorker author Janet Flanner. She was speaking about his prose, and she or he meant it as a praise. Over the years, Rorem turned identified for his diaries — maybe much more than for his music. It began in 1966 together with his Paris Diary, which included an specific chronicle of homosexual life lengthy earlier than such a factor turned routine.

Tim Page, a Pulitzer Prize-winning music critic himself, is a fan of Rorem’s prose. “Even though I admire his compositions a lot,” Page says, “I would say that in some ways, the diaries and the criticism are the things which mean the most to me. The bracing thing about Ned is that even when you disagree with him, he gets you thinking — and I think that’s one sign of a real master critic.”

Rorem, who was born Oct. 23, 1923 in Richmond, Ind., shared completely different components of himself relying on which medium he was working in. The written phrase is the place he shared the main points of his private life. In his music, not a lot.

“Ned almost prided himself on a certain emotional detachment, on a certain sort of craftsmanship. His diaries were where he kept his diary — his music was something else,” Page says.

Here’s how Rorem himself put it in certainly one of his books, known as Lies:

“I don’t believe that composers notate their moods, they don’t tell the music where to go. It leads them … Why do I write music? Because I want to hear it. It’s simple as that. Others may have more talent, more sense of duty. But I compose just from necessity, and no one else is making what I need.”