A Conversation with Ned Rorem

Music Battling the World: A Conversation with Ned Rorem

by Rich Grzesiak

In his Music from the Inside Out (1967), the composer Ned Rorem wrote, "Love is a mystery which, when solved, evaporates. The same holds for music."

Rorem's own highly publicized life and loves radiate anything but mystery yet his much honored talent as a composer enjoys a puzzling obscurity. The more he has written about his life, the less his own musicality has gained an audience.

His greatest gift, by his own admission, lies in the act of musical composition, yet the world recognizes mainly his prolific pen and gifts as critic and educator. His highly regarded essays and diaries dwarf the popularity of his songs, cantatas, and sonatas, an irony he does not bear lightly (a recent biographical credit claims "his music, including literally hundreds of songs, choral pieces, symphonies, and operas, has been performed by Leonard Bernstein, Leontyne Price, Eugene Ormandy, Leopold Stokowski"). But if the sheer number of recorded performances means anything in the world of classical music — surely a surefire if vulgar way of judging popularity to the exclusion of quality — then Britain's Gramophone Classical Catalogue gives him one LP listing while America's The New Schwann lists barely two dozen LP's of Rorem works.

Even his writing gives Rorem its own recherché kind of imprisonment: The International Thesaurus of Quotations (1970 edition) credits him with almost two dozen bons mots, yet his critical essays (Setting the Tone, Music and People, Pure Contraption) are relatively unknown beyond a select audience of bibliophiles.

It was Rorem's personal memoirs that really brought him into the public eye. After 20 years of relative obscurity as a composer, the 1966 publication of his Paris Diary thrust him into the limelight with its unabashed, highly sophisticated narrative of his life, loves, and sexuality. Rorem the musician may have been beloved by Cocteau, Thomson and Boulez (and a winner of the Pulitzer Prize for composition), but his diaries have provided his greatest prominence in the fine arts: his Paris Diary was followed by a New York Diary and even a Final Diary. Last September the North Point Press published his latest collection of journal entries, The Nantucket Diary, covering the period of 1973-85.

Although he turned 64 last October, Rorem retains the fiery inspiration so evident in his oft iconoclastic work. He believes very strongly that this society has abandoned its artists in favor of a militarized, philistine culture of increasingly embittering ugliness. He feels that his own work is neither recognized nor properly understood.

I talked and corresponded with him several times in the fall of 1986, while he busily commuted from Nantucket to Manhattan to Philadelphia (where he rests, resides and teaches, respectively). We talked of death, religion, love, education, his friendship with writer Gore Vidal, his unique perspective on the subjects of opera, film music, rock and roll, as well as his own highly individual thoughts about style.

RG = Rich Grzesiak; NR = Ned Rorem

RG: Vidal once told an interviewer that "death is literally no thing — nothing." So he does not think about it in that it simply doesn't exist. How do you evaluate his statement? Do you ever think about death?

NR: I was thinking about death all this morning. And I think about it all afternoon and all evening too — I think about it constantly. I'm morbid by nature.

Just as I am an atheist who nevertheless honors believers, so am I interested in and vaguely envious of people who say they don't think about death. When Vidal says that death is "no thing," I probably agree, that there is no afterlife. But why do we live if we must die? What does all this mean? Still, I persist — am, indeed, driven because however small my contribution might be, in theory it will live on after me. As long as there are music libraries and record stores, I will be represented, until they, too, are blown up in the inevitable explosion.

RG: Vidal also likes to claim that "love does not exist." In other words, romance is a medieval convention that was blown out of all proportion by European culture. It took on a fantastical life which Christianity seized on and enforced. Is he right?

NR: I wasn't alive in medieval times and neither was Gore. His point of view is 20th century. He's talking about something he can't know about, except historically, and history changes with every passing day.

Still, he doesn't allow himself to become entangled in the destructive, thrilling, constructive, time-consuming, egocentric manner that I've so often given into over the years. Love can be generous, yes, but it's also what the French call égoisme à deux, and quite petty. Gore may have painted himself into a corner with his eternal objectivity, but who am I to claim he'd be a better person if he let himself go? He tends to compartmentalize all the lights and shadows of his life, and I think that's great. It gives him freedom to think clearly, and to produce a great deal. He's essentially an adjusted, if not a happy person (can anyone with brains be happy in this day and age?) What I respect is that on these talk shows, as he's told me, "I spend the first 80 seconds plugging my new book — because that's why I'm there — and the next half hour discussing things that make a difference, like environmental pollution or Nicaragua or French literature."

That's what's unusual about him: he's less concerned with his own navel, like so many of us, than with an outer shell under which we all live.

RG: Some of Vidal's critics find him emotionally cold, and therefore, regard his essays as far finer than his novels.

NR: When we say that we are defining him in as narrow a way as we may feel he is about love. Anybody as generous with his time and concern about this crazy planet is hardly emotionally cold. That's too easy a label to attach to him; people that say that about him have never met him. His books exemplify a logical, elegant, educated and intelligent mind in the act, through art, of alerting mankind before it's too late. When a person uses an intellect so rare, we are inclined to say that that person is emotionally cold as opposed to somebody like Jerry Falwell, who has no intellect at all but is oh so warm.

That his novels are "not as good as his essays," has nothing to do with his being emotionally cold. Besides, is fiction by definition hotter than non-fiction?

RG: You say you're an atheist?

NR: Technically, I'm a birthright Quaker, and a good one philosophically. (For example, I'm a pacifist, and believe that no war, under any circumstances, is moral. It's axiomatic that if we gave a fraction of the effort we spend on instrumenting distrust toward instrumentating mutual respect, the world would be a more fruitful place).

But theologically, I cannot believe in God's existence. I wish I could. As I said, I believe in Belief, but I have no Belief. Nevertheless, some of my most persuasive music has been settings of so-called sacred texts. I'm drawn to these texts, however, for their poetry, not for their sanctity. Religion, like love, can be as devastating as it is productive. Nonetheless, although I know there is no afterlife, I feel that all living things — an ameba, an oak, a flea, a whale — have equal rights while on Earth.

RG: You have a very strong reputation in the musical genre known as the "art song." I went over my listings of your works in the Schwann catalogue, and, correct me if I'm wrong, but I don't believe I came across any material indicating you've composed a full length, full blown opera as we know it from the nineteenth century.

NR: Miss Julie is certainly full blown. It was the last commission in 1965 of the Ford Foundation for the New York City Opera. It's nearly three hours long, and everything a nineteenth century opera is supposed to be. Based on Strindberg's play, it spills forth with choruses, recitatives, quartets, and, of course, arias. It's an opera all right.

I've written seven other very little ones — some without orchestra, and only twenty minutes long — but they are true operas by being staged, costumed, sung and acted.

RG: Do you feel frustrated that you haven't written more full length operas?

NR: A twenty minute opera is "full length" if it is complete in itself. However, I'm not sure what opera is any longer today, and neither is anyone else. Most contemporary operas fail not because of a lack of talent but from lack of outlets, at least in America. No major opera company — neither the Met nor the N.Y. City Opera — can afford to allow four or five commissioned operas a year to be produced acceptably, and then to fail. They do one new one every decade, rather than five every year, as in previous centuries. There is no permanent venue for new opera, except in schools; and even the companies that do occasionally produce them wield veto power over the libretto, which is usually of a non-experimental sort.

Yet composers have probably said as much as can be said in the old soap opera tradition — La Traviata, La Boheme, even Miss Julie.

RG: The criticism one hears constantly about the Met is that it focuses on the war-horses, it constantly revives French, German and Italian opera. It provides no outlet for Spanish, Polish, English, American or Russian opera, for example.

NR: From the standpoint of the living composer, the Met is hopeless and so is the City Opera under Beverly Sills. Their purpose is not and never will be to promote the music of our time

RG: But what of the operas of the past that have never been produced at all? The Tchaikovsky or Rimsky-Korsakov operas which we know only by their recordings?

NR: My concern is contemporary music, that's really what needs talking about, no doubt [many] readers are interested in war horses, but I'm not.

RG: You gave a blurb to a book entitled Knowing the Score: Notes on Film Music, indicating that it was the book "you always had wanted to write." I am aware of neither your interest in this subject nor any film scores you've composed.

NR: I've composed for every medium but that, but I'd love to.

RG: Many critics take a dim view of film scores, equating them to the drek of James Horner [composer for the Star Trek films].

NR: What about the film scores of Prokofiev, Honegger, Auric, Thomson, Walton, or Copland?

RG: You sound very enthusiastic about this type of music. Do you still want to write music for the movies?

NR: I used to want to. Like any self-respecting American, I was raised on the movies, which are very, very close to my heart.

I used to think that the future of opera would be through movies, that we had come, with our post-Freudian machinations, beyond Dumas and Strindberg, into an era via Wozzeck where what could be said on the opera stage was more than conspicuous banalities made subtle by melody. Life seemed more complicated, in a manner that couldn't be projected over the proscenium arch. Maybe the manner could be reflected in film where the singer would sound and look right because he could be dubbed. The close-up is to movies what the aria is to opera. You might therefore use a director like Antonioni with his physically beautiful but nonverbal cast of characters who could express their sophisticated mutability in music. The camera could be focused on the back of their head or on their trembling hands, while they uttered their psychoanalytic frustrations.

Even "realistic" singing lends itself to film. The movie The Umbrellas of Cherbourg may have been corny, but every last phrase was sung, to a score by Michel Legrand, and it worked — as an opera.

So I wasn't talking about adaptations like Zeffirelli's Othello or Bergman's Don Giovanni, but about opera concocted from scratch for the movies.

Today I'm not so sure that that's the answer. Still, nobody's tried it, I'd like to, but it's too expensive.

RG: Certain film composers enjoy a very wide audience: for example, Jerry Goldsmith, John Williams

NR: Goldsmith is inventive and evocative and personal. But there's nothing John Williams has written that Richard Strauss has written better. Now that Strauss' copyright has expired, John Williams has cribbed verbatim the tone poems of Strauss who, during his lifetime, was one of the highest paid composers who ever lived. Yet Williams is said to have made a billion [sic] dollars from his uncredited riflings.

RG: One also hears criticism that Williams steals far too much from Max Steiner and Erich Wolfgang Korngold as well.

NR: All art is in a sense taking from what has already existed and making it your own, but Williams doesn't make it his own — he makes it lesser Strauss.

There's hardly any distinguished movie music being written today because 9 out of 10 movies use amorphous rock scores, or no scores at all, or simply a meaningless oleo of bathos, like Marvin Hamlisch.

RG: You once wrote that The Beatles were equal to Schumann or Monteverdi so far as their inventiveness goes. Have you reconsidered your opinion?

NR: Popular music interests me not at all. The Beatles were a fluke, and we can view them now in retrospect, and they are to be taken seriously and it was music! There has been nothing since. But what I think about popular music is not important except insofar as it pre-empts my life and livelihood.

I don't believe much in popular music anymore. It's like a great sow of impure breed rolling over and suffocating more fragile breeds. Yet it's 99% of the music that everybody, including intellectuals, listens to today. Perhaps opera represents 1%. The music that I and my colleagues write is not even despised because we do not exist in the ken of those educated people much less with the masses.

RG: Sibelius and Mozart seem to be enjoying another revival, and the Shostakovich symphonies seem to be recorded with greater frequency. Are there other composers being neglected that you would like to see revived?

NR: The composers that are being neglected are the composers that are living and breathing today.

Shostakovich, Sibelius and Mozart are hardly neglected by purveyors of classical music. Every time there's a new gimmick like CD's, all of these composers are re-recorded for the hundredth time. Ours is the only society ever that is primarily concerned with the past. Your questions to me have been mainly about the past. It's inconceivable that 100 years or more ago that Debussy or Chopin or Haydn would be so concerned about their past.

Serious music had a function in the milieu of Bach. Today, no more. People today are aware of music more through performance than through what is performed. They want to get Sutherland's record of this or Karajan's record of that or Bernstein's record of this and that. They compare the performers with each other but the music itself is simply a matter of pyrotechnics, whereas I am necessarily concerned with what is performed.

RG: In your book Setting the Tone you claimed that under conservative regimes funding for the arts seems to flourish. You refer to former President Nixon's throwing money to the arts as being like "sand thrown into the eyes of his critics."

NR: I would take that back now, certainly for the Reagan administration. Generally the well-off have more time (and education) to devote to the arts, but, obviously, with the know nothing regime of today, well, Texas billionaires aren't very obsessed with the nuances of high culture. One of Reagan's first presidential gestures was to cut the arts funding to nearly nothing.

The world has changed since I wrote those words. Mind you, Nixon was hardly an esthete, but it is a fact that more money was given during his regime. But in time of revolution, the arts get short shrift.

RG: I beg your forgiveness for my next question, which I ask on bended knee, as I'm certain it's been asked of you a hundred million times, and certainly it will be asked yet again and again: do you still keep a diary?

NR: My new one was published last September 30 [1987]. It's called The Nantucket Diary, and it covers 1973 through 1985 [North Point Press; $30/hardcover].

RG: I suspect that some of your books have been translated into foreign languages.

NR: One of my books was published in England — so it was translated into English! Another, not a diary, appeared in Brazil (in Portuguese), and that's all the translations I've had.

I have no big following. There was a certain gay following 20 years ago because The Paris Diary was "honest" and "courageous." I'm really a coward, but am too lazy not to say what I think, and what I think can sometimes get me into trouble, so in that sense, yes, I'm honest.

I don't dissimulate about myself. I would like to say that I've never suffered from being what I am, but in the past year and especially with the new Supreme Court ruling [upholding Georgia's anti-sodomy statute(s)], I suddenly feel a little like a Jew in Nazi Germany. The net is tightening. I feel very vulnerable for the first time.

RG: Do you enjoy teaching at Philadelphia's Curtis Institute of Music? A recent New York Times op-ed piece tackles the declining (historical) memory of students today. People [college students] can't even remember Nixon today.

Are students stupider today than 20 years ago?

NR: Well, I'm not teaching stupid people. Those that I teach are hand-picked in a specialty so rarefied that even a Galbraith would find it incomprehensible teach classical music to budding composers

I'm good at it, at finding who a young composer thinks he is, then at what stands in his way from becoming, and finally at removing the obstacles. That's all teaching is about, unless it's also about firing enthusiasm

As to the declining collective memory, it depends on the school you go to. Oberlin College is a very emancipated center. But even out in Omaha or Tulsa, the mere fact that they invite me and others like me for seminars means that someone's doing things right.

My field is not general education. I can't judge what my students know about the world of yesterday anymore than Gore Vidal, talking about love, can know what Emily Dickinson or Walt Whitman may or may not have suffered in the boudoir or Napoleon or Julius Cæsar.

I do take a dim view of general education. The world is becoming progressively more mediocre. Yet paradoxically, when I judge contests for young composers who are obviously highly specialized, I'm struck by their efficiency and expertise.

But who the hell is going to perform their symphonies? As with opera, there's less of an outlet for concert music than ever, yet more people producing it.

Young composers must make their own new rules now, and found their own small recording companies. Big companies won't help them. Musical publication like book publishing in general is becoming more inferior because it's centered unabashedly on gain and not on quality.

A small press like North Point Press is the future of quality book publishing, and not a cartel like Simon & Schuster.

RG: In closing, then, could you sum up your thoughts on style?

NR: Style? [Long pause]. Are you speaking of a person, or of what that person does? Style — more vulgarly known as class — is a stance you're born with and it can't be bought. Like charm it is innate and can't be convincingly faked, though it's not the same thing as charm. A person can have style without charm: for example, Faye Dunaway, Mick Jagger, Salvador Dali. Or charm without style: Bette Midler, maybe, or Ronald Reagan. Or both at once: Sir Laurence Olivier, Bette Davis.

I see I'm just speaking of show biz types (Reagan included), not artists of lasting accomplishment — artists who, in themselves, can be without personality, but whose works shimmer with charm and style — and, of course, content, which is the other side of the coin. Occasionally style is content, as with Gertrude Stein or John Cage, or maybe even Sigmund Freud. Or you can find style posing as content, as in the entire oeuvre of Pierre Boulez. (Boulez has a certain charm, too, but he'd hate to hear about it).

insofar as style means fashion, or vogue, I like to quote Cocteau: "Fashion is beauty that becomes ugly. Art is ugliness that becomes beautiful."

Style applies to behavior more than to product; thus it's irrelevant to what, in the long run, counts. One might generalize, nevertheless, that Beethoven had neither charm nor style but was a great artist, and that Ravel had both style and charm — and was a great artist! Philip Glass is all style, no content. Bruckner is all content.

The French are style. The Germans are all content. One can go on forever. It's just a game.

Rich Grzesiak's editorial work won the Gay & Lesbian Press Association's Wallace Hamilton Award for outstanding achievement in cultural reporting during 1984. This interview originally appeared in In Style.