Composer and writer Ned Rorem is dead

Musical and intellectual figure very renowned in the United States, the artist died at the age of 99 at his New York home, November 18.

By Renaud Machart

“I am a composer who also writes and not a writer who is also composed,” liked to repeat Ned Rorem, who died at his home, in New York, barely a month after celebrating his 99 e anniversary, October 23. He was probably due to this clarification because the reputation of his many writings on music and his intimate newspapers had ended up going beyond that of his compositions, especially outside his native country, the United States.

If none of the partitions of his very vast catalog never made a scandal, The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem made a big noise when he published, in 1966 (in 2003, Les Éditions du Rocher published his translation under the title Parisian 1951 -1955). In this first of the eight volumes of intimate newspapers which he will sign, until the last, Lies, A Diary, 1986-1999 (Counterpoint, 2000), Rorem tells his intimate life in a clear and uninhibited way.

But the real object of the scandal was the “outing” – a term which did not exist then – personalities whose homosexuality was not always publicly known. However, Rorem will never consider himself a standard bearer of homosexual liberation (“It is for the younger generations”, he said), even less an activist, even when he describes in Lies, the last days and the Death of AIDS after 59 years old, his companion the organist and choirman James Holmes.

In his various intimate newspapers, Ned Rorem alternates gossip, protruding of observations and words of great finesse. This very strong intelligence adored paradoxes and developed them brilliantly, as evidenced by his many collections of tests on music (not just classic) and other cultural subjects, none of which has been translated in our language, even if Figures of French culture are mentioned there (Jean Cocteau, Marguerite Duras, Ravel and Debussy, Poulenc, etc.).

About the genre that is the diary, Ned Rorem noted in his Parisian newspaper 1951-1955: “A diary has only range by the accumulation of unlimited observations (many of which are obsessive and recurrent ), and never through the development of themes (because then, it would no longer be a newspaper). Works of art must have a plan, a beginning, an end. By nature, a newspaper has no form in the -Abow that, accidental, improvisation; which is why, even if it cannot be a work of art (improvisation excludes it), it can be a masterpiece. ”

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