Word: rorem
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...exist on that instrument-he juggled the music for the entire string section to correct it. "Few composers," says he, "know much about the technicalities of copying," and he can lecture for hours on the proper method of indicating the duration of a glissando. "Arnie," says Composer Ned Rorem, "has an aural...
...ROREM New York City...
...Rorem is tall, dark, hand some and undoubtedly the best com poser of art songs now living. "I can put anything to music, including the en cyclopedia," he once remarked, with an engaging lack of diffidence. The New York City Opera and the Ford Foundation believed him, commissioned him to do an opera. Last week Rorem's opera, based on Strindberg's Miss Julie, had its premiere. The overall verdict: Rorem would have been better off with the encyclopedia - and the U.S. is still looking for its first major operatic composer...
...that Rorem did not produce a singable and at times memorable score. But the materials of the play resist transmogrification into that elusive amalgam of drama and music that is successful opera. Rorem's struggle, in fact, is a classic example of the peculiar agony that creating an opera can be. When he got the Ford Foundation's grant four years ago, he first tried a setting of DuBose Heyward's novel Mamba's Daughters, was deep into it when the project had to be scuttled be cause of copyright problems. Then he tackled an original...
...interplay of a neurotic count's daughter and her sadistic butler lover baring their psyches for two hours is about as static as an opera can get without freezing right in its tracks. To give it life and thrust, music of explosive lyric power and sweep was needed. Rorem, a conservative composer who scorns the avant-garde ("They are all writing the same piece"), provided instead a score that is largely music-to-probe-the-subconscious-by-moody, groaning, occasionally dissonant. The few lighter moments-a duet between two village lovers, the chorus celebrating the festival of Midsummer...