Matthew Paris writes:

Sometimes we don't realize what innovations in media strategy are in front of us. Until Ned Rorem published his Diaries, there was no classical composer that didn't have the profile among a public any more interesting than the information one might garner about a CEO in an unobtrusive Iowa armature company. Ned was the first American composer to have more of a public personality than that.

If his presentation of himself in these Diaries was one who was a homosexual, drunk, handsome courtier in French social salons of princesses, offering candid remarks about other people that were perhaps not notable for indiscretion or compassion, gave the public all they needed in the way of a sensational existence to pay attention to him and his music.

I didn't have that impression of Ned at all. I know very well anyone who writes as much music as he does spend most of his time alone in a room looking at a blank piece of paper.

Ned lives on West 70th Street in an apartment that is dark and well-finished with his partner, Jim, an organist. Ned has no airs. He is immaculately civilized, aims to please, is courteous and very clever in his conversation. He is warm and likes people. His parents were particularly pleasant folk. They were Midwest Quakers who perhaps didn't know what to make of their urbane son.

One of Ned's quintessentially Midwestern qualities is his dislike of death, yet he is one who feels it is something of an enigma. "I was at my father's death bed and saw him die; one moment he was there, the next he was gone; I felt it," he said, expressing a kind of sublimity, a sense of a miracle.

Ned has done more to promote c temporary classical music than nearly anyone in America. We like our creative folk to be a little lewd. He had appended a public personality, not quite his own, to the direct attractions of his music.

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WNYC archives id: 85297