Martha’s Vineyard Times, July 6, 2000: “Gift to the Island from a Musical Giant,” by Dawn Aberg.
On Monday evening, July 10, Martha’s Vineyard audiences will have the exceptional opportunity, the pleasure, and indeed the honor, to witness the world premiere of a musical work by one of this country’s foremost composers of serious music: Ned Rorem.
At 8 pm at the Old Whaling Church in Edgartown, the Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society will present Mr. Rorem’s “An Oboe Book” in the first program of its 2000 season. In a further amazing gift to our Island, a venue known more this time of year for barbecues, fishing, and celebrity watching than high culture, the composer himself will be present to deliver pre-performance remarks at the Monday evening concert.
That Ned Rorem’s name is not common currency in the provinces (where we live) is a comment on the sad state of contemporary American artistic awareness, not on Mr. Rorem’s genius. He stands as the pre-eminent composer, certainly in this country and perhaps in the world, of contemporary art song. The richness, emotional range, and precision of his work in this genre highlight his special insight into that rare space in which the worlds of words and music overlap, or sometimes collide.
His three-part song cycle for four singers and piano, “Evidence of Things Not Seen” is, according to New York Magazine’s reviewer, “one of the musically richest, most exquisitely fashioned, most voice friendly collections of songs I have ever heard by any American composer.” In an article in “Music America,” which recognized Mr. Rorem as its Composer of the Year in 1998, Allen Hughes wrote that the composer “has, for more than 40 years, steered a steady tonal and lyrical course past competing isms and fads — serialism and minimalism among them — and ended up a winner.”
Words and music: these two very different sorts of articulation reveal different aspects of voice in its more abstracted sense, and combine in Mr. Rorem’s work with an elegance of expression and thought that must be heard to be understood.
As introduction to Mr. Rorem’s work, listeners should consider the recently released “Songs of Ned Rorem” performed by mezzo-soprano Susan Graham and pianist Martin Martineau. The album has Mr. Rorem’s full endorsement. The composer considers Ms. Graham to be America’s best mezzo. “She interests me, as she has good diction,” he told The Times from his home on Nantucket, “as well as a beautiful voice.” When assessing a singer’s performance of song, Mr. Rorem stated that he looks for diction above all else, not “interpretation.” The singer should take it for granted that he or she has a beautiful voice, the composer insists, and pay attention to the words.
Although Mr. Rorem may be best known for his vocal music, his musical work extends far beyond this specialized field. He was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in 1976 for his orchestral suite “Air Music.” The Atlanta Symphony’s recording of his “String Symphony, Sunday Morning” and “Eagles” received a Grammy award in 1989. His chamber works have been toured or recorded by the Guarneri String Quartet, the Emerson String Quartet, adn the Beaux Arts Trio. Nevertheless, Mr. Rorem’s basic, and gifted, insights into voice as the heart of a lyric line extend to all his musical work. “I conceive music vocally,” he insists. “Whatever my music is written for — tuba, tambourine, tubular bells — it is always the singer within me crying to get out.”
Do not be misled into thinking that Mr. Rorem is a sentimentalist. He does not talk about inspiration when he discusses the creation of his work. In fact, attempts to draw him out regarding the creative process meet with the composer’s trademark curmudgeonly resistance (something I confess that a diehard fan finds endearing).
Instead, Mr. Rorem talks of composition in straightforward, common sensical ways. “The professional artist takes self-expression and puts it in a communicable state,” he states in a matter of fact fashion. A composer does, he admits, obey “certain rules of prosody, of innate comprehension and elegance, in how to set a phrase to music,” in taking the words and putting them in a different medium. But, when the finished work emerges, Rorem pulls no punches. “It is either good or it ain’t.”
Rorem describes his choice of texts for his vocal work as words that “speak to my condition, as we Quakers say.” Since the passing early last year of the accomplished New York organist James Holmes, Mr. Rorem’s devoted companion of over 30 years, that condition has been one of melancholy. It might seem odd to hear the creator of such exquisitely ordered gems as the 27-second “I am Rose” say it. But in Mr. Rorem’s opinion, “the whole universe is sort of random.” He is philosophical about the role of human beings on the planet. “The difference between us and other animals,” he told The Times, “is that we try to give life meaning when there is none. Art was invented to pass the time until we die.” In the face of the random nature of experience, he would “rather pass the time making art” than most other things.
In a different sort of engagement with words, Mr. Rorem is a prolific diarist and writer of essays. He qualifies these literary efforts. “I am a musician who happens to write,” he says. “Writing is the sideline.” Diaries are a unique artistic genre, “on the spot,” in the composer’s words “without a beginning, middle, and end.” Elsewhere he has written that the diary “depicts the moment, the writer’s present mood which, were it inscribed an hour later could emerge quite otherwise.”
Whatever the qualification, his Paris and New York Diaries, recently reissued in paperback by Da Capo, have gained Mr. Rorem a great deal of notoriety. Along with his 1993 memoir “Knowing When to Stop,” the accounts are, according to Anthony Tommasini of the New York Times, “spiked with score-settling, brilliant and compulsively readable observations on music, mores and cultural politics.” A new volume of diaries, “Lies,” will be out in three months. The ironic title refers to the fact that, as Mr. Rorem puts it, “whenever you write about other people, someon is going to say that it’s not the truth.”
The Martha’s Vineyard Chamber Music Society specially commissioned an oboe work from Mr. Rorem, planned as the finale to Monday night’s performance. The composer has written quite a bit for solo oboe, he says, even with piano, although more frequently in suites that involve quintets of insturments. “I like the oboe,” he says. “It is a terribly singular instrument, perhaps the most poignant and saddest sounding instrument.” He goes on to point out that it is not easy to write for oboe, that it is more restricted in quality than, say, a clarinet, which can sound like other instruments in the orchestra and can play the orchestral comedian. “An oboe,” he notes bycomparison, “always sounds like an oboe.”
Dawn Aberg 