ned rorem

I finally finished Ned Rorem's Later Diaries (1961-1972). I went back to see when I had originally ordered it and it turns out that it took me 10 months to polish it off. As you might have guessed, it's not exactly light reading (the only kind I'm good at) and, looking back on it, I shouldn't have started with his third diary as he references the first two quite a bit.





















That being said I'm really, really glad I stuck with it to the end. He is an amazing composer (he won the Pulitzer in 1976 for his Air Music) and, although I don't know much of his music aside from a few random choral pieces, he is really good at articulating some of the things that I can't in terms of the experience and personal philosophy of being a composer. I ended up underlining half of the book and scrawling notes in the margin for myself and I think I'll go back and record what I highlighted so I can have it all in one place.

Here are a couple of things he said that were memorable enough to warrant a mark of some sort:

January 27, 1965

"Why do I write music? Because I want to hear it--it's as simple as that. Others may have more 'talent,' more 'sense of duty'. But I compose just from necessity, and no one else is making what I need."

September 3, 1965

"...the solitude of work, the silence of my own sounds."

January 1, 1970

"There is no immortality. Of that which we were, nothing remains. A Bach fugue is itself, it is not Bach. An equation of Einstein is itself, not Einstein. Chartres is itself, not generations of builders, nor love of the Lord, nor even that thrill of eternity small poets feel. Perfection is mute."

And lest I give the impression that the entire book is just pearl of wisdom after pearl of wisdom, I'll include this very diary-ish entry.

September 17, 1966

"Miss Marsh has come, spent the afternoon, gone. She wants more high notes. Music after all is made for instruments with practical limits. We lunched on red grapes and oatmeal cookies, spoke of her Moscow prize, walked around the lake, and agreed that Sun must be sung in a dress (a gown, as singers say) of gold chiffon. She shall have her high notes."

As good as all that is, those passages make it pretty clear why I think it took me so long to read. The thing about a published diary is that there is no plot propelling you through chapters and, because of this, it can be very easy to set the book down and forget about it for a while (i.e. almost a year). I've got his next diary sitting on the nightstand so we'll see how long it takes me to finish that.

Aside from that, the Urdu piece (which still doesn't have a title) is shaping up pretty well and I'm about to spend an afternoon tethered to my computer inputting notes: Finale, iTunes and strong coffee not far away. I wrote (what I think is) the final transition yesterday and, at the moment, it looks like I've hit the last stage of this project. There are a few notes here and there that have to be written for the oboe but the choral stuff, for the most part, is done. My original deadline is November 1 but I set a goal for myself to have it in the mail 2 weeks early so I could have some time off before this monumental French piece starts intruding on my sleep.