Ned Rorem

"Anyone can be drunk, anyone can be in love, anyone can waste time and weep, but only I can pen my songs in the remaining years or minutes," wrote Ned Rorem. Known both as a writer and a composer, Rorem was intriguing as both a musical figure and as a personality. He was self-described as a profoundly diatonic composer, and his music language betrayed the influence of his French impressionist idols Debussy and Ravel. Rorem's harmonic palette was generally characterized by vertical extrapolations: through modality, polymodality, and chordal alterations, of an essentially tonal ...