Knowing When to Stop: A Memoir by Ned Rorem

by Ned Rorem

One of America's most brilliant composers and diarists recreates the vibrancy, intrigues, and extraordinary accomplishments of the art world, the gay world, and the music world in New York and Paris during the 1940s and 1950s, offering vivid portraits of Leonard Bernstein, Aaron Copland, Paul and Jane Bowles, Truman Capote, and other leading figures of his generation. Photos.

Genres: Music, Memoir, LGBT

Hardcover

First published January 1, 1994

About the author

Ned Rorem (born October 23, 1923) is a Pulitzer prize-winning American composer and diarist. He is best known and most praised for his song settings.

Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana and received his early education in Chicago at the University of Chicago Laboratory Schools, the American Conservatory of Music and then Northwestern University. Later, Rorem moved on to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia and finally the Juilliard School in New York City.

In 1966 he published The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem, which, with his later diaries, has brought him some notoriety, as he is honest about his and others' sexuality, describing his relationships with Leonard Bernstein, Noël Coward, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson, and outing several others[vague] (Aldrich and Wotherspoon, eds., 2001). Rorem has written extensively about music as well. These essays are collected in anthologies such as Setting the Tone, Music From the Inside Out, and Music and People. His prose is much admired, not least for its barbed observations about such prominent musicians as Pierre Boulez. Rorem has composed in a chromatic tonal idiom throughout his career, and he is not hesitant to attack the orthodoxies of the avant-garde.

Reviews

[Al Rankin · Rating 5 out of 5]

Although I never met Ned Rorem, he and I had many friends in common.