Setting the Tone: Essays and a Diary

by Ned Rorem

A sterling collection of essays, commentary, reviews, and personal recollections on art, love, and the musical life, from Ned Rorem, award-winning composer and author extraordinaire
Ned Rorem, the acclaimed American composer and writer, displays his incisive, sometimes outrageous genius for artistic critique and social commentary with a grand flourish in this engaging collection of essays and diary entries. Fearlessly offering opinions on a wealth of subjects--from the lives of the famous and infamous to popular culture to the state of contemporary art--Rorem proves once again that he is an artist who tells unforgettable stories not only through music, but with a pen, as well. Setting the Tone gathers together essays and commentary previously published elsewhere and combines them with pages from Rorem's ongoing diary, offering readers a vivid and enlightening view of Rorem's world along with an honest portrait of the author himself. Whether he's lambasting critics and former friends and acquaintances, vivisecting opera, or presenting his views on theater, film, books, or composers and their music, Rorem is ingenious, incorrigible, and madly entertaining.

383 pages, ebook

First published May 1, 1983

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

[GONZA · Rating 4 out of 5]

Such an interesting book, essays, notes, diaries, sketches about the life in the 50/60/70 with all the most important people. A critical and cynical eye but never mean, Ned Rorem tells about music, its protagonists and those times with an incredible capacity to describe and to be interesting at the same time.

Libro veramente interessante, saggi, note, diari, brevi descrizioni della vita durante gli anni '50,'60 e '70 e dei suoi protagonisti piú importanti, sia in campo artistico che no. Con un occhio critico e a volte cinico, ma mai cattivo, Ned Rorem racconta la musica, ed i suoi compositori con un'incredibile capacitá descrittiva.

THANKS TO NETGALLEY AND OPEN ROAD INTEGRATED MEDIA FOR THE PREVIEW!