Composer Ned Rorem
Orpheus concludes its season with a celebration of great orchestrators, including Haydn, whose expanded instrumentation added rich colors and textures to his orchestrations. Three 20th century geniuses, Ravel, Stravinsky and Ned Rorem, took the idea of orchestral color to new heights in their work. Now Ned Rorem enhances his legacy, adding new songs to his repertoire and orchestrating this collection for the first time, especially for Orpheus and the glorious Susan Graham, long considered to be a premiere interpreter of his work. Following is an interview with with Ned Rorem and Aaron Grad.
How did you come to start composing songs?
I started writing songs on pre-existing texts pretty young, not because I loved songs, but because I loved poetry. I didn’t see why I shouldn’t link my two loves, which were music and poetry, so I did. I was also lucky in that I had good people to sing them immediately, fellow students at Northwestern University, and at The Curtis Institute where I went to school when I was still a teenager.
For all the music and all the words you have written, have you ever linked the two?
No. I flatter myself that, whatever my songs are worth, at least my choice of texts is pretty good. If the Ned who writes words and the Ned who writes songs were both good, then I wouldn’t need to write, I would just be able to drop them. They are two separate things entirely. It’s also rather European of me, because Americans are almost always specialists, and Europeans are general practitioners.
11 Songs for Susan has a unique format, mixing new songs with orchestrations of old songs and including texts by seven different poets. Did you conceive this new work as a unified song cycle?
It’s a song cycle if I say it is. I’ve written several so-called cycles, usually all on one poet or all on one theme. But these are not on one theme, and they certainly are not just on one poet. I was supposed to write a bunch of songs for Susan Graham, and so that’s what I did. Susan is one of the few real singers – that is to say with a real voice and a real reputation – who does contemporary music. When Orpheus Chamber Orchestra asked me to write a piece for her, I was very pleased to do it.
You included three songs with Paul Goodman texts in this piece, and you have written many others over the years. What is the history behind your Goodman settings?
I’ve written perhaps 400 songs, of which the first songs were by Paul Goodman, who was a friend from my childhood. He was about ten years older than me. I wrote Clouds a long time ago on a Paul Goodman poem, and the orchestration just asked for strictly strings. The Lordly Hudson is one of the first and one of the most popular songs I ever wrote. I haven’t actually heard this orchestral setting of The Lordly Hudson yet. I’m sure it will sound good, but I don’t know if it needs all of this.
When you orchestrate songs, do you ever change or add musical material?
No, I’m not writing new material at all; I take it exactly as it is. I’m looking, for example, at I Strolled Across an Open Field, which is a rollicking song, and the orchestration is sort of obvious. It asks for these things.
One of the new songs, Wild Nights, and another that is decades old, The Serpent, share a daringly sparse style of accompaniment, with often just a single line supporting the singer. What draws you to this sound?
I’m an economical composer. I like to put down on paper what needs to be put down, and not put down what doesn’t need to be put down. It’s the same with orchestration: I try to keep as near to the original impetus as I can. And I try not to obliterate the singer with too heavy an orchestra. I don’t like doublings in
orchestration.
Your music has been a major influence on many younger American composers. Do you pay attention to what they are doing? Do you like what you hear?
I taught for about 15 years, but then I stopped teaching, and I don’t know how to do it anymore. How do you teach? What does it mean? All you can do is deal with something that already exists and say what’s wrong with it. But you can’t make a person compose who isn’t a composer. The farther I get from it, the less I know about it. And I don’t feel an urge to keep up on what’s happening, but I just do, by the nature of things. I try to go to friends’ concerts and hear what’s going on, and some of it I like and some I don’t. I would say this: I think America, with all of its vulgarity, is the most interesting country musically in the world today. I can’t even think of the name of a composer in France or Germany, let alone what they are doing.
What drives you to keep writing new music?
Money! I’ve said almost all I have to say, both in my books and in my music. I don’t really think much about it anymore unless I get a commission. I’ve got a couple of very small commissions at the moment, but if I died now, I wouldn’t be ashamed of leaving what I’ve done.
You are known as the great American composer of songs, and you also have written many successful instrumental pieces, including a Pulitzer prize-winning orchestral work. What people seem to connect to in your music, no matter the format, is its “singing” nature. Is that a core quality of your music?
All music is song. Everything is sung, whether there is a singer around or not, even The Rite of Spring, even Bolero. The pitched human voice is what impelled music from the days of the cavemen up to the present. Even with people who’ve never written for the voice, music is the voice.
