Ned Rorem, composer and writer, is both a gifted memoirist and one of our most acerbic cultural commentators. This anthology of his musings on music, people, and life surveys the full range of his literary achievement and reflects the evolution of his sensibilities.The first part of the book is devoted to writing of an autobiographical nature, including ruminations on being alone and on becoming a composer. The second part focuses on music and individuals from Bartók and Ravel to Edith Piaf and the Beatles. The final part consists of portraits and memorials of such figures as Martha Graham, Paul Bowles, Marc Blitzstein, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Truman Capote. The book also includes a lengthy conversation on the art of the diary.

When The Paris Diary exploded on the scene in 1966 there had never been a book in English quite like it: Its intimate combination of personal, literary, and social insights was unprecedented. Rorem's self-portrait of the artist as a young man, written between 1951 and 1955, was also a mirror of the times, depicting the now vanished milieu of Cocteau, Eluard, Gide, Landowska, Boulez, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, and others whose paths crossed with Rorem's in such settings as Paris, Morocco, and Italy. The New York Diary , published the following year, pictured the period between 1956 and 1960, when Rorem had returned to America. The diaries marked the beginnings of Gay Liberation, not because Rorem made a special issue of his sexuality, but because he did not rather, he wrote of his affairs frankly and unashamedly. A casualness informs each sensual entry, and the overall tone is at once bratty and brilliant, insecure and vain, loving and cultured, but, above all, honest and entertaining.

Ned Rorem is celebrated as one of America's greatest living composers. His diary of his early years, The Paris Diary and the New York Diary , was widely acclaimed. The Later Diaries continues one of the most sustained efforts in the intimate journal form ever undertaken and offers candid insights into his astonishing life, career, art, friendships, and love. In these years, Lions, Miss Julie, and Poems of Love and the Rain were composed and most of his books written he also continued to meet the famous and infamous and to write of them with the charm that Janet Flanner characterized as "worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet."

This latest installment of Ned Rorem's diary opens in 1986, when the author is sixty-two, and closes in 1999, when he is seventy-five. Though Rorem remains as energetic as ever during these years,new books written, new music composed,the tone of this volume is autumnal: His life and his world are winding down. He mourns the passing of dear friends, endures the indignities of growing old, and notes with bitterness the collapse of the taste and standards that once defined his artistic circle. As AIDS becomes an epidemic, he traces its grim course through the gay community and through the discourse of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. Lies is an anthology of forms, each entry a carefully chosen, brightly coloured tile in a literary mosaic, with all that readers have come to expect from Rorem: erotic fantasies, gratuitous slights, aphorisms, indiscretions, program notes, puns, punditry, and beauty.

In the earliest published diaries of Ned Rorem, the acclaimed American composer recalls a bygone era and its luminaries, celebrates the creative process, and examines the gay culture of Europe and the US during the 1950sOne of America’s most significant contemporary composers, Ned Rorem is also widely acclaimed as a diarist of unique insight and refreshing candor. Together, his Paris Diary, first published in 1966, and The New York Diary,which followed a year later, paint a colorful landscape of Rorem’s world and its famous inhabitants, as well as a fascinating self-portrait of a footloose young artist unabashedly drinking deeply of life. In this amalgam of forthright personal reflections and cogent social commentary, unprecedented for its time, Rorem’s anecdotal recollections of the decade from 1951 to 1961 represent Gay Liberation in its infancy as the author freely expresses his open sexuality not as a revelation but as a simple fact of life. At once blisteringly honest and exquisitely entertaining, Rorem’s diaries expound brilliantly on the creative process, following their peripatetic author from Paris to Morocco to Italy and back home to America as he crosses paths with Picasso, Cocteau, Gide, Boulez, and other luminaries of the era.  With consummate skill and unexpurgated insight, a younger, wilder Rorem reflects on a bygone time and culture and, in doing so, holds a revealing mirror to himself. 

Acclaimed composer Ned Rorem delights and provokes with a fearless collection of vivid memories, critiques, and musings on life, music, and his worldPulitzer Prize–winning American composer Ned Rorem has been lauded for his art songs, symphonies, operas, and other orchestral works. With Critical Affairs, as with his other literary works, the great maestro once again demonstrates that he is a master of words as well as music. Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, Critical Affairs opens a window into the brilliant mind of a multi-talented artist and acute observer of the world around him. Rorem is fearless—sometimes shameless—in critiques of his contemporaries and their work. He gives glowing praise to those who merit it and tears down those he feels do not with a sharp and cunning wit. His remembrances of past challenges and conquests, both artistic and sexual, alternately scandalize and mesmerize, and his thoughts on everything from Walt Whitman to rock music carry weight and substance. Through it all, the author retains his unique charm and grace, whether he’s confidently confessing a shocking personal indiscretion or remembering with lyrical fondness a late musical giant who helped to shape his extraordinary career.

The esteemed American composer and unabashed diarist Ned Rorem provides a fascinating, brazenly intimate first-person account of his life and career during one of the most extraordinary decades of the twentieth centuryNed Rorem is often considered an American treasure, one of the greatest contemporary composers in the US. In 1966, he revealed another side of his remarkable talent when The Paris Diary was published, and a year later, The New York Diary, both to wide critical acclaim. In The Later Diaries,Rorem continues to explore his world and his music in intimate journal form, covering the years 1961 to 1972, one of his most artistically productive decades. The Ned Rorem revealed in The Later Diaries is somewhat more mature and worldly than the young artist of the earlier works, but no less candid or daring, as he reflects on his astonishing life, loves, friendships, and rivalries during an epoch of staggering, sometimes volatile change. Writing with intelligence, insight, and honesty, he recalls time spent with some of the most famous, and infamous, artists of the era—Philip Roth, Christopher Isherwood, Tallulah Bankhead, and Edward Albee, among others—openly exploring his sexuality and his art while offering fascinating, sometimes blistering, views on the art of his contemporaries.

A magnificent collection of essays, opinions, and reflections on life, culture, art, love, and music—always lyrical, witty, and brazenly provocative—from one of the most acclaimed contemporary American composersTime magazine has called Ned Rorem “the world’s best composer of art songs.” But his genius does not end in the realm of classical music. Rorem has a rare gift for writing, as well, and the wide acclaim that has greeted his memoirs, essay collections, and published diaries attest to this fact. An Absolute Gift is a cornucopia of Roremisms—essays, reviews, and opinions on a vast array of fascinating subjects, from music to film to drama to sex. Here also are candid diary entries, displaying the frankness and remarkable insight for which Rorem is known. Whether he’s lambasting or celebrating the world’s great musical works and their creators (and, according to Stephen Sondheim, “He is one of the best writers about music that I have ever read”), offering intensely personal musings on death and love, or brilliantly dissecting the artist’s craft, Ned Rorem is always fascinating, always provocative, and enormously entertaining.

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 extraordinaireNed 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.

A thrilling, poignant, and bold memoir of the early years and accomplishments—both musical and sexual—of renowned contemporary composer Ned RoremNed Rorem, arguably the greatest composer of art songs that America has produced in more than a hundred years, is also revered as a diarist and essayist whose unexpurgated writings are at once enthralling, enlightening, and provocative. In Knowing When to Stop, one of the most creative American artists of our time offers readers a colorful narrative of his first twenty-seven years, expertly unraveling the intriguing conundrum of who he truly is and how he came to be that way. As the author himself writes, "A memoir is not a diary. Diaries are written in the heat of battle, memoirs in the repose of retrospect." But careful thought and consideration have not dulled the sharp point of Rorem''s pen as he writes openly of his life and loves, his missteps and triumphs, and offers frank and fascinating portraits of the luminaries in his circle: Aaron Copland, Truman Capote, Jean Cocteau, Martha Graham, Igor Stravinsky, Billie Holliday, Paul Bowles, and Alfred C. Kinsey, to name a few. The result is an early life story that is riveting, moving, and intimate—a magnificent self-portrait of one of the great minds of this age.

The acclaimed author of The Paris Diary, Pulitzer Prize–winning American composer Ned Rorem offers readers a mellow, thoughtful, and candid chronicle of his life, work, and contemporariesOne of our most revered contemporary musical artists—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and declared “the world’s best composer of art songs” by Time magazine—Ned Rorem writes that he is “a composer who writes, not a writer who composes.” Despite this claim, Rorem’s published diaries, memoirs, essay collections, and other nonfiction works have all received resounding acclaim for their lyricism, bold honesty, and insightful social commentary. His Nantucket Diary, covering the years 1973 through 1985, reveals a more mature and graceful Ned Rorem, a man who has experienced great loss and serious illness yet has lost none of his acute observational skills and keenly opinionated nature. His wit remains bracing and his candor refreshing as he offers sharp critiques on the state of modern classical music and its creators. His accounts of times shared with luminaries and legends, musical and otherwise (including Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee, Virgil Thomson, and Stephen Sondheim) are consistently enthralling and delightful. The outspoken hedonist of The Paris Diary may be older and more subdued now, but his incisive observations and unique outlook on life, both personal and creative, remain an unforgettable reading experience.

Ned Rorem explores the state of contemporary classical music in a magnificent collection of personally selected essays and critiques of masterworks, lesser works, and their legendary creatorsPulitzer Prize–winner Ned Rorem’s musical compositions are considered some of the finest produced in the past century. His literary works have been hailed as “scintillating” (Time magazine) and “extraordinary” (The Washington Post). Rorem’s remarkable twin talents are brilliantly intertwined in Settling the Score, a masterful collection of essays on music, composers, and the state of the art. Selected by Rorem himself, these enthralling and provocative pieces examine the works of the great and (in the author’s lively, unabashed opinion) the not-so-great masters of twentieth-century classical music—Debussy, Ravel, Copland, Gershwin, Barber, Cage, Bernstein, Britten, Stravinsky, and others. With keen precision, he dissects the so-called serious music of our time while predicting where the form is bound in the future. Never lacking in intelligence or wit, each essay in Settling the Score sings in a voice that is clear and true.

Ned Rorem, composer and writer, is both a gifted memoirist and one of our most acerbic cultural commentators. This anthology of his musings on music, people, and life surveys the full range of his literary achievement and reflects the evolution of his sensibilities.The first part of the book is devoted to writing of an autobiographical nature, including ruminations on being alone and on becoming a composer. The second part focuses on music and individuals from Bartók and Ravel to Edith Piaf and the Beatles. The final part consists of portraits and memorials of such figures as Martha Graham, Paul Bowles, Marc Blitzstein, Frank O’Hara, Allen Ginsberg, and Truman Capote. The book also includes a lengthy conversation on the art of the diary.

When The Paris Diary exploded on the scene in 1966 there had never been a book in English quite like it: Its intimate combination of personal, literary, and social insights was unprecedented. Rorem's self-portrait of the artist as a young man, written between 1951 and 1955, was also a mirror of the times, depicting the now vanished milieu of Cocteau, Eluard, Gide, Landowska, Boulez, the Vicomtesse de Noailles, and others whose paths crossed with Rorem's in such settings as Paris, Morocco, and Italy. The New York Diary , published the following year, pictured the period between 1956 and 1960, when Rorem had returned to America. The diaries marked the beginnings of Gay Liberation, not because Rorem made a special issue of his sexuality, but because he did not rather, he wrote of his affairs frankly and unashamedly. A casualness informs each sensual entry, and the overall tone is at once bratty and brilliant, insecure and vain, loving and cultured, but, above all, honest and entertaining.

Ned Rorem is celebrated as one of America's greatest living composers. His diary of his early years, The Paris Diary and the New York Diary , was widely acclaimed. The Later Diaries continues one of the most sustained efforts in the intimate journal form ever undertaken and offers candid insights into his astonishing life, career, art, friendships, and love. In these years, Lions, Miss Julie, and Poems of Love and the Rain were composed and most of his books written he also continued to meet the famous and infamous and to write of them with the charm that Janet Flanner characterized as "worldly, intelligent, licentious, highly indiscreet."

This latest installment of Ned Rorem's diary opens in 1986, when the author is sixty-two, and closes in 1999, when he is seventy-five. Though Rorem remains as energetic as ever during these years,new books written, new music composed,the tone of this volume is autumnal: His life and his world are winding down. He mourns the passing of dear friends, endures the indignities of growing old, and notes with bitterness the collapse of the taste and standards that once defined his artistic circle. As AIDS becomes an epidemic, he traces its grim course through the gay community and through the discourse of the Reagan, Bush, and Clinton years. Lies is an anthology of forms, each entry a carefully chosen, brightly coloured tile in a literary mosaic, with all that readers have come to expect from Rorem: erotic fantasies, gratuitous slights, aphorisms, indiscretions, program notes, puns, punditry, and beauty.

In the earliest published diaries of Ned Rorem, the acclaimed American composer recalls a bygone era and its luminaries, celebrates the creative process, and examines the gay culture of Europe and the US during the 1950sOne of America’s most significant contemporary composers, Ned Rorem is also widely acclaimed as a diarist of unique insight and refreshing candor. Together, his Paris Diary, first published in 1966, and The New York Diary,which followed a year later, paint a colorful landscape of Rorem’s world and its famous inhabitants, as well as a fascinating self-portrait of a footloose young artist unabashedly drinking deeply of life. In this amalgam of forthright personal reflections and cogent social commentary, unprecedented for its time, Rorem’s anecdotal recollections of the decade from 1951 to 1961 represent Gay Liberation in its infancy as the author freely expresses his open sexuality not as a revelation but as a simple fact of life. At once blisteringly honest and exquisitely entertaining, Rorem’s diaries expound brilliantly on the creative process, following their peripatetic author from Paris to Morocco to Italy and back home to America as he crosses paths with Picasso, Cocteau, Gide, Boulez, and other luminaries of the era.  With consummate skill and unexpurgated insight, a younger, wilder Rorem reflects on a bygone time and culture and, in doing so, holds a revealing mirror to himself. 

Acclaimed composer Ned Rorem delights and provokes with a fearless collection of vivid memories, critiques, and musings on life, music, and his worldPulitzer Prize–winning American composer Ned Rorem has been lauded for his art songs, symphonies, operas, and other orchestral works. With Critical Affairs, as with his other literary works, the great maestro once again demonstrates that he is a master of words as well as music. Winner of the ASCAP Deems Taylor Award, Critical Affairs opens a window into the brilliant mind of a multi-talented artist and acute observer of the world around him. Rorem is fearless—sometimes shameless—in critiques of his contemporaries and their work. He gives glowing praise to those who merit it and tears down those he feels do not with a sharp and cunning wit. His remembrances of past challenges and conquests, both artistic and sexual, alternately scandalize and mesmerize, and his thoughts on everything from Walt Whitman to rock music carry weight and substance. Through it all, the author retains his unique charm and grace, whether he’s confidently confessing a shocking personal indiscretion or remembering with lyrical fondness a late musical giant who helped to shape his extraordinary career.

The esteemed American composer and unabashed diarist Ned Rorem provides a fascinating, brazenly intimate first-person account of his life and career during one of the most extraordinary decades of the twentieth centuryNed Rorem is often considered an American treasure, one of the greatest contemporary composers in the US. In 1966, he revealed another side of his remarkable talent when The Paris Diary was published, and a year later, The New York Diary, both to wide critical acclaim. In The Later Diaries,Rorem continues to explore his world and his music in intimate journal form, covering the years 1961 to 1972, one of his most artistically productive decades. The Ned Rorem revealed in The Later Diaries is somewhat more mature and worldly than the young artist of the earlier works, but no less candid or daring, as he reflects on his astonishing life, loves, friendships, and rivalries during an epoch of staggering, sometimes volatile change. Writing with intelligence, insight, and honesty, he recalls time spent with some of the most famous, and infamous, artists of the era—Philip Roth, Christopher Isherwood, Tallulah Bankhead, and Edward Albee, among others—openly exploring his sexuality and his art while offering fascinating, sometimes blistering, views on the art of his contemporaries.

A magnificent collection of essays, opinions, and reflections on life, culture, art, love, and music—always lyrical, witty, and brazenly provocative—from one of the most acclaimed contemporary American composersTime magazine has called Ned Rorem “the world’s best composer of art songs.” But his genius does not end in the realm of classical music. Rorem has a rare gift for writing, as well, and the wide acclaim that has greeted his memoirs, essay collections, and published diaries attest to this fact. An Absolute Gift is a cornucopia of Roremisms—essays, reviews, and opinions on a vast array of fascinating subjects, from music to film to drama to sex. Here also are candid diary entries, displaying the frankness and remarkable insight for which Rorem is known. Whether he’s lambasting or celebrating the world’s great musical works and their creators (and, according to Stephen Sondheim, “He is one of the best writers about music that I have ever read”), offering intensely personal musings on death and love, or brilliantly dissecting the artist’s craft, Ned Rorem is always fascinating, always provocative, and enormously entertaining.

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 extraordinaireNed 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.

A thrilling, poignant, and bold memoir of the early years and accomplishments—both musical and sexual—of renowned contemporary composer Ned RoremNed Rorem, arguably the greatest composer of art songs that America has produced in more than a hundred years, is also revered as a diarist and essayist whose unexpurgated writings are at once enthralling, enlightening, and provocative. In Knowing When to Stop, one of the most creative American artists of our time offers readers a colorful narrative of his first twenty-seven years, expertly unraveling the intriguing conundrum of who he truly is and how he came to be that way. As the author himself writes, "A memoir is not a diary. Diaries are written in the heat of battle, memoirs in the repose of retrospect." But careful thought and consideration have not dulled the sharp point of Rorem''s pen as he writes openly of his life and loves, his missteps and triumphs, and offers frank and fascinating portraits of the luminaries in his circle: Aaron Copland, Truman Capote, Jean Cocteau, Martha Graham, Igor Stravinsky, Billie Holliday, Paul Bowles, and Alfred C. Kinsey, to name a few. The result is an early life story that is riveting, moving, and intimate—a magnificent self-portrait of one of the great minds of this age.

The acclaimed author of The Paris Diary, Pulitzer Prize–winning American composer Ned Rorem offers readers a mellow, thoughtful, and candid chronicle of his life, work, and contemporariesOne of our most revered contemporary musical artists—winner of the Pulitzer Prize and declared “the world’s best composer of art songs” by Time magazine—Ned Rorem writes that he is “a composer who writes, not a writer who composes.” Despite this claim, Rorem’s published diaries, memoirs, essay collections, and other nonfiction works have all received resounding acclaim for their lyricism, bold honesty, and insightful social commentary. His Nantucket Diary, covering the years 1973 through 1985, reveals a more mature and graceful Ned Rorem, a man who has experienced great loss and serious illness yet has lost none of his acute observational skills and keenly opinionated nature. His wit remains bracing and his candor refreshing as he offers sharp critiques on the state of modern classical music and its creators. His accounts of times shared with luminaries and legends, musical and otherwise (including Leonard Bernstein, Edward Albee, Virgil Thomson, and Stephen Sondheim) are consistently enthralling and delightful. The outspoken hedonist of The Paris Diary may be older and more subdued now, but his incisive observations and unique outlook on life, both personal and creative, remain an unforgettable reading experience.

Ned Rorem explores the state of contemporary classical music in a magnificent collection of personally selected essays and critiques of masterworks, lesser works, and their legendary creatorsPulitzer Prize–winner Ned Rorem’s musical compositions are considered some of the finest produced in the past century. His literary works have been hailed as “scintillating” (Time magazine) and “extraordinary” (The Washington Post). Rorem’s remarkable twin talents are brilliantly intertwined in Settling the Score, a masterful collection of essays on music, composers, and the state of the art. Selected by Rorem himself, these enthralling and provocative pieces examine the works of the great and (in the author’s lively, unabashed opinion) the not-so-great masters of twentieth-century classical music—Debussy, Ravel, Copland, Gershwin, Barber, Cage, Bernstein, Britten, Stravinsky, and others. With keen precision, he dissects the so-called serious music of our time while predicting where the form is bound in the future. Never lacking in intelligence or wit, each essay in Settling the Score sings in a voice that is clear and true.