Settling the Score: Essays on Music

by Ned Rorem

Discusses Gershwin, Copland, Flanagan, Barber, Bernstein, Cage, Debussy, Ravel, Straus, Stravinsky, Toscanini, Britten, popular music, and the future of music

Genres: Music

366 pages, Hardcover

First published May 1, 1988

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

[Kyle · Rating 4 out of 5]

Very enjoyable, high brow essays. Even the essays that I had no interest in seemed to have big nuggets of wisdom from one of America's oldest living composers. The collection was published in the late 1980s, but I found it surprising how well much of the content had aged. It was extremely interesting to read about Rorem's take on "Our Music Today" in essays from both the 1970s and 1980s. Only a handful of essays fell short––(naturally) usually the most esoteric ones, such as his analysis of French popular song and comparisons with his own song cycles. Other essays I thought I would enjoy (such as the ones about The Beatles), but those fell short likely because of their date of publication (pre-White Album). Still, I felt enriched while reading and wanted to get to listening to some of the repertoire he discusses.

[Michael Cervantes · Rating 2 out of 5]

He should stick to composing