Contemporary composers, singing, Frenchie posturing, easy parking, and cute gay guys! No wonder SFist asked me to guest-post about the documentary film Ned Rorem: Word and Music. Cross-post below.
Ned Rorem certainly was a hottie. It's easy to see how this handsome, talented, literate 25-year-old American slipped comfortably into Parisian artistic and social circles of, shall we say, a certain caliber back in 1949. He lived the life of archival black-and-white photographs, and we view these images with nostalgic envy—who wouldn't want to be an A-list fag in post-war Paris, breakfasting on croissants and café au lait under greenery like scenery on rue François Premier?
Now Ned Rorem is a handsome and youthful-looking 81-year-old, and in Ned Rorem: Word and Music—screened at Frameline on Sunday—he joins us as a voyeur, looking back at the portrait he painted of himself in his early (and somewhat notorious) Paris Diary. Over the course of 10 years, directors James Dowell and John Kolomvakis conducted a series of interviews with this Pulitzer-winning composer, and the result is a personal introduction to a genteel, thoughtful man who is unabashedly artistic, poetic, lyrical. We watch him watch himself, and it's touchingly obvious that the reminiscences are sweet ones.
But we also see from his face and his words that the Paris Diary and the New York Diary were from a long time ago. He talks about abandoning alcohol in his 40s because, well, anyone can drink and party but only he can write his music. We're allowed a window on his relationship with his late partner James Holmes, who died during the course of making the film; the Rorem half of Holmes/Rorem has a different presence than The Famous Composer Ned Rorem, and we're lucky that the filmmakers were able to capture it.
In an interesting bit, Holmes says that he doesn't particularly like the person he encountered in the Diaries, but that the Ned Rorem he met in person was extremely attractive to him. Holmes points out that Rorem created in words the person he wanted people to see him as—always sought after, unbearably talented, incredibly good-looking... And then it struck me, hey, Ned Rorem was really just writing a blog!
Dowell and Kolomvakis got plenty of insights from Rorem's colleagues, including an extensive interview with fellow composer/writer Paul Bowles (yes, he was a composer); Allen Ginsberg in the back of a car; writer Edmund White (who also knows intimately the "gay American artist goes to Paris and gets some" routine); music critic Tim Page; composer John Corigliano; and Rorem's old friend Edward Albee, the playwright. They also showed a few performance snippets, notably the Emerson String Quartet playing an intense excerpt from his 4th string quartet and Sharon Isbin playing a more reflective solo guitar piece (perhaps from the Suite?). But, as one audience member asked during the Q&A afterwards, why no interviews with performers?
This is a good question, one the filmmakers didn't answer beyond, "Oh, we just had too much material to work with already." For a composer whom Time has called "the world's best composer of art songs," it was inexplicable that the singers like Phyllis "He's our Schubert" Curtin and Susan Graham, who have been such champions of his work, were not interviewed and featured prominently. On a related note, I don't quite get how little time was spent on the songs that are perhaps the most important part of his output. Angelina Reaux singing the wild "Visit to St. Elizabeth's" and a bizarre, breathy, super-reverby recording of "Early in the Morning" (as the soundtrack to a photo montage) were the only representatives.
I don't think it's a stretch to suggest that these songs are the core of his work: Rorem himself says, "I conceive all music ... vocally. Whatever my music is written for—tuba, tambourine, tubular bells—it is always the singer within me crying to get out." And when I say "songs," I'm explicitly not talking about opera, though he's also written half a dozen of those. Opera is about bigness, large gestures, high drama, extroversion. The Ned Rorem we see in Ned Rorem: Word and Music is a gentle-man who is interested in the poetry of life and the internal, so it's no surprise that his elegant and lyrical musical settings of poets' words would rank high among the most affecting work he's done. And that's my only beef with this film: I wish Ned Rorem: Word and Music had focused more on the "and" part of Word and Music, because I think it's his deep understanding of how music illuminates the word that makes him a memorable composer.
One last thing before I return you to your regularly scheduled SFist programming. The Victoria Theater was packed—PACKED!—at 11 o'clock on a Sunday morning with people who came to see this film about a contemporary American composer who is writing new music for concert halls. Most musicians would be delighted beyond words if they could get 300 people to a performance of contemporary music on a Saturday night! I once heard Peter Sellars (the opera director, not the Pink Panther guy) say, in every field—theater, literature, movie—something new is something exciting, something people rush to go experience.... except music. He called it pathological. To everyone who was in that theater at 11am on Sunday, and to everyone who looked at that film description and thought, hmm, that could be interesting, your charge is to go forth into our concert halls when there's music by someone you don't know and who's living in the same world that we are—with open ears. It's astonishing how many interesting things our contemporaries have to say.
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