THE VOICE OF CHICAGO'S GAY, LESBIAN, BI, TRANS AND QUEER COMMUNITY SINCE 1985

In a too-rare return to the city where he grew up, distinguished American composer, celebrated diarist and gay icon Ned Rorem will be in Chicago May 22 for a concert of his music presented by the Chicago Chamber Musicians. The program of three works concludes the annual Composer Perspective series in which the Chicago Chamber Musicians ( CCM ) invite distinguished musical authors to curate concerts of their own music.

Rorem's catalog of work includes opera, symphony, chamber music, choral music and—most significantly—songs and song cycles. A master of prosody ( the art of fitting words to music ) , Rorem has acknowledged that creating works for solo voice and piano is his focus and forte.

But he's never set his own words to music, although Rorem is the highly regarded author of numerous volumes of essays about music, plus lively personal diaries published between 1966 and 2000 that detail—often wittily and sometimes cattily—his openly gay sexual adventures in America, Europe and Morocco from the late 1940s onward. Now 81, Rorem has never considered himself a sexual pioneer or gay-rights advocate. Forthright and frank about matters musical, political and sexual, Rorem has commented that it simply was too much work to hide who and what he was ( and is ) . His 33-year relationship with James Holmes ended with Holmes' death in 1999, a principal focus of Rorem's most recent diary volume, Lies.

For the May 22 concert, Rorem has selected works from three decades, Winter Pages, written in 1981 for a chamber quintet of violin, cello, clarinet, bassoon and piano; and String Quartet No. 3 written in 1990, and Aftermath, premiered at the Ravinia Festival in 2002. It's composed for male voice and a trio of violin, cello and piano. It features settings of 12 poems by William Blake, A. E. Houseman, Matthew Arnold, Elizabeth Barrett Browning and Shakespeare among others.

In preparation for the May 22 concert, Ned Rorem spoke by phone with the Windy City Times. We asked him about Aftermath.

NED ROREM: It's a recent piece written in the aftermath of the 9/11 business. It's in 10 movements on a series of poems that have to do with war and peace. I'm a Quaker and a pacifist, which I think everybody is in a sense. I don't particularly believe in inspiration, but I think this piece definitely is impelled from that international catastrophe. I won't say tragedy, but catastrophe. It was commissioned by Ravinia. That is, I was commissioned to write a piece for Ravinia, and then this thing happened. It's called Ten Songs of War and Love, and it's not quite a half-hour long. I took poems from people that never would have occurred to me before. I found them in a book about poems of war. It has a very good ending: 'When I am dead, even then I will still love you, I will wait in these poems. When I am dead, even then I am still listening to you, I will still be making poems for you out of silence. Silence will be falling into that silence. It is built in music.'

WINDY CITY TIMES: What about the String Quarter and Winter Pages?

NR: It's called Winter Pages because I had a piece called Autumn Music and Summer Music and Spring Music and ( then ) winter pages. It doesn't mean anything. I don't think music means anything unless it has words. The String Quarter was written for the Emerson Quartet who made a very good recording of it. There's one wrong note in it, but you don't need to know that. The fourth quarter, which I hope it is, has about 10 movements also, and each movement is named after a Picasso picture.

WCT: Do you feel that vocal music is more accessible than instrumental music alone?

NR: That depends on who you're trying to access. Serious classical music is just fading from any kind of public consciousness, even among cultured intellectuals—they don't know what you're talking about, they don't know the names of living composers, except Sting or somebody. People have always hated vocal music because they don't know why these people are making all these funny sounds. If the other music is background for a movie or a ballet or something, they can take it a lot easier than if it were not.

So you can't make these generalities that you are trying to put into my mouth at all, except that I will say that the world of vocal music is in a worse state than it ever was. Nobody writes songs anymore. Opera is being done quite a bit, and still is being commissioned here and there. But rich people—you know who Paris Hilton is? I hate verbs made out of nouns, but she parties. If she would take a hundred million dollars and spend 99 of it on going to parties, and with the other million dollars commission one or two composers to write operas, she would go down in history the way—if the Pope were to do the same thing, commission someone to do a chapel—the way they did it with Michelangelo or Dante or Bach. Or if President Bush would spend, instead of 40 million on an inaugural party for Christ's sake, spend 39 million and take another million and commission some works, and he would go down in history with Bach and so forth.

WCT: We've been very fortunate in Chicago to have the Lyric Opera of Chicago support a series of commissions over the last dozen or 15 years by composer William Bolcom, along with a composer-in-residence program.

NR: Yes. I think that's great. And I wrote a piece for the Chicago Symphony with John Corigliano. I wrote a big piece, but it's never been done again—but it's for chorus and orchestra and it's about an hour. I feel very, very warmly about Chicago in every way. If I come for the concert with my friend, we'll rent a car and run around the South Side. I can remember every single street corner of the South Side, and the building where I lived. Nothing has changed in Chicago. It never looks littler than it usually does, or bigger, it's exactly the same. And the building I used to live in on Dorchester Avenue, when I was there last I went out into the backyard, and the fence still hasn't been fixed.

WCT: Can a serious composer make a living in the United States today, without having to teach? Just from composing.

NR: We are the only era in history, ever, in which the performer is more important than the composer. Across the street from me in New York lives the violinist Itzhak Perlman. He makes more in one concert than I make in a year, and he makes it by playing music exclusively of the past, Mendelssohn and Schumann and Beethoven and all that. I make a living as a composer but it's a modest living and I have taught for ages. You can't make a living like the performers do today. Nine out of ten reputable composers do teach, like Corigliano and David Del Tredici and anyone that I can think of.

WCT: I wanted to ask one non-musical question. You and James Holmes were a couple for over 30 years. Do you feel you can offer advice on how to sustain a relationship?

NR: Have you read Lies? It came out about two years ago. You should try to get it, particularly if this article is for a gay magazine, because there it is. It goes up to and through the death from AIDS of my partner of 33 years. It's a pretty good book.

You have to work every day, with friendships, too, and with families, too. The Washington Post asked a lot of people, including me, on Valentine's Day to make a remark about love. I said a great love lasts about three years, because Tristan and Isolde then die or Romeo and Juliet then die. If you picture these people as a bourgeois couple raising children and fixing peanut butter sandwiches, the glamour of it is not there.

I think also, the physicality of it—I'm 81 and I think about sex all the time, other people don't—but I think the body is made in such a way that you do. But I'm not sure how many lovers still are horny after 50 years. I think that love turns into something you call friendship that's more than love, and then there's love that's more than friendship, but unless there is friendship in love it can't last.

You have to respect a person for their own identity as well as their body. It can be very sexy to have sex with someone from another class—rich people like truck drivers and so forth—but that can go only so far. If you're going to live and pay your bills together, you have to have something in common. In the case of Jim, he was 15 years younger than me and he was a terrific musician. There was nothing he didn't understand. And he had a certain gift as a composer but he didn't take himself very seriously. I was more talented than he, but certainly not more intelligent. But I can't give advice to the lovelorn. You have to work at it. And I know my friends have to be patient with me. I'm getting crankier by the minute.

WCT: If ever I've heard a cue to say goodbye, that's it. Thank you, Mr. Rorem.