- He won the Pulitzer award in 1976 for his suite Air Music.
- He's been an Officer of the French Legion of Honor since 2004.
- He was called "The world's best composer of art songs" by Time Magazine.
- Rorem was the subject of a 2005 documentary film, Ned Rorem: Word & Music.
- Miss Julie and Our Town are Rorem's only full-length operas. Our Town was first performed by the Indiana University Opera in Bloomington in 2006.
- In 1966 he published The Paris Diary of Ned Rorem. This was followed by Later Diaries 1951-1972 (1974) and The Nantucket Diary of Ned Rorem, 1973-1985 (1987). In them he is always candid, and open about his and other men's sexuality, describing his relationships with Leonard Bernstein, Noël Coward, Samuel Barber, and Virgil Thomson, and outing several others.
- Rorem composed in a chromatic tonal idiom throughout his career, and was not hesitant to attack the orthodoxies of the avant-garde.
- Rorem was raised as a Quaker and referred to this in interviews in relation to his piece A Quaker Reader, which is based on Quaker texts.
- Rorem's notable students included Daron Hagen and David Horne.
- Rorem's life partner was organist James Roland Holmes (1939-1999).
- Rorem also had a short affair with writer John Cheever.
- From his first compositions, Rorem stressed the importance of a cycle's overall structure, paying close attention to the song order, progression of keys and transition between songs. He also emphasized theatricality, aiming to convey an overarching message via a unified emotional affect or mood.
- Like in other genres, the musicologist Philip Lieson Miller remarked that "Rorem's chosen field of song is not for the avant garde and he must be classified as ... conservative", and that "he has never striven for novelty". Miller elaborates that this conservatism is not extreme enough to allow for convenient formal analysis.
- Best known for his art songs, his other works include operas, concertante, piano music as well as choral, chamber and orchestral works.
- To obtain certain effects, Ned Rorem has experimented with more modernist effects, such as intense chromaticism, successive modulations and alternating time signatures.[.
- He wrote extensively about music as well. These essays are collected in the anthologies Music from Inside Out (1967), Music and People (1968), Pure Contraption (1974), Setting the Tone (1983), Settling the Score (1988), and Other Entertainment (1996).
- Rorem is best known for his vocal art songs, of which he wrote more than 500. Many are coupled into some thirty or song cycles, written from the early 1940s to 2000s.
- His prose is much admired, not least for its barbed observations about such prominent musicians as composer and conductor Pierre Boulez.
- Many of his earliest songs remain unpublished; his first published cycle is the Flight for Heaven (1950), a setting of nine poems by the lyric poet Robert Herrick, along with a piano interlude.
- Ned Rorem composed numerous cycles to the poetry of an individual writer: John Ashbery, Witter Bynner, Demetrios Capetanakis, George Darley, Frank O'Hara, Herrick, Kenneth Koch, Howard Moss, Sylvia Plath, Wallace Stevens, Alfred, Lord Tennyson, and Walt Whitman, who he dedicated three cycles. His few settings in other languages include French poems by Jean-Antoine de Baïf, Jean Daurat, Olivier de Magny, Henri de Régnier, Pierre de Ronsard, as well as ancient Greek texts by Plato.
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