Other Entertainment
Collected Pieces
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- £10.99
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- £10.99
Publisher Description
A collection of insightful essays, interviews, and commentaries on music, art, and those who make it, from acclaimed author and Pulitzer Prize–winning composer Ned Rorem
It is a rare artist who can deftly cross the boundaries separating one artistic endeavor from another. Contemporary American composer Ned Rorem is one of the able few, not only “the world’s best composer of art songs” (Time magazine) but a remarkable purveyor of prose works, as well. Rorem’s superb collection Other Entertainment features insightful and fascinating essays on music, musicians, and literature, as well as provocative interviews with well-known figures in the arts and elsewhere. Whether he’s offering a cogent analysis of Benjamin Britten’s published diaries, confronting John Simon on the famously acerbic film and theater reviewer’s alleged homophobia, or providing in-depth commentary on the lives and accomplishments of major artists and musical colleagues—as well as moving obituaries for those we have lost—Rorem proves himself to be as entertaining and controversial a social and cultural critic as America has ever produced.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
Rorem describes himself as a composer who writes rather than a writer who composes, but given the state of the audience for serious music, it's a good bet he is known to more people as a writer, particularly of often sensational diaries and more recently of a lively autobiography, Knowing When to Stop. That title is rather ironic in view of this collection, which is a pretty random assemblage of pieces that nearly all appeared elsewhere and don't add much to Rorem's record as a writer. Among the book reviews, he is particularly good on the diaries of Benjamin Britten and decidedly waspish about Kazuo Ishiguro's latest novel. In addition, we find a long talk with critic John Simon on the latter's hostile remarks about gays; some eloquent obituaries of a range of friends; and a few fragments, of which a personal essay on his home in Nantucket has great charm. In a frank foreword, Rorem writes that looking over the pieces, he was impressed by how often he repeated certain obsessions and jokes, and hoped the editor would "weed them out." If the editor has, it doesn't show; this is a perfunctory volume, even if it is by a man who is always worth reading.
