Piano Quartets

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Quartets


First name: Ned
Last name: Rorem
Dates: 1925
Category: Quartet
Nationality: american
Opus name: Serenade on five English poems. Quartet for piano, violin, viola & cello : (in one movement) (1979)
Publisher:
Peculiarities: See: http://maurice.bgsu.edu/search~S0?/Xd:(piano+quartets)&SORT=D/Xd:(piano+quartets)&SORT=D&SUBKEY=d%3A(piano+quartets)/851%2C1166%2C1166%2CB/frameset&FF=Xd:(piano+quartets)&SORT=D&879%2C879%2C
Information: Rorem was born in Richmond, Indiana on October 23, 1923. As a child he moved to Chicago with his family; by the age of ten his piano teacher had introduced him to Debussy and Ravel, an experience which "changed my life forever," according to the composer. At seventeen he entered the Music School of Northwestern University, two years later receiving a scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. He studied composition under Bernard Wagenaar at Juilliard, taking his B.A. in 1946 and his M.A. degree (along with the $1,000 George Gershwin Memorial Prize in composition) in 1948. In New York he worked as Virgil Thomson's copyist in return for $20 a week and orchestration lessons. He studied on fellowship at the Berkshire Music Center in Tanglewood in the summers of 1946 and 1947; in 1948 his song The Lordly Hudson was voted the best published song of that year by the Music Library Association. In 1949 Rorem moved to France, and lived there until 1958. His years as a young composer among the leading figures of the artistic and social milieu of post-war Europe are absorbingly portrayed in The Paris Diary and The New York Diary, 1951-1961 (reissued by Da Capo, 1998). He currently lives in New York City.