Ned Rorem (b.1923): Book of Hours • End of Summer • Bright MusicThe brilliant American composer and essayist Ned Rorem was born into a Quaker family in Richmond, Indiana, in October 1923, the son of Gladys Miller, a civil rights activist and C. Rufus Rorem, a medical economist, and was brought up in Chicago. In 1944, Rorem moved to New York City, following studies first at the Music School of Northwestern University and secondly with the noted teacher Rosario Scalero at the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia, where his fellow-students included Lukas Foss; Barber and Menotti were also pupils of Scalero. Today, he maintains an Upper West Side apartment in New York City and a bungalow on Nantucket.

The first compositions which Ned Rorem acknowledges appeared in 1943, w