Composer Ned Rorem died at the age of 99. The composer was hailed as “the world’s best composer of art songs” and was a Pulitzer Prize and Grammy winner.

Born on October 23, 1923, in Richmond, Indiana, Rorem was raised a pacifist in the Quaker Society of Friends and at the age of 10, began taking piano lessons with Margaret Bonds in Chicago. At the age of 15, he began studying theory at the American Conservatory with the “Dean of American Church Music” Leo Sowerby.

He would enroll at the Music School of Northwestern University in 1940. However, he would leave after winning a generous scholarship to the Curtis Institute in Philadelphia. However, he never finished and went on to work as a copyist for Virgil Thompson in New York in exchange for $20 and composition lessons.

He did, however, get his degree at the Juilliard School, first his Bachelor’s (1946) and then his Master’s (1948).

He was awarded the $1,000 George Gershwin Memorial Prize in composition and worked as a piano accompanist for Martha Graham and Éva Gauthier.

At the age of 25, he moved to Paris and live in the region for eight years, making a two-year detour to Morocco. He would go on to study with Arthur Honegger and entered the patronage of Vicomtesse Marie-Laure de Noailles. She introduced him to Poulenc, Auric, Milhaud, and Cocteau, among others.

In 1957, he returned to the US where he became the Composer-in-Residence at the University of Buffalo from 1959 to 1961 and the University of Utah from 1966–67. In 1980 Rorem became the head of the composition department in Curtis where he worked until 2003.

He became one of the most prolific composers of his generation and wrote over 500 songs, sourcing text from some of the most important poets and writers of his day including Gertrude Stein, John Ashbery, Robert Frost, Sylvia Plath, e.e. cummings, Theodore Roethke, Frank O’Hara, and Elizabeth Bishop.

He also composed three symphonies, four piano concertos, chamber music for all combinations, eight operas, choral works of every description, ballets, and other music for the theater.

Outside of his musical compositions, he was also famous for his controversial diaries and he published sixteen books.

He was also a LGBT advocate as he was openly gay at a time when it was against the law in the United States. In his diaries, he wrote, “I am a composer, not a gay composer … Anyone can be gay—it’s no accomplishment—but only I can be me.”

He lived with his partner of over 30 years James Holmes until Holmes’s death in 1999.

Rorem died on Nov. 18, 2022 in New York City, in his home on the Upper West Side, surrounded by family and friends. He is survived by six nieces and nephews and eleven grandnieces and nephews.