Monsieur Cā, curator of The Standing Room, has also written, for the SF online mag SFist, a nice review of the documentary Ned Rorem: Words and Music, starting out with the bold lead sentence "Ned Rorem certainly was a hottie." Noteworthy is his closing exhortation:
The Victoria Theater was
packed — PACKED!– at 11 o’clock on a Sunday morning with people who
came to see this film about a contemporary American composer who is
writing new music for concert halls. Most musicians would be delighted
beyond words if they could get 300 people to a performance of
contemporary music on a Saturday night! I once heard Peter Sellars (the
opera director, not the Pink Panther guy)
say, in every field — theater, literature, movie — something new is
something exciting, something people rush to go experience…. except
music. He called it pathological. To everyone who was in that theater
at 11am on Sunday, and to everyone who looked at that film description
and thought, hmm, that could be interesting, your charge is to
go forth into our concert halls when there’s music by someone you don’t
know and who’s living in the same world that we are — with open ears.
It’s astonishing how many interesting things our contemporaries have to
say.