Monsieur C—, 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.
