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What's New: Indiana Bicentennial

Christian Steiner

No one is quite sure of where the term Hoosier came from, but it was definitely in use from the 1840s, to describe a resident of Indiana. Back in 1816, Indiana became the 19th state – a time where Beethoven and Schubert were both writing music in Europe.

We’ll celebrate the great state of Indiana, with musicians and orchestras from the Hoosier state, including the Indianapolis Symphony, and composer Ned Rorem on this edition of What’s New!

Ned Rorem is one of America's most honored composers. In addition to a Pulitzer Prize, awarded in 1976 for his suite Air Music, Rorem has been the recipient of a Fulbright Fellowship (1951), a Guggenheim Fellowship (1957), and an award from the National Institute of Arts and Letters (1968). He is a three-time winner of the ASCAP-Deems Taylor Award; in 1998 he was chosen Composer of the Year by Musical America. The Atlanta Symphony recording of the String Symphony, Sunday Morning, and Eagles received a Grammy Award for Outstanding Orchestral Recording in 1989. From 2000 to 2003 he served as President of the American Academy of Arts and Letters. In 2003 he received ASCAP's Lifetime Achievement Award, and in January 2004 the French government named him Chevalier of the Order of Arts and Letters.

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.

John Nasukaluk Clare is comfortable behind a microphone, streaming video or playing violin. A former broadcaster for NPR, John has previously worked with Voice of America, the Canadian Broadcast Corporation and stations in Texas, Kansas, Nevada, California, and Pennsylvania. In 2005, Clare earned the Deems Taylor Award from ASCAP for radio broadcasting, citing his work on 20/20 Hearing. Having performed with famed tenors Luciano Pavarotti and Andrea Bocelli, John has worked with the Mozart Festival Texas, Mid Texas Symphony, Nevada Chamber Symphony, Shreveport Symphony, Abilene Philharmonic and Wichita Symphony Orchestra.