"I feel very, very, very lucky that I'm able to support myself as a composer of serious music," he says. "My income is not so much from royalties as from commissions, prizes, fellowships, and official handouts, such as the National Endowment of the Arts, and the Guggenheim Fellowship, which I now am living on." Born in Indiana and raised in Chicago, Rorem began composing music at the age of 10. He was never attracted to pop music, and today he likes it less than ever. "Inasmuch as pop music goes hand in hand with high volume, I bitterly resent it," he says. "When the Met Opera gives a concert in Central Park the same night that the Schaefer Beer Festival gives one of their concerts, they're crushed like the runt beneath the belly of a great fat sow." When a desire for more space and lower rent drove Rorem from Greenwich Village to the West Side 10 years ago, he feared that he was moving to "a big, nonartistic, bourgeois ghetto." He soon changed his mind. In _An Absolute Gift_ he makes the statement: "From 116th Street to 56th Street, the West Side contains more first-rate artists, both performers and creators, than any concentrated neighborhood since Paris in the 1920s." One of Rorem's favorite Westside businesses is Patelson's Half Price Music Shop at 160 W. 56th Street, right across from the stage door of Carnegie Hall. "It's the best music shop in America," he testifies. "They have everything or they can get it for you." All of Rorem's books carry a fair amount of philosophy. But the only principle that the artist claims to have stuck by during the entire course of his life is: "I've never sold out. I've never done what I didn't want to do. ... I've never been guided by other than my heart. And certainly not by money." ******** WESTSIDER JULIUS RUDEL Director of the New York City Opera 4-22-78 In 1943, Mayor Fiorello La Guardia made an announcement that the old Mecca Temple on West 55th Street would be converted into the City Center of Music and Drama. As a result, a new major company was born -- the New York City Opera. A young Jewish immigrant, Julius Rudel, who had fled Austria with his family not long before, immediately went to City Center in search of a job. He was hired as a rehearsal pianist, and in the years to come his talents blossomed forth in many areas. Working quietly behind the scenes, he became the Opera's indispensable Mr. Everything, who not only knew every phase of show production, but could be called on to conduct the orchestra and even take the place of a missing cast member on stage. Rudel's versatile musicianship and his personal charm did much to knit the company together.