“Do people still write letters?” asked composer Ned Rorem, reading at Barnes & Noble on the Upper West Side from the preface of his book “Wings of Friendship: Selected Letters, 1944-2003” (Shoemaker & Hoard). Drawing a comparison with email, he continued: “I, in any case, like most of my generation, born in the 1920s – and like all literate folk before that for a thousand years – still send handwritten messages in stamped envelopes. These messages will arrive days – as opposed to seconds – later.”

Mr. Rorem read a few letters, including one to Daron Hagen, who was among Mr. Rorem’s first composition students at the Curtis Institute. Amid a discussion of Proust, Mr. Rorem writes that people “don’t ever change much. They become more of what they always were. A nasty young man doesn’t suddenly, in old age, become lovable. A lovable person doesn’t suddenly, in old age, become nasty. … A person without charm cannot buy charm, no matter how rich he is, and a person with charm cannot shed it at will – even when committing murder.”

The letters offer a look at Mr. Rorem and a circle of far-flung accomplished friends, including Edmund White, Gloria Vanderbilt, Judy Collins, and expatriates Gore Vidal and Paul Bowles. His writing exhibits a keen ear for gossip, a love of friendship and good conversation, and the drive to accomplish while there is still time. As he read from the epilogue – “as I move toward (what for others is) the Final Exit.” He writes to Mr. Hagen, “Things don’t necessarily get ‘better’; indeed after fifty they get ‘worse.'”

In the audience were such friends as Ms. Collins, whose voice, Mr. Rorem once wrote, is “made of unalloyed silver,” and Ellen Adler, who he likened in a letter to Paul Bowles to the expatriate writer’s wife, Jane.

The book contains only Mr. Rorem’s letters to others, since, as he writes in the preface, letters from others to him “would involve endless permissions, refusals, payments, [and] long waits.” One audience member asked Mr. Rorem which of his correspondents’ letters were most worth reading. He said one was Frank O’Hara, who had brilliant insights on music, such as how to structure an opera libretto.

Another asked his opinion of musician Frank Zappa. Mr. Rorem said he once was on a program with him in Rome, but Zappa went on late, and Mr. Rorem left early: “I had a date.”

Theater critic John Simon, who is in Mr. Rorem’s book and has three collections of his own works coming out in September by Applause, was in the audience. He queried Mr. Rorem to what extent he wrote for the recipient or for posterity.

Mr. Rorem acknowledged that, when one begins to consider posterity, it alters the equation. But he said he writes music “for myself and one other,” adding, to audience laughter: “Unless it’s a commission piece, and then it’s for the money.”

He was asked about contemporary music. “I’m stranded in the 20th century,” he said. “Ninety-nine and forty-four-one-hundredths percent of music today is 10th-rate rock music of one sort or another. The other half of one per cent is classical.” Most of that is Beethoven and Mozart, and “one-one-hundredth of that is me and my brothers and sisters.”

Also in the audience was Living Theater co-founder Judith Malina; poet and photographer Erik LaPrade; Eileen Weiss, managing director of Same Difference Interfaith Alliance; actress Sondra Lee, who played Tiger Lily in “Peter Pan” and is writing her memoirs; writer Maggie Paley, who is among those conducting interviews for an oral biography of George Plimpton to be published by Random House, and Jim Gavin, who is writing a life of Lena Horne.

The book is like a party invitation to eavesdrop on Mr. Rorem talking to his friends.

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LOOKING AT LIVES “It was great fun seeing art history alive in the flesh,” said Stephen Haller, reflecting on the opening Thursday of “The Artist’s Gaze: Photographs by John Jonas Gruen.” Painter Larry Zox and photographer Duane Michals were among those both in attendance and on the walls of the Stephen Haller Gallery. The show runs through August 6.

The walls contain a pantheon of artistic, musical, and literary talent in black and white, taken over several decades: David Hockney looking a little like Truman Capote; Jasper Johns laughing; Paul Cadmus in profile in front of a painting of himself by Chuck Close; Roy Lichtenstein, Arthur Miller; Inge Morath; Willem de Kooning; Marisol; Eric Fischl; Frank O’Hara, and others. The Whitney Museum of Art holds more than 300 of Mr. Gruen’s portraits of artists in its collection.

Mr. Zox, an abstract painter, was born in Des Moines, Iowa, and moved to New York in 1958.

Among other highlights, Mr. Michals, who hails originally from McKeesport, Penn., photographed the 1968 Olympics for the Mexican government, and contributed photos for the Police’s “Synchronicity” album. The Paris-born Mr. Gruen studied at University of Iowa, where he met his wife, the painter Jane Wilson. Ms. Wilson, also in attendance, posed for a photograph in the show and is represented by the DC Moore Gallery.

What surprised Mr. Haller at the opening, he said, was how many young people came out.