Ned Rorem was born on October 23, 1923 in Richmond, Indiana, USA. He is a composer, known for Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider (1994), Jack Mitchell: My Life Is Black and White (2006) and For the Whales (1989).
All teaching is hype, so I do it partly for the money. Three-fourths for the money, and one-fourth because I'm fairly good at the mysterious process of what it is. You can really teach anything in the world in the performing arts except the making of it, because I can make anybody, any beginner, into a fairly decent pianist with a little bit of technique. They might not play with what used to be called 'feeling', but they can get the right notes. With composing you can't start from scratch. You have to take the person who is presented as a composer and he has to have written something so you can tell him what's wrong with it.
2
People ask where music is going because they are anxious about where music is, which indicates an anxiety about virtually everything in our century. But it's also indicative of the arts. The arts, therefore, are not a stabilizer. They have been in the past. There is no reason that I, as a composer, should know the answer to that question any more than anyone else. I don't think about the future. I think about myself. I am interested in my own posterity, and I'm always surprised when friends of mine - intelligent people and even artists - say they don't care.
3
Music doesn't mean anything literally: people hear what you tell them to hear. If you took 'La Mer' of Debussy and told a listener who had never heard of it, 'This represents three times of day in the city of Paris - the morning in the slaughter-houses, noon at the market, and evening at the cafes of Montmartre', your listener will hear that forever more, and he will never hear the sea.
4
One never becomes a master of one's craft, ever. Even if there were five hundred years instead of fifty to write in, there are always questions to be asked. It's not easy, but songs are not difficult for me. What's difficult for me are more abstract musical forms where I'm not guided by a pre-set form that another artist has already made - in other words, a poem.
5
The writing of prose fulfills a very different need in me than music does. I don't quite know what those needs are, but my two vocations have always overlapped to some extent. My music I had always thought of as elegant and pristine and well-tailored and circumspect - French if you will - and the prose was snotty and mean and bloody and wild, without discipline.
6
There is no one right way to play a piece, and certainly not the composer's own way. There are as many ways as there are legitimate performers. The notation of music is an extremely inexact craft, as opposed to the painting of a picture. The finished picture is there, and obviously any pair of eyes that center in on a picture will have their own concept of what the picture is.
7
The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But, oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience.
8
Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.
9
Divine fires do not blaze each day but an artist functions in their afterglow, hoping for their recurrence
10
Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.
11
[on The Breach (1970)] I've always enjoyed [Claude] Chabrol movies, but not until "La Rupture" was I struck by how dumb they are. Which is not to put them down. But they do follow formulas which aren't intelligent so much as abstract: frames fitted around an actress, always the same, his wife. Film after film features Stéphane Audran in identical situations to which she reacts identically, icy in the heat, cold-blooded before hot blood. Of all his dumb films, this is Chabrol's dumbest. Suddenly we find that Audran can't act her way out of a paper bag. Like Faye Dunaway, she is so wondrously fake, so fair of face, elegant of posture and so carefully posed, that we don't realize that she' not "interpreting", but merely moving from stance to stance like a mannequin. But I'll buy her: she's a star who does know how to walk, which American women don't (question of actioning the legs independently of the midriff, and daring to take long strides). The film is too farfetched to fear, and old-fashioned. LSD today seems so sixties.
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Fact
1
He was called "The world's best composer of art songs" by Time Magazine.
2
He's been an Officer of the French Legion of Honor since 2004.
3
He won the Pulitzer award in 1976 for his suite Air Music.
Composer
Title
Year
Status
Character
Jack Mitchell: My Life Is Black and White
2006
Documentary
Nuit américaine
2005
TV Special documentary
Ned Rorem: Word & Music
2005
Documentary
For the Whales
1989
TV Movie documentary
Thanks
Title
Year
Status
Character
Nothing Left Unsaid: Gloria Vanderbilt & Anderson Cooper
2016
Documentary the producers wish to thank
Flicker
2008
Documentary special thanks
Self
Title
Year
Status
Character
Jack Mitchell: My Life Is Black and White
2006
Documentary
Himself
Great Conversations in Music
2005
TV Series
Composer
Sleep in a Nest of Flames
2001
Documentary
Himself
Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider
1994
Documentary
Himself - Composer
Known for movies
Paul Bowles: The Complete Outsider (1994) as Himself - Composer
Jack Mitchell: My Life Is Black and White (2006) as Composer
$3 Million
