Biography

He won the Pulitzer award in 1976 for his suite Air Music.

He's been an Officer of the French Legion of Honor since 2004.

He was called "The world's best composer of art songs" by Time Magazine.

Rorem was the subject of a 2005 documentary film, Ned Rorem: Word & Music.

Miss Julie and Our Town are Rorem's only full-length operas. Our Town was first performed by the Indiana University Opera in Bloomington in 2006.

[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.

Humor is the ability to see three sides to one coin.

Divine fires do not blaze each day but an artist functions in their afterglow, hoping for their recurrence

Inspiration could be called inhaling the memory of an act never experienced.

The same piece of music alters at each hearing. But, oh, the need to repeat and repeat and repeat unchanged the sexual experience.