Ned Rorem

From Philosopedia

Rorem, Ned (23 Oct 1923 - )

Rorem is sometimes described as music’s elder statesman but also its enfant terrible. “Swords and Plowshares,” which he wrote for the Boston Symphony in 1990, has pacifism as its theme—Rorem is outspoken in his own views concerning pacifism.

For thirty-two years, Rorem lived monogamously with James Holmes (2 Apr 1939 - 7 January 1999), an organist and choir director in New York who died of cancer. Rorem believes that gay-rights groups should seek to abolish the military, not to achieve fuller representation in it.

A member of the American Academy, Rorem in 1976 won the Pulitzer prize in music. In addition to writing journals, he is best known for his vocal works such as “Air Music” (1975) and "5 Prayers for the Young} (1977).

His Paris Diary (1966) shocked many with its revelations about his and others’ sexual escapades as, for example,

• I can’t sleep with famous people. Or for that matter with rich people, or people in power, used to being the center of attention. I have been in bed with four Time covers—Lenny Bernstein, Tennessee Williams, Noel Coward, and John Cheever (included among 3,000 proportionately anonymous souls, including one woman)—and I performed out of a combination of duress and politeness.

In Setting the Score (1988), Rorem went on record as not believing in God nor in an after-life. Asked specifically about his views concerning humanism, Rorem responded to Warren Allen Smith in 1996,

• I have gone on record dozens of times in my thirteen books (and specifically in the essay, “Notes on Sacred Music” in the collection Settling the Score) that I do not believe in God, nor in an after-life. I do, however, believe in Belief, which is why I have made so many musical settings of good poetry (and prose) about God. I am a Quaker “by inheritance.” My parents converted before my birth, not for religious but for philosophical purposes, and hoped to ally themselves with a group that believed in pacifism. For better or worse I believe that all war is wrong at all times. But I never go to meetings . . . any more than to Alcoholics Anonymous meetings, the tenets of which I nonetheless observe.

To New York Times reporter Anthony Tommasini, he responded similarly:

• I don’t think life has a purpose. We invent purposes to get through life. I feel basically good, but I am surrounded by death, the deaths of friends, and friends’ mates, and every time it is unbearable. I don’t believe in God, and I know there is no afterlife. Yet I do believe in belief. I’m not moved by the belief of the Moonies, but I am by the belief of Michelangelo, King David, Paul Goodman.

(See entry for brothels.)

{GL; The New York Times, 20 January 1998; WAS, 2 November 1996}

Correspondence

Rorem is clear about his non-belief in God or an afterlife.