Art & Creativity Quote by Ned Rorem

Rorem’s line lands like a slap at the whole cottage industry of explaining music: program notes, artist interviews, the critic’s dutiful search for “what it’s about.” Coming from a composer who lived inside sound for a century, it’s not anti-intellectual so much as anti-translation. Music resists being paraphrased because its force isn’t semantic. It doesn’t deliver information the way language does; it organizes time, sensation, expectation. Try to convert that into nouns and you end up with weather metaphors, plot summaries, or emotional fortune cookies.

The cleverness is in the double move: “the hardest…to speak of” sounds like a challenge to criticism, then Rorem undercuts the premise. It’s hard not because music is mystical, but because “meaning” is the wrong tool. He’s needling our modern habit of demanding legible content from every art object, as if a piece must carry a message to justify attention.

Context matters: Rorem wrote in an American 20th-century landscape where music was constantly forced into camps - formalism vs. expression, abstraction vs. narrative, “accessible” vs. “difficult.” His insistence that music has “no meaning to speak of” is a defense of autonomy, but also a warning: when we talk about music, we’re often talking about ourselves - our need for story, our hunger for certainty, our anxiety about ambiguity.

The subtext is almost liberating. If music isn’t “about” anything, then listening isn’t decoding. It’s presence, pattern, memory, body. Criticism still has a job, but it’s closer to describing an experience than extracting a thesis.