11.4.10 | Time Out: Chicago | "Ted Hearne's Katrina Ballads"

3.6.08 | The New Haven Independent | "Katrina Ballads Pierce the Heart"

TURNING 150, BUT YOUTHFUL AS EVER
By Alan Kozinn, The New York Times, January 29, 2012

It has been a long time coming — about four years of raising money and renovating — but on Wednesday evening the Issue Project Room settled into its new digs in the former Board of Education building at 110 Livingston Street in downtown Brooklyn. For anyone who spent time in Issue Project’s former home, a tiny space at the Old American Can Factory, also in Brooklyn, this is a new world: the room is spacious (5,000 square feet) and rich in retro grandeur, with marble floors, columns and arches, and a high, ornate ceiling.

Though the hall is comfortably functional now, another two years of renovations are planned. Then it will be an entirely flexible space, with neither a permanent stage nor fixed seating, so that performers can use it in any of several configurations. Right now colorful, sound-absorbing panels dot the walls, and according to Ed Patuto, Issue Project’s executive director, the organization has halved the room’s natural reverberation time of about five seconds. Mr. Patuto said he would like to shave off another second or so.

But as they are, the acoustics suited the experimental works that the Wet Ink Ensemble performed at the inaugural concert, the first installment of Gaudeamus Muziekweek New York. The series is an American version of a Dutch new-music festival that has flourished since 1945. The festival, in Utrecht, does not focus particularly on Dutch music; its scope is international, and the Brooklyn edition is following suit, with a Dutch group, Ensemble MAE, joining two American ones, Wet Ink and the International Contemporary Ensemble, in programs that are global and eclectic.

That said, Wet Ink’s opening concert was devoted mostly to American works, with a piece by the Japanese composer Yoshiaki Onishi as the sole exception. All were, at heart, about morphing timbres and textures, and whether by design or by happenstance, they added up to an impressive demonstration of the space’s tolerances for dynamic breadth and clarity of projection.

In “Nucleus” Alex Mincek, the composer and saxophonist, offered a philosophical look at repetition and variation, moving between repeated (but subtly different) figures and sudden changes that retained some of the melodic DNA of the repetitions. Not surprisingly the similar phrases arrested the ear, but the quick changes in tempo, volume and density proved more memorable.

Another of the ensemble’s composer-performers, Kate Soper, sang her own “cipher,” an exotic score in which her vocal settings of text fragments from Wittgenstein, Freud, Jenny Holzer, Michael Drayton and Sara Teasdale closely matched, in timbre and gesture, a brash violin line played energetically by Joshua Modney. Sometimes Ms. Soper ran a hand along the fingerboard.

Mr. Onishi, though not a member of Wet Ink, conducted his “Départ dans ...,” a delightfully tactile score for two harps, oboe, viola and cello. At first the work’s variegated strands move at different speeds and compete for attention, but they gradually fall together to create an interlocking contrapuntal texture with the precision of a Swiss-watch mechanism.

Ted Hearne’s “Vessels,” for violin, viola and piano, creates an abstract yet alluringly visual image. The piece is in two layers, with an ethereal outer sheath built of pianissimo high-lying figures moving at different speeds and a solid inner core of more assertive themes.

The program also included Christopher Trapani’s “Passing Through, Staying Put,” a study of contrasting motion (languid lines versus rhythmically driven ones), and Richard Barrett’s “codex I,” a fascinating, semi-improvised collision of modernity and an imagined antiquity, with spacey electronic sounds as a sort of glue holding the two worlds together.

TURNING 150, BUT YOUTHFUL AS EVER
By Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times, April 12, 2011

Since its founding in 1861, the Yale Glee Club has become one of the best collegiate singing ensembles, and one of the most adventurous. This is the kind of glee club that has been conducted by Krzysztof Penderecki; it is to the television show "Glee" approximately what the Metropolitan Opera's National Council Auditions are to "American Idol."

On Friday the group celebrated its 150th anniversary with an exciting, beautifully sung concert at Carnegie Hall. Its director, Jeffrey Douma, didn't settle for an evening of chestnuts: the program consisted almost entirely of recent works written for the ensemble. From Dominick Argento's sensitive "Dover Beach Revisited" and James MacMillan's heartrending "Nemo Te Condemnavit" to Michael Gilbertson's eloquent "Weep You No More" and Robert Vuichard's exuberant "Zephyr Rounds," the group sang with clarity, rhythmic precision and passion.

Ted Hearne's thoughtful "Partition," first performed two weeks ago, focuses on Yale's uneasy relationship with the diverse city of New Haven. Shimmering, seething orchestral textures underlie fragments of Edward Said's writings on separation and reconciliation and long lists of businesses passed as you drive through New Haven to the university. (The progression from "Libreria Cristiano" to "Bikram Yoga" tells the story.) The piece ends with choral lines falling in and out of harmony, punctuated by beats in the double basses that finally settle into unison.

Accompanied by the excellent Yale Symphony Orchestra, the ensemble closed the concert with Vaughan Williams's antiwar cantata "Dona Nobis Pacem." Walt Whitman's Civil War poetry, which forms the heart of the piece, was being written just as Yale's glee club was formed, and the group's powerful performance did justice to a long tradition of excellence and experimentation.

Concert Review: 21c LIEDERABEND
By Steve Smith, The New York Times, April 8, 2011

“I feel like at a real 19th-century Liederabend there would be more flirtation between the performers and audience,” the singer and pianist Gabriel Kahane said during the opening program of 21c Liederabend on Thursday evening. He affected the tremulous tone of a cagey suitor: “What are you doing later tonight?”

Mr. Kahane’s brief assignation offered a moment of pop-inspired directness during a long, ambitious evening of contemporary art song and opera, part of a three-night series produced by VisionIntoArt, Beth Morrison Projects and Opera on Tap.

Theo Bleckmann reprised selections from Phil Kline’s “Zippo Songs” in luminous new arrangements, played elegantly by the pianist Timothy Andres and the American Contemporary Music Ensemble. A versatile, enchanting artist, Mr. Bleckmann added his own mesmerizing songs and participated in chattering ensembles by Julia Wolfe from the 1999 Bang on a Can opera “The Carbon Copy Building.”

Russell Platt wrangled iconic poetry in “Two Whitman Panels” with stately decorum and unruly chromatic lines. Matt Marks treated sexual candor both sardonically and tenderly in “I [XX],” emphasizing the dramatic flair of the soprano Mellissa Hughes.

In a resourceful, astonishingly beautiful Wilfred Owen setting by Gregory Spears, Amelia Watkins, a soprano, and Anthony Roth Costanzo, a countertenor, intertwined in languorous flights. Ted Hearne’s “Is It Dirty” evoked urban roil with jazzy motifs in raucous collision.

Paola Prestini’s elaborate “Aging Magician,” a premiere based on an earnest Jonathan Safran Foer text, forged an enigmatic détente among Rinde Eckert’s potent delivery, Mr. Kahane’s soulful singing, moist narration by Melvin van Peebles, a clattering musical-junk sculpture by Mark Stewart and more.

YALE-ITES PROMISE A 'GLEE'-FUL EXPERIENCE AT CARNEGIE HALL CONCERT
By Anneleise Cooper, The Columbia Spectator, April 7, 2011

Though once merely evocative of mirth, today the word “glee” seems almost inextricably linked to music—in particular to teen crooning, thanks to the eponymous TV show and its weekly dose of pop tunes. Glee clubs weren’t always belting Journey, though: Their inception dates back centuries—or, in the case of the Yale Glee Club, exactly 150 years. The group will celebrate its milestone with a special performance this Friday, April 8 at Carnegie Hall (881 Seventh Ave., at 57th Street).

Originating in England in the 1700s, the term “glee club” initially denoted a men’s society that performed short, lighthearted songs called “glees.” By the mid-19th century, the tradition made its way to American universities—first Harvard, then Michigan, then Yale—and continued to develop from there, through various iterations and styles, into its current co-ed choir format.

Though the Yale Glee Club is certainly proud of its history, this upcoming performance is not retrospective. “The focus of the Carnegie concert, actually, is new music,” Jeffrey Douma, director of the club since 2003, said. “I thought it would be interesting if this concert looked more towards the future, and also recognized the glee club’s historic role as a catalyst for new choral music.”

Just as Marshall Bartholomew innovated the choral arrangement of folk tunes as the club’s director from 1921 to 1953, Douma hopes to showcase the Club’s originality with the premiere of “Partition,” a contemporary piece he commissioned from Yale School of Music alum Ted Hearne. “I asked him to compose something that wasn’t necessarily about the Glee Club specifically, but that recognized the power of music to draw people together,” Douma said. “But I really left it up to him to decide what that might look like.”

Hearne chose to focus on a conversation between Edward Said and conductor Daniel Barenboim, specifically with regards to Said’s assertion that “when you divide something up, it’s not so easy to put it all back together.” The quotation can apply to a broad scope, from the British Empire to musical composition, and Hearne recognized a resonance with Yale’s socioeconomically stratified home New Haven, a town in which, as Hearne said, “different classes are very sharply divided—there are partitions.”

Though the inspiration is political, Hearne intends his piece to be more journalistic than message driven. For example, two of its movements consist entirely of the names of businesses that line the walk through New Haven toward the Yale campus.

Listed in order, these locations are meant to invite listeners—and, specifically, the club members themselves—to recognize New Haven’s geographic segregation in a way that is easy to overlook. “This is your city. Take responsibility for it or don’t, but notice it,” Hearne said. “I think the choir gets that, which is extremely gratifying.”

Douma interpreted a further significance, noting that these movements make manifest the “artificial boundaries and barriers between people, even though we live right next door to each other.”

Still, beyond this theme of separation, Hearne hoped to create a celebration of the unifying power of song. “Making music together, and even more specifically making vocal music together, connects people in an immediate and direct way because our voices are very personal,” Douma said, noting that he has attended multiple weddings of former Glee Club compatriots.
Hearne agreed: “I grew up in choirs, and I found that to be a very community-driven experience.”

As such, he said, “there are no solos in my piece—it’s very much about the interaction.” One movement finds the choir split in two, forming the word “easy” with section each saying half—the one literally unable to complete its message without the other.

Though perhaps without the TV show’s celebrity pop, this Glee performance seeks to provide contemporary relevance, while also showcasing the Yale Glee Club’s rich history of connection and innovation.

IT'S YALE GLEE CLUB'S YEAR TO LOOK BACK, AND AHEAD
By Kathryn Shattuck, The New York Times, April 7, 2011

They came in bow ties and crimson gowns, spry of step or aided by walkers, their college memories more or less intact. On Feb. 12, nearly 650 members of the Yale Glee Club, past and present, poured into Woolsey Hall on the university's campus in New Haven with a singular purpose: to celebrate the ensemble's 150th anniversary. And naturally, to sing.

Sing they did, from the stage and the balconies: the full-throated men's alumni chorus with its boyish 93-year-old soloist, Stowe Phelps, and yodelers from the class of '62; the mixed alumni chorus, 450 strong in rafter-rattling spirituals; and the 84 tender undergraduate voices of the glee club itself.

After the boola boolas died down and the rivalry dimmed ("We'll leave poor Harvard behind so far, they won't want to play us anymore"), after the last white handkerchief — waved high to the strains of "Bright College Years," the unofficial alma mater — was tucked away, the choristers wedged themselves at long tables in the cavernous Commons, their reminiscences interrupted by outbursts of glee club favorites. Some were certain they heard the ghosts of alumni like
Cole Porter, Charles Ives and Vincent Price singing along.

Harvard can breathe easy on Friday when the Yale Glee Club performs at Carnegie Hall in a concert intentionally devoid of old school standards. Intended instead to highlight the ensemble's contemporary role in collegiate choral music, the program will feature Vaughan Williams's "Dona Nobis Pacem" and works by Dominick Argento, James MacMillan, Robert Vuichard and Michael Gilbertson, commissioned by the glee club's current director, Jeffrey Douma.

"This 150th-anniversary year has been primarily about looking back," Mr. Douma said, "but I wanted there to be one event that really looked to the future."

Ted Hearne's "Partition" will receive its New York premiere, accompanied by the Yale Symphony Orchestra. It was based on a text by Edward Said "in which he discusses music's power to transcend boundaries that we otherwise wouldn't be able to cross," said Mr. Hearne, who earned a master's degree in composition. It explores the relationship between Yale students and greater New Haven, a city he called "as studied in segregation as it is segregated."

"There is a certain kind of academic focus on these issues that, even while aggrieving the socioeconomic divisions within a city, nonetheless serves to strengthen them," he wrote in the program notes for "Partition."

"Do you sing?": the question is barked out each year at the Freshman Bazaar, where students are lured into extracurricular activities, including more than a dozen choirs. But perhaps none of the others can claim the devotion of the glee club, the third-oldest such group in the nation, behind Harvard (which isn't about to let Yale forget it) and the University of Michigan.

Some loves never fade away. In 1937 Prescott Bush — the father of George H. W. Bush and the glee club alumnus Jonathan Bush, and a grandfather of George W. Bush — forged the Yale Glee Club Associates, whose official capacity is to advise the undergraduate ensemble. Other graduates loath to give up the bonhomie of the college a cappella experience formed the Yale Alumni Chorus in 1998.

"There's something really spectacular about singing together, about creating harmony," said Clay Kaufman, the associates' president. "It's similar to being on a sports team, to accomplishing something as a group that you can't do on your own."

Born in 1861 on the Yale Fence where 13 crooners serenaded passers-by, the club became an international sensation under Marshall Bartholomew, its director from 1921 to 1953. In 1928 the American collegians embarked on their first European tour, bowling over audiences with folk songs and spirituals collected and arranged by the director they called Barty.

In 1939, on the choir's fourth tour, the men sailed to and from Europe on the Queen Mary, crossing the continent on trains whose shades were drawn by soldiers in Germany so that military preparations were not visible. In Oslo, their escorts were ladies-in-waiting to the Queen of Norway; in Helsinki, they drank tea with the Finnish composer Jean Sibelius at his home.

"We were aware that Hitler was feeling ambitious and had invaded Czechoslovakia," said Mr. Phelps, the 93-year-old, but "at 21 or 22, we were not terribly concerned."

During World War II, the club's compass was pointed toward South America, thrilling Brazilians with "Away to Rio!" and inspiring the formation of a choir in La Plata, Argentina. Returning to Europe in 1949, it edited German works out of its programs after audience members found the songs too painful.

In 1969, during Fenno Heath's four-decade tenure as conductor, the club emulated the Beatles and the Rolling Stones and appeared on "The Ed Sullivan Show." That year, the university went coed and the next year, so did the group. The backlash from alumni, who were met with a sound and a repertory that were distinctly different, was enormous.

"I was not altogether overjoyed but knew it was obviously inevitable," Mr. Phelps said. "It's not that I didn't like girls. It was the opposite: I loved them. It's that I felt that a men's chorus had a particular strength, a particular resonance that was unique."

In the fall of 2003, Mr. Douma, now 39, became only the seventh director in the ensemble's history: a legacy that sometimes causes him to gulp, he said, as he walks between portraits of Mr. Bartholomew and Mr. Heath hanging on either side of his office door in Hendrie Hall.

"The glee club has always been at the vanguard of new choral music in the United States," Mr. Douma said. "We think of Barty's arrangements now as old standbys, but when they were produced, they were new and fresh."

Though he is not a composer like Mr. Heath, who turned out works like "Abraham Lincoln Walks at Midnight" and "Beat, Beat Drums!," Mr. Douma is intent on making his own imprint.

"When we've commissioned new works, that's about trying to shape what the repertoire is going to look like for collegiate choirs in the 21st century," Mr. Douma said. He's established the Emerging Composers Competition, which seeks new choral work, and the Fenno Heath Award, for new Yale songs from current students.

He has also built on a choral festival with New Haven high schools, begun by his interim predecessor, Timothy Snyder. And he has carried on the mission of the Yale Alumni Chorus in taking music to underprivileged youths in places like Brazil and the Dominican Republic.

"The alumni chorus was inspired by the glee club, but now the work of the alumni chorus is filtering back to the students," Mr. Douma said. In June the glee club will retrace much of the 1928 inaugural European tour; it will also perform with the Yale Alumni Chorus in Istanbul.

"The glee club has absolutely been the core of my undergraduate experience," said Emily Howell, the reigning president. "And of any particular memory, I would probably say the reunion was the highlight of the last four years: sharing the traditions that we still celebrate, and seeing how they've maintained the social dynamic that is just as much a part of glee club now as it was then."

Recently, Ms. Howell and a few of her fellow choristers made some resolutions. "One of them was, in 25 years to be able to afford to go to the 175th reunion," she said. "And in 50 years to be able to walk onstage for the 200th."

CD Review: Ted Hearne's Katrina Ballads
By Doyle Armbrust, Time Out Chicago, November 4, 2010

Like the Ground Zero chamber-music impromptus by Juilliard students during the September 11 rescue operations, composer Ted Hearne’s Katrina Ballads is an act of artistic empathy. Whereas the former sought simply to offer solace, Hearne’s song cycle serves as an exquisitely written, if caustic, reminder of the inert and fatuous responses by government officials in the wake of the hurricane.

Fans of Antony and the Johnsons may hear parallels to the singer’s high-frequency vibrato in mezzo-soprano Abby Fischer’s arresting “Prologue,” but with its cabaret-style vocals and politically charged libretto, Katrina Ballads resembles more of a Kurt Weill and Bertolt Brecht collaboration.

For the text, the Chicago-born composer keenly includes only direct quotes taken from national media interviews, a decision that allows then Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, First Lady Laura Bush and the President to indict themselves far more damningly than any commentary might. “Anderson Cooper and Mary Landrieu: 9.1.05” weaves a duet between the CNN interviewer’s restrained vexation and the Louisiana senator’s incomprehensible responses, underpinned by anxious eighth-notes on viola and cello. The interchange ends in an inextricable knot of piano, strings, electronics and flute every bit as baffling as the words.

Hearne’s greatest success lies in his interweaving of New Orleans brass, blues and gospel with phrases such as “FEMA” and “supplemental bill” in a manner utterly convincing and musically compelling. Amid an abundance of expertly composed numbers, a turntablist-like breakdown of George Bush’s infamous line “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heck of a job” stands out as a miniature masterpiece.

GREEN LIGHT FOR EXPERIMENTALISM: TWEAKING CONVENTIONS AND BENDING RULES
by Allan Kozinn, music critic, The New York Times, September 21, 2010

When contemporary artists tamper with time-honored masterpieces, those who object usually cite what they consider a reliably horrifying image: drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa. But as Marcel Duchamp discovered in 1919, sometimes drawing a mustache on the Mona Lisa (or a copy of it) is exactly the right thing to do, and it may be that having the right artist paint the right mustache can yield some insight about the lady with the faint smile.

The program the enterprising ensemble Red Light New Music played on Monday evening at Symphony Space was devoted largely to mustache painting. The group — part new-music band, part composers’ collective — dedicated most of the first half to Salvatore Sciarrino’s deftly iconoclastic reworking of four pieces by the Italian Renaissance composer Gesualdo. After intermission the musicians offered a freewheeling version of Mozart’s Piano Concerto No. 9 in which each movement was reconfigured by one of the composers who runs Red Light.

This program was created and performed with a sense of humor. Mr. Sciarrino’s Gesualdo fantasy, “Voci Sottovetro” (1999), begins with a galliard in which a xylophone and a bass clarinet trace the contours of the courtly dance, and includes an instrumental canzone with speedy melodies darting through a slow, melancholy chord progression. In two madrigals, “Tu m’uccidi, o crudele” and “Moro, lasso,” the vocal lines, shaped gracefully here by Sonya Knussen, a mezzo-soprano, are offset by quirkily revised accompaniments that expand on Gesualdo’s penchant for acidic harmony.

For the Mozart, the Red Light composers proposed a rule: the piano part would be left intact. As it turned out, all three arrangers bent the hands-off rule, necessarily, it seemed, because radical changes in the orchestral score invariably occasioned alterations in how the solo line was presented.

Scott Wollschleger’s version of the opening Allegro — subtitled “The Impossibility of Disappearances: ‘Under Erasure’?” — imposed silences and sudden bursts of sound on Mozart’s score. Christopher Cerrone used heavily manipulated electronics, as well as tremolando string writing, in his tweaking of the Andantino, at times setting the piano line against a heavily processed computer track instead of live strings and woodwinds.

Vincent Raikhel’s amusingly revised Rondo used electronics too, though more sparingly: a rhythmic clicking, like the sound of a phonograph needle on a worn 78-r.p.m. disc, was overlaid on the performance, which was otherwise distinguished by idiosyncratic scoring touches. An accordion, played by Nathan Koci (who also played horn in the earlier movements), participated fully in dialogues with the piano and fleetingly made the ensemble sound like an early-20th-century tearoom orchestra, and at times a vibraphone mirrored the piano writing.

egor Shevtsov, the pianist, brought a suitably Mozartean elegance to his performance. He also played the prominent piano part in a movement from a chamber concerto, a work in progress by Liam Robinson, the fourth Red Light composer-director. And the group’s percussionist, Kevin Sims, held the spotlight in Charlie Wilmoth’s “Red Light,” which opened the program. The ensemble, conducted by Ted Hearne, played the entire program with admirable energy and precision.

CD REVIEW: Ted Hearne, Katrina Ballads
by Alex V. Cook, Oxford American, September 14, 2010

Hurricane Katrina, to those who were out of the range of the wind and the water, manifested as a tempest of voices in the media. Ted Hearne's 2007 song cycle KATRINA BALLADS, re-issued on the fifth anniversary of the storm, gathers the barrage of testimonies from rooftops, as well as comments by former President Bush ("Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job") and Kanye West ("George Bush doesn't care about black people"). Hearne casts these narratives into song: West's diatribe becomes an impassioned jazz ballad that gives way to a gospel revival. Dennis Hastert's plans for reconstruction get lost in the calamitous machination of the eleven-member chamber orchestra. Hearne bangs on the "Brownie" comment like one does a coffin nail.

The endless trek depicted on "Bridge to Gretna," one of three instrumental interludes, is laid out in shuddering guitar, confused woodwinds, and the occasional scream from the strings, culminating in a ragtag, prog-rock stalemate—dense and impenetrable as the people escaping the flood upon arriving in the suburbs across the river. Collecting the din of Katrina into an easy narrative is impossible, but Hearne does an excellent job offering this artful sample of what this tragedy five years later still has to say. (New Amsterdam, 2010)

CD REVIEW: Ted Hearne, Katrina Ballads
by Noah Bonaparte Pais, Gambit (New Orleans Alternative Weekly), August 30, 2010

Katrina Ballads, a 10-song, 70-minute orchestral cycle by Ted Hearne, should come with a Surgeon General's Warning. Anyone who watched in horror as New Orleans devolved into a state of madness that first week of September 2005 — which is to say, almost everyone — will be flooded with severe emotion at Hearne's creation. For those who lived through it, this powerfully evocative piece could prove at times unbearable. Doubtless the most ambitious musical homage to the hurricane and its aftermath, it also may be the most successful. Hearne, an award-winning 27-year-old composer, debuted the work in 2007 as a stage performance for 11 players and five singers (including himself). An alternately tense and exalting melange of woodwinds, brass, keys and strings, its lyrics are drawn entirely from interview transcripts, turning each track into a nightmare flashback: A prickling opener by mezzo-soprano Abigail Fisher sets the tone, comparing the fates of New Orleans, New York and San Francisco; the most heartbreaking moment, an interpretation of Mississippian Hardy Jackson's cries on camera for his missing wife, is presented as an operatic spiritual by baritone Anthony Turner. But Hearne's most impressive accomplishment is his use of music as a sardonic commentary on government response. He makes Anderson Cooper's curiously dodgy interview with Sen. Mary Landrieu into a dramatic game of cat and mouse; repeats George W. Bush's "Heckuva job, Brownie" speech until it's a scale-slipping, comical absurdity; and sets Barbara Bush's Houston remarks to bright, biting ragtime piano. Expertly sequenced, it somehow manages personal and cultural empathy, political mockery and Hitchcockian suspense.

A FLOOD OF SONGS WASHING OVER A CITY
by Allan Kozinn, music critic, The New York Times, August 25, 2010

John Lennon used to say, during the period he was writing overtly political music, that his songs were a form of journalism. Ted Hearne, a composer who was born in 1982, two years after Lennon was killed, seemingly takes a similar view. He described his “Katrina Ballads” — an expansive song cycle about Hurricane Katrina’s devastation of New Orleans, and the government’s inadequate response — as a “somewhat journalistic piece.”

Ted Hearne conducting “Katrina Ballads” at Le Poisson Rouge on Tuesday evening. His ensemble of 11 musicians and 5 singers included Nathan Koci on the French horn.

But where Lennon saw himself as an author of editorials couched as ballads, Mr. Hearne confined his editorializing to his music. The texts of the 10 “Katrina Ballads” are drawn entirely from news reports, mostly from the week of the storm. It is in the selection of those texts, and in the way they are set and accompanied, that Mr. Hearne’s sadness and anger come through.

What he was after was not a documentary about Katrina as the people of New Orleans experienced it, but rather an inflected, interpreted record of how the rest of the country watched it unfold — that is, as the news media presented it, complete with resoundingly famous sound bites. They include President George W. Bush’s praise of Michael Brown, the director of the Federal Emergency Management Agency — “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job” — which Mr. Hearne made into the full text of an extended jazz aria, and Kanye West’s declaration that “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

To commemorate the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina — and to celebrate the release of the “Katrina Ballads” on CD (New Amsterdam) — Mr. Hearne and nearly all the musicians on the recording performed the full cycle on Tuesday evening at Le Poisson Rouge.

The contrast between the disc and the live performance was extraordinary: the fastidiously produced recording, though it delivered some of the work’s punch, left me cold. But the concert reading had a tough edge and a wildness of spirit that suited the music, and the subject.

It had an important visual element too. The four vocal soloists sat on high stools in front of a scrim, with the instrumental ensemble, conducted by Mr. Hearne, behind it. A film by Bill Morrison, using footage from New Orleans, as well as some of the television interviews Mr. Hearne set to music, was projected onto the scrim and a wall to the side of the stage.

Mr. Hearne’s Prologue uses part of a report from The Houston Chronicle about New Orleans’s vulnerability, originally published in 2001, and set as a slow blues number. René Marie sang it with a supple, evocative lilt, with the rest of the singers joining in for a staid, polyphonic rendering of the final line, “to some extent, I think we’ve been lulled to sleep.”

The melding of popular and classical styles begins immediately. The bluesy vocal line of the Prologue is underpinned by a score that seesaws between chamber scoring and rock guitar. The second ballad, “When We Awoke, It Was to That Familiar Phrase: New Orleans Dodged a Bullet,” is mostly an essay for French horn and electronics, and the two instrumental interludes take in some of the livelier elements of New Orleans jazz. “Dennis Hastert: 8.31.05,” given a dark, jazz-tinged rendering by the tenor Isaiah Robinson, is accompanied by a churning, almost Minimalist piano figure.

The work’s centerpiece is a setting of an interview conducted by an angry Anderson Cooper, the CNN anchor, with the calmly, almost robotically diplomatic Senator Mary Landrieu. It is presented first as a duet between Anthony Turner and Abigail Fischer and as a quartet when Mr. Cooper presses Ms. Landrieu to say she is angry, and at whom.

But an extended, jazzy riff built around President Bush’s “heck of a job” statement, sung with unbridled energy by Mr. Hearne, is also a clear highlight, as are Mr. Robinson’s barnstorming performance of Mr. West’s speech and Ms. Marie’s affectingly direct rendering of a long, reflective quotation from Ashley Nelson, an 18-year old resident of New Orleans.

REVIEW: Fresh perspectives in Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble season opener
by Mark Kanny, PITTSBURGH TRIBUNE-REVIEW
Monday, July 12, 2010

Fresh perspectives abounded Friday night at the Pittsburgh New Music Ensemble's first concert of it 2010 season at City Theatre, South Side.

"Petroushkates" by Joan Tower was the winning opening piece, more lyrically inspired than the group's previous performance and with keen rhythmic interplays, as well. It whets the appetite for hearing her music during the 2010-11 season when she'll be the Pittsburgh Symphony's composer of the year.

Ted Hearne's "One of Us, One of Them" was a compelling contrast of rhythms and timbre in two parts. The first contrasted piano timbres with metallic percussion, in which Hearne's use of glockenspiel and crotales was particularly delightful to the ear. Percussionist David Skidmore played on the piano strings in the second part, and benefited from Christopher McGlumphy's sensitive amplification.

"Delicate Songs" by Aaron Jay Kernis -- a trio for clarinet, violin and cello in three movements -- was intensely lyrical in the outer movement and playful in the "Patter(n) Song."

The one disappointment was David Lang's "Little Eye," which was monotonous. But the concert closed with a winner -- Thomas Albert's "Night Music."

A COMPOSER BRINGS MESSAGE OF PEACE TO LEE HIGH STUDENTS
by Pat Ammons Newcomb, The Huntsville Times, January 25, 2010

HUNTSVILLE, AL - Justin Jordan led a line of almost 60 singers through the hallways of Lee High School on a recent afternoon.

"Shosholoza, Kule Zontaba," called out the Lee junior as teachers popped their heads out of their classrooms to see what was going on.

The singers marched around the cafeteria, singing in layers of baritone, alto, tenor and soprano a song used to protest apartheid in South Africa.

An hour earlier the group had never heard the song or perhaps even of the Xhosa language in which they were singing.

Their new-found knowledge came courtesy of Ted Hearne, who was in town for the premier of his trumpet concerto for the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra's trumpetist Christopher Colletti.

While in Huntsville Hearne visited Lee, Grissom and Butler high schools to share his compositions with choral students.

"I like to teach this song orally," which is the way the South African people learn the song, Hearne told the Lee students. The traditional people "don't read music like we do. That's why I'm not passing out music."

Hearne has visited South Africa twice, including in 2006 on a Kaiser Family Fund grant with a friend, choral conductor Mollie Stone. He is the artistic director for Yes is the World, a nonprofit organization that seeks to promote peace and social change through musical collaboration.

"It's like music forms a community," Hearne said. "It builds community just by singing the social music the way it's used in South Africa."

The first song Hearne taught the Lee students translates, roughly, to mean a train coming out of a mountain tunnel into the light, just as the people would emerge from the apartheid era "into the light of a new South Africa," Hearne said.

The students first practiced the pronunciation of the words and their deep vowel sounds. Then Hearne worked with each section of singers on their parts.

"You've got to be more spiritual," he said to the basses.

When he called for a soloist, Justin's choir members pulled him out of the crowd. His role would be to lead the song, his voice crying out the words above the rest of the singers.

"That's awesome," Hearne said after a short tutorial with Justin. "You've got a great voice."

Dan Halcomb, president and CEO of the Huntsville Symphony Orchestra, sat in awe as he watched Hearne and the students work.

"This is way beyond me," he said as the students quickly picked up the music. "This is a beautiful song."

The symphony paid Hearne to write the original work for Colletti, who is a friend of Hearne's, with a grant from the Alabama State Council for the Arts. The school visits were included in his contract "because he wanted to do educational outreach" while in Alabama, Halcomb said.

At Butler and Grissom, Hearne taught some of his composition "Katrina Ballads." For that work, he used the actual words of people in the week following Hurricane Katrina's devastation of New Orleans and the coast of Mississippi.

With the Lee choral magnet students, he wanted to do the South African music, including a complex song in the Zula language.

Following the workshop, Hearne took questions from the students.

He attended Whitney Young High School in Chicago, the same magnet school Michelle Obama attended, as well as the Manhattan School of Music and the Yale University School of Music.

His mother is a singer, and she got him into his first choir when he was five. He was composing music by the age of 12.

"I wanted to create stuff," he said.

As the class ended, students hung around to ask Hearne more questions. As they slowly left the choir room, they continued to sing the music they had just learned.

"Shosholoza, Kule Kontaba," Stimela siphume, South Africa."

COMPOSER HEARNE CAPTURES KATRINA'S DESPAIR: Ripped-from-headlines work honors New Orleans
by Tara Dooley, The Houston Chronicle, August 26, 2010

In the aftermath of Hurricane Katrina, New Orleans and its residents suffered as the floods destroyed lives and property.

But for much of the rest of the country, the loss and despair of the city was experienced remotely, on television, in newspapers and on the Internet.

For composer Ted Hearne, the news and reactions came to him from across his computer.

"This has affected me more than any other event that has happened in my life, and I was a political guy before that," Hearne said in a telephone interview from his home in New York.

The reports and responses of a shocked America became inspiration and fodder for Katrina Ballads, a vocal and instrumental composition, which will be performed Saturday at the Hobby Center.

Hearne's ripped-from-the-headlines libretto features some of the more controversial utterances of the weeks following the storm. The text includes Kanye West announcing that "George Bush doesn't care about black people" on a national telethon and an exchange between television news anchor Anderson Cooper and U.S. Sen. Mary Landrieu.

The prologue features a portion of a Houston Chronicle story by reporter Eric Berger.

"It is about Americans experiencing what happened to New Orleans, and it is in honor of New Orleans," Hearne said.

Houston's Foundation for Modern Music is presenting Hearne's work as it marks the fifth anniversary of Hurricane Katrina, which hit land in southeast Louisiana on Aug. 29, 2005.

Events begin Friday with the Eclectic Cabaret!, a concert of New Orleans music styles from jazz to classical. Local performers include musicians from Divas Productions, Greenbriar Consortium and the Foundation for Modern Music.

Katrina Ballads will be presented Saturday in the Hobby Center's Zilkha Hall. Some of the proceeds from the two events will benefit music programs for children in New Orleans and Houston, said Raul Orlando Edwards, artistic director of Foundation for Modern Music.

"Since Katrina has been out of the media, people have forgotten that there is still a lot of need," Edwards said. "We wanted to bring an awareness."

Hearne, 28, started work on the piece in the months after Katrina. The first performance was in 2007 in South Carolina. In 2009, it won the Netherlands' International Gaudeamus Prize.

Recently, lighting design and a video by avant-garde filmmaker Bill Morrison were added to Katrina Ballads production. The updated version premiered Tuesday in New York.

The music is organized into 10 songs and two interludes and is performed by an ensemble of 11 instrumentalists and five singers. It draws from multiple genres found in New Orleans and includes segments inspired by jazz, gospel, blues and rock music.

The mixture pushes the boundaries of what is usually considered classical music, said Hearne, a trained singer and composer who is completing his doctorate at Yale University.

However, increasingly composers are bending the genre.

"It is a tricky issue in music today," Hearne said. "We have access to all kinds of music, and there is a sense that stylistic boundaries no longer make sense in a lot of cases."

Katrina Ballads also defies the traditional classical music standard in which "there is a reverence for really old pieces and (the sense) that the best music is eternal and the music of the gods," Hearne said.

Hearne, for one, is not losing any sleep worrying about whether Katrina Ballads will become an eternal part of the classical canon.

"That is not really the point as much, I think, as for someone who is listening and who cares to be a little challenged by music," he said. "This piece may have a completely different meaning in 20 years, and it should."

MINIMALISM AND A STYLISTIC KALEIDOSCOPE
by Allan Kozinn, music critic, The New York Times, April 1, 2009

New-music festivals are often nomadic, but the MATA Festival has wandered more widely than most, having started at the Anthology Film Archives in the East Village and moved to Chelsea and Brooklyn in recent years. Now it has settled in at Le Poisson Rouge, the Greenwich Village club that in the last year has become an important part of the new-music circuit. It is a perfect home for the festival: the club’s programming philosophy overlaps with MATA’s mission of presenting young composers who write in any style that suits them.

As a prelude to each of the festival’s four concerts, the first of which was on Tuesday evening, MATA is playing “The Hidden,” a 10-minute multimedia piece with a brash electronic score by Mike Vernusky and amusingly quirky quick-cut video images by Daniel Maldonado. The work was played twice; the second time Mr. Maldonado’s faded, stressed images imposed an almost narrative structure on it.

The concert proper was performed by the Knights, a flexible chamber orchestra conducted by Eric Jacobsen. Its opening and closing pieces, though worlds apart in texture and other surface details, were propelled by similar Minimalist engines.

Francesco Antonioni’s “Macchine Inutili” (2007) begins with a Minimalist keyboard ostinato, around which strings and winds weave increasingly assertive themes. A drummer playing a trap set periodically leaps in with syncopations, but between these episodes the ostinato remains.

Andrew Hamilton’s “Product No. 1” (2009) is also driven by repetition. It begins as a chorale, sung and played by the orchestra, then repeated, again and again, each repetition introducing subtle changes. Instrumental flourishes are added. Words are dropped, syllable by syllable. By the end of the score the chorale has morphed into a vigorous ensemble movement in the style of a Baroque concerto grosso, with a couple of comic false endings.

Mike Block’s Cello Concerto, Movement 1 (2009), in which the composer was also the soloist, had its comic moments too, mostly to do with sudden juxtapositions of styles. A jazz section winds up in a rock chord progression; Asian-accented cello melodies turn into bluegrass themes. This is a piece less about stylistic restlessness than about defiance. Who says a work has to dwell within a coherent musical universe?

Ted Hearne’s “Cordavi and Fig” (2007) was the odd work out; couched in a vigorous post-tonal style, it sounded fresh and muscular amid all this abidingly consonant music.

Also included were three chamber scores. Justin Messina’s “AM: Obama!” (2009), a duet for laptop and percussion, juxtaposes heavily processed and generally incomprehensible radio recordings from the presidential campaign with an alluringly exotic percussion line, played deftly by Joe Gramley. Exoticism in the form of an imagined antiquity propels Joe Pereira’s “Echi Dromi” (2001), a flute and percussion duet in which Alex Sopp gave a beautifully nuanced account of the exquisite flute line. And Sarah Snider contributed the angular, gracefully expansive “Thread and Fray” (2006), for viola, bassoon and percussion.

A LESSON IN THE LYRICS
by Diana Samuels, The New Orleans Times-Picayune, August 29, 2008

The musicians gathered around the TV knowing what they were about to see and hear. They had spoken many of the same words themselves, over and over during rehearsals.

But this was the first time, after a shrimp gumbo dinner in Charleston, S.C., the evening before their first performance, that they'd watched the Hurricane Katrina video clips all together, all at once.

New Orleans "looks like a lot of that place should be bulldozed, " former Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert said on the screen.

"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job, " President Bush said.

The next day, the musicians performed the "Katrina Ballads", a concert based on original media reports from Katrina and its aftermath. Ted Hearne, a 26-year-old composer from Chicago, wrote the "Katrina Ballads" in the months following the storm, hoping to create music that would make people remember the devastation and the unique media moments the hurricane created.

"I started feeling like people wanted to forget what happened and what was said, " Hearne said.

Since its premiere last spring, the show has been performed several times on the East Coast and in Chicago. Digital recordings will be released online today on New Amsterdam Record's Web site, www.newamsterdamrecords.com; plans are to eventually make it available at online music stores such as iTunes, and on CD. Hearne hopes to find the financial backing to keep the show traveling and ultimately bring it to New Orleans.

In the 70-minute performance, singers give voice to famous quotes from the storm. The music fuses different genres. One singer incorporates a country twang while warbling Barbara Bush's statement that, "So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them"; another transforms Kanye West's angry "George Bush doesn't care about black people" into a triumphant, gospel-like release.

"What I'm trying to do is push people's boundaries a bit in terms of art, " Hearne said.
Jason DeCrow / AP PhotoHearne, far left, works with his four singers, from left, Anthony Turner, Isaiah Michael Robinson, Abigail Fischer, and Allison Semmes at a rehearsal in New York.

The combination of different types of music is in part an homage to New Orleans as a musical melting pot, Hearne said. He'd visited New Orleans twice before the storm and remembered music pouring onto the sidewalks.

"Band after band, they were projecting a joy in playing music, " Hearne said. "It's hard to put a finger on what they're actually playing because they move so easily from one genre to another."

As a musician, the disregard for New Orleans' cultural richness hit Hearne hard after Katrina, he said.

"There's art everywhere, " Hearne said. "There's a spirit of making music in that city that's unlike anything I've ever seen."

Hearne's mother is a singer, and he grew up singing in the Chicago Children's Choir. He graduated this year from Yale University's master's degree program in music and currently lives in New York.

He was in New York when Katrina struck. Watching CNN anchor Anderson Cooper blast Sen. Mary Landrieu, he was awed by how the disaster dissolved the typical relationship between politicians and the media.

"There's this layer of b.s. that was totally broken down, " Hearne said.

He began writing the Katrina Ballads a couple of months after the storm, recruiting musicians he had met throughout his career to form a 17-person ensemble that includes Hearne and four other singers. Instrumentation ranges from guitar, to piano, to trumpet.

The performance is essentially chronological. An instrumental movement about the infamous phrase "New Orleans dodged a bullet" leads to Anderson Cooper, which leads to President Bush's praise of FEMA Director Michael Brown.

"It takes these moments that could have been missed, " horn player Nathan Koci said, "stopping the tape for a second and being like, 'Did you guys hear that?' "

Baritone Anthony Turner sings the desperate cries of Hardy Jackson, a Biloxi, Miss., resident who was interviewed on television after the storm. "My wife, I can't find her body, she gone, " Turner sings.

Turner's performance is about "the idea of helplessness and looking for help, " he said. "It is deep despair, and just the passion, the yearning behind it."

The performance ends with words taken from then-18-year-old Ashley Nelson, who lived in the Lafitte housing development. On the public radio show "This American Life, " she described starving as she waited for rescuers.

"She's so smart and she's so wise, " Hearne said. "The way that she succinctly calls everybody to task . . . it just totally floored me."

Hearne has focused on music with a social conscience since he was a student in New York on Sept. 11, 2001. Looking for a way to examine the tragedy through music, he started the nonprofit organization Yes is a World to bring young artists together and promote social change.

"I've always loved music, " Hearne said, but since Sept. 11, "I feel I need to use music in a way I feel like I am contributing to society."

Koci said he thinks the "Katrina Ballads" is a particularly successful example of music with a political point.

"It can get tricky when you're doing art and activism together, " he said. "Both of them can kind of get compromised."

So far, the concert has been performed mostly for other musicians, but Hearne and the other musicians hope to bring the show to broader audiences.

"We've got people that are crying, we've got people that are exuberant that someone is speaking out, " Turner said of the audiences at earlier performances. "We've got a whole range."

Hearne wanted to perform in New Orleans and Houston this year for the anniversary of the storm, but struggled to find sponsors without a high-quality recording. With today's digital release, they hope to raise enough money to bring the performance down South to the communities that might find it most powerful.

"Every time we do it, " Koci said, "we all want to do it more."

LYRICS RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES
by Christopher Arnott, Yale Alumni Magazine, May/June 2008

As the musicians tune up before the March 5 concert at New Haven's Trinity Lutheran Church, the electric guitarist playfully pretends to whack the bassist next to him with his instrument. A red-haired pianist in a corduroy jacket is reaching inside the piano, plunking and thumping the wires by hand -- as he will do moments later during the performance. On the stage are some instruments you don't often find in a small ensemble: a French horn, a vibraphone, and -- critically -- a man working the knobs of a sound board to make sure some sounds don't wash away the others.

This is a melting pot, all right. What the audience doesn't know yet is the boiling point.

Katrina Ballads is a ten-part impression, by School of Music composition student Ted Hearne, of the devastation of New Orleans and the uncomfortable social truths it uncovered. The prelude starts with vaguely connected, increasingly upset chords, toots, piano tinklings, and an ominous knocking -- all combining to create more of an imagined cultural calamity than a literal recreation of a flood. A plaintive blues refrain -- "New Orleans is sinking" -- comes into play, with the beauty and theatricality of the opening of Porgy and Bess.

In subsequent movements, the musical styles seem to come from everywhere. But the text is all derived from media coverage of New Orleans in the wake of Hurricane Katrina. An operatic baritone intones Biloxi native Hardy Jackson's distress: "My wife, I can't find her body, she gone." Anderson Cooper '89's apoplectic on-air response to Senator Mary Landrieu -- "Do you get the anger that is out here?" -- peaks with four vocalists joining in, key phrases clipped and repeated like hip-hop samples.

Then Hearne, the composer, takes the microphone: he's saved the evisceration of George W. Bush '68 for himself. Hearne turns Bush's praise of FEMA director Michael Brown ("Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job") into a punchy, jumpy bout of scat singing, with implications of madness and desperation. Then comes a sort of delusional torch song from Bush's mother, Barbara, taken from her remarks after visiting Katrina evacuees at the Astrodome: "So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." Then hip-hop activist Kanye West gets his say -- "I hate the way they portray us in the media" -- in a stark musical context completely different from his own chart-topping records.

After the full 70-minute song cycle was performed at Trinity Lutheran, three sections of the work were played the following night at that month's New Music New Haven concert at Yale's Sprague Hall. Two days later, the ensemble went to New York to perform the entire cycle at Greenwich House. Hearne is shopping a recording of the piece to labels; he hopes to have a CD released by the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in September. He also hopes to keep his band together and tour the piece while it's hot.

Hearne sees Katrina Ballads as a community-building work about collaboration and diversity. "When I wrote it," he explains, "I knew I needed a sound engineer with it. When you have string instruments playing against trumpets, it makes it more complicated, right? But New Orleans is all about different cultures, many styles of music."

KATRINA BALLADS PIERCE THE HEART
by Melinda Tuhus, New Haven Independent, March 6, 2008

Composer and singer Ted Hearne led a performance of his "Katrina Ballads" that electrified his New Haven audience and powerfully reminded them that the tragedy in the Gulf Coast is far from over. Hearne, a graduate student at the Yale School of Music, assembled a dozen musicians and four singers at Trinity Lutheran Church on Orange Street Wednesday night for his Katrina Ballads, which set to music some of the most infamous words uttered in the days immediately after Katrina struck on August 29, 2005. Hearne wrote the music, conducted it, and sang a solo of a three-minute song using just the one sentence President George Bush uttered to his FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) director at the time, Michael Brown; "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Click here to listen.
Other immortal statements included then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert's question, "How do you go about rebuilding this city? It doesn't make sense to me. It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed." Also, the short speech by Kanye West at a Katrina relief telethon that ended with the famous phrase, "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

Baritone Anthony Turner sang the shocked and shocking words of a resident of Biloxi, Mississippi that began, "My wife, I can't find her body, she gone…I held her hand tight as I could and she told me, 'You can't hold me.'"Shocking in another way was Barbara Bush's comment that the thousands who sought shelter at the Houston Astrodome were "underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them."

In the program's introduction, Hearne wrote, in part, "It is my hope that setting primary-source texts from the devastating week in 2005 when Katrina hit will help us keep this time active in our memory, challenging us to cut through the spin that followed, and bringing us closer to an understanding of the true aftermath. New Orleans has long been a musical epicenter and a real crossroads of culture. The musical influences present in Katrina Ballads are plentiful and diverse. In that sense, this work is a tribute to the life of music, and its ability to shape and inspire us."

The audience, which included many connected with the School of Music, gave the performers a standing ovation. The applause trailed off and then burst out in another long round of enthusiastic clapping and hollering. John Sipher said, "It was really powerful. I got chills through my body countless times. It's a really mature work."

A DEEPLY MOVING TRIBUTE
by Joshua Rosenblum, Spoleto Overview Critic, The Charleston Post and Courier, June 2, 2007

With "Katrina Ballads," presented by New Music Collective on the Piccolo Spotlight Concert Series, Ted Hearne has crafted a flashy, 70-minute multi-stylistic song cycle about the 2005 hurricane disaster in New Orleans, using as his texts only primary sources—i.e. things people actually said. Hearne, a sophisticated composer with a songwriter's instincts, draws on blues (naturally, in a piece about New Orleans), gospel, grunge, electronic processing, and chance music, with homages to Varese, Glass, and New York's downtown new music scene. In Hearne's capable hands, somehow it all makes sense—it's really good stuff.

Hearne's amazing quartet of four vocalists—soprano Allison Semmes, mezzo Abby Fischer, tenor Isaiah Robinson, and baritone Anthony Turner — were just as adept at crossing between so-called serious and popular styles as Hearne. Turner and Semmes brilliantly recreated Anderson Cooper's well-publicized interview with Sen. Mary Landrieu, in which Cooper blasted politicians who were busy thanking each other, while Landrieu remained maddeningly unflappable.

Robinson sounded glorious delivering then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert's tone deaf suggestion that maybe we should bulldoze the whole place—it was a rolling, rhythmic rock number, punctuated by angry chords from electric bass and guitar, and gradually submerged in instrumental chaos. To a deliberate but cheerful groove with music-hall style piano tremolos, the deft, versatile Fischer implicitly skewered Barbara Bush for her infamous remarks on how lucky the refugees were to be in the Astrodome.

Hearne, who conducted his own complex work with great skill, saved for himself an extended bravura riff on "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job," repeating the phrase obsessively and in wild, stuttering transformations while the razor sharp, eleven-piece ensemble lurched rhythmically on around him.

"Don't forget those poor folks down there," Hearne is urging us, in the best way he knows how. The audience responded with an instant standing ovation.

Album Review: Ted Hearne's Katrina Ballads
by Dave Allen, Phawker, November 12, 2010

Much to my eternal chagrin, I never visited pre-9/11 New York City. (My excuse now, as it was at the time of my first visit in 2002, is that my upbringing was at first international, in Asia, and then rural and isolated, in Maryland, some four hours from Gotham. Geography was an obstacle.) Not visiting pre-Katrina New Orleans makes more sense, especially in terms of geography, but my sense of regret was perhaps even greater when I visited the city for the first time last month. It’s likely different now in ways I cannot understand, but I know this much: New Orleans has roughly 100,000 fewer residents than it did before the storm, and the insignia of rescuers - X’s with dates, letters and other indications of triage efforts - can still be found on the outsides of homes throughout the city. In some cases, when the X’s were painted over, residents drew new over the fresh paint, though whether out of pride or remembrance I can’t say.

Before my visit, I listened extensively to Ted Hearne’s Katrina Ballads, an hour-long song cycle of contemporary-classical music inspired by the aftermath of Katrina in 2005. In its sonic inventiveness, as well as in its settings of soundbites from politicians, talking heads, and one distraught, rambling hip-hop artist, I already found it exemplary. But now, having heard the stories of people who lived through the storm, the album stands out to me even more, both in its artistry and in its treatment of its subjects. For this composition, Hearne [pictured below, right] had to overcome the words he chose to set; many of them, more than five years later, are still overly familiar. The ultimate measure of this composition’s success is how ably Hearne transforms these indelible sayings and, in a sense, redeems them through art.

I was immediately struck by how even the infamous phrases that emerged from the Katrina disaster were reanimated and revivified; long strings of words that announce doom and despair are transformed into Morse code-like patter in “Prologue: Keeping Its Head Above Water,” taken from a 2001 article in the Houston Chronicle, and in the affectingly portrayed duet based on Anderson Cooper’s interview with Senator Mary Landrieu. The urgency of many of these lines, though, is informed by New Orleans’ native musical styles; languorous blues, jitterbugging swing, and sinuous horns and woodwinds temper the anger roiling beneath many of the sung words. Hearne even wrings all the dramatic and linguistic possibilities out of “Brownie, you’re doin’ a heckuva job,” a phrase surely at or near the top of the All-Time Political Boners list. Hearne sings the line himself, over and over again, in a madcap number that pairs a manic delivery with crunchy guitars and horn blasts.

Not every song in the cycle is so sonically jam-packed, though, and it’s the slower, more meditative numbers bring to mind both the laidback ease of “The City That Care Forgot” and the pace of the government’s response and the city’s recovery. Hearne shows a sharp ear in the leaner, more spare numbers, like the fragment of “Old Man River” that leads into a laid-back lounge number that puts tinkling cocktail piano behind a languorous, blues-y setting of Barbara Bush’s off-hand racism, delivered amid the squalor of the Superdome. Mezzo-soprano Abby Fischer sings “almost everyone I talk to says ‘we’re moving to Houston’” like it’s a line from Bing Crosby and Bob Hope’s “The Road” series.

Many sounds on the album — gnarly, distorted guitars and torqued-up drum set, for example — wouldn’t sound out of place on a hard-rock or heavy-metal album. Others will sound classical to you — baritone Anthony Turner’s wide vibrato in “Hardy Jackson 8.30.05″ or the creeping, dissonant string figures like something out of Stravinsky or Schoenberg. I find the album speaks most eloquently when the genre is harder to pin down: The pain evident in “Hardy Jackson” — “My wife, I can’t find her body, she gone,” Turner sings — could come from anywhere, as could the tumbling piano behind “Dennis Hastert 9.1.05,” a setting of the speech where the former House speaker says the city looks like it should be bulldozed. What a loss it would have been if it had, though you’ll find no judgment of Hastert’s words in the music.

For all my fascination with Hearne’s sensitivity to text, I keep coming back to a purely instrumental track, “When We Awoke, It Was to That Familiar Phrase: New Orleans Had Dodged a Bullet.” It starts with stately, eloquent brass figures — a French horn, though I couldn’t identify it when I first heard it — that, through electronic manipulation, loops and turns on itself. Other instruments pile on — guitars, clarinets, a clanging cowbell — and though the French horn loop persists, it all leads to disintegration. No words are needed.

Between Katrina and my visit, of course, there’s been yet another tragedy in the Gulf Coast. I don’t yet know of plans for a “BP Ballads” album, though I’d keep an open mind if Hearne were to try to set Tony Hayward’s bafflement or Congressman Joe Barton’s toady-ish apology. For now, whether you knew New Orleans before the storm or not, there’s Katrina Ballads. It has all the humanness of this decade’s great human tragedy, and enough of the tragedy that it feels close at hand, like an X or a high-water mark on the front of a house.

MODERN HISTORY
(CD Review of Ted Hearne's Katrina Ballads)
Step Tempest, August 24, 2010

Katrina Ballads - Ted Hearne (New Amsterdam Records) - This week, New Orleans, Biloxi and other communities in the Gulf Coast area commemorate the 5th Anniversary of Hurricane Katrina. To this day, the towns and cities have been slow to recover and, when you add to that the horrific oil spill of 2010, some wonder if it will be decades and not just several more years before an sense of normalcy descends upon the region.

2 years ago this week, New Amsterdam Records issued a digital-only recording of composer/vocalist Ted Hearne's "Katrina Ballads." (my Hartford Courant review is here.) On August 31 of this year, the label releases the CD. With texts taken from television and radio interviews as well as newspaper articles, the piece served as a powerful reminder of how bad the government, local, regional and national, reacted to the catastrophe. The music combines elements of modern classical music, jazz, rock music, and opera (but no "rhythm and blues") and is a punch to the stomach of those who care for their fellow man. Setting to music President Bush's compliment to Michael Brown of FEMA "Brownie You're Doin' A Heck of a Job" is both humorous and a caustic reminder of the ineptitude that characterized the Federal Government's original reactions to the hurricane. There is a stunning orchestration of the Anderson Cooper interview with Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu; it highlights the reporter's on-the-ground visions with the politician's tiptoeing around the subject of why facilities have not been set up to deal with the dead and the dying, never mind those who are healthy yet without food, water or power. The music surrounding Cooper (whose work was stellar during the tragic days and weeks following the storm) is dark, angular and foreboding while, for Senator Landrieu, the music is sweet and harmonically rich. The "Barbara Bush" piece blends the New Orleans musical influences of Louis Moreau Gottschalk and the classical side of Randy Newman with the former First Lady's insensitive comments.

The score, orchestrated for 11 musicians and 5 vocalists, never overpowers the words, instead placing them upfront, continually in the face of the listener. The 2 instrumental "Interludes" are short yet also contain the anger, frustration and sadness that the other pieces convey. Because the images we saw during the days of late August and September 2005 are still in our minds (thanks to the work of many documentarians, including Spike Lee and, more recently, Tavis Smiley), the "Katrina Ballads" rings loud and so true. For more information on this superb work, go to www.katrinaballads.com or www.newamsterdamrecords.com

WHEN POLITICAL MUSIC IS GOOD: TED HEARNE'S KATRINA BALLADS
by Zachary Woolfe, Capital New York, August 20, 2010

It's hard to write classical music about current events. The traditional idea of serious music was that it should somehow transcend such transient concerns as politics. That notion seems ridiculous in 2010, but it hasn't made it much easier for classical music—the cachet of which has always depended on its Olympian detachment, its presentation of The Big Picture—to wade into timely, explicitly political material.

Can music create change? Can it bring people together? Perhaps more to the point, can political music be good? In the past, composers have had uneven results with it. Sometimes—as with Benjamin Britten's War Requiem—they end up creating a masterpiece. Sometimes—as with John Adams' opera The Death of Klinghoffer—they get protested. Sometimes—as with Mr. Adams' self-described "memory space" about 9/11, On the Transmigration of Souls—they're cloying and heavy-handed.

But for many members of a young generation of composers, it's a given that their works should engage social and political issues and fulfill a broader ambition than aesthetic satisfaction.

"There's a sense that everything has to be obscured so much that it's abstract," said Ted Hearne, a 28-year-old composer, in an interview at a café on the Upper West Side. "And I don't really buy that. Especially when you're really affected by something and you want to express it. We're artists and musicians living in New York, and we're very privileged to be able to do that. We're struggling for a way to make it count, in our art."

Mr. Hearne's most successful piece to date, it so happens, is a highly political work called Katrina Ballads, a new recording of which (to be released just in time for the fifth anniversary of the hurricane) will be celebrated with a performance at (Le) Poisson Rouge on Tuesday.

Katrina Ballads is a cycle of songs and instrumental pieces set to, Mr. Hearne's website says, "primary-source texts from the week following Hurricane Katrina" that include Kanye West's "George Bush doesn't care about black people" speech and a transcript of an acrimonious conversation on Anderson Cooper's show between Mr. Cooper and Louisiana Senator Mary Landrieu. The music is alternately anxious and sedate, and the texts are stretched out, bent, and repeated, giving the disorienting, dulling sensation of something seen over and over again on TV. As Mr. Hearne said, "I think it's a piece about people experiencing that shit through the media and not being there themselves."

He is very conscious of not having been there himself. As the disaster unfolded in August and September of 2005, Mr. Hearne was in New York, preparing for a semester of teaching at Manhattan School of Music. He had experimented with politically charged pieces in the past, but found himself particularly obsessed with the hurricane and its aftermath, watching the footage again and again. Kayne West's speech in particular stayed with him, and in the beginning of 2006 he set it to music, thinking it would be perfect for his friend, the singer Isaiah Robinson. The other songs accumulated throughout that year, including one set to George Bush's notorious praise of FEMA director Michael Brown—"Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job"—that became the piece's emotional center.

"The feeling of catharsis or release was really surprising to me," Mr. Hearne said about performing "Brownie" in public for the first time. "I was so angry. I don't think I realized the extent to which the anger would come out in performance. That was a real lesson for me. It was the first time I was really able to emote as a performer. I still think about that, I try to get that back, I try to remember that when I'm composing. 'Cause that was real. I felt connected to the world I was in."
The complete Katrina Ballads premiered in May 2007 at the Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina, and has had a few performances since then, at the Greenwich Music House in March 2008 and in Chicago, New Haven, and Amsterdam (where, in September 2009, it won him the Gaudeamus Composition Prize).

Beth Morrison, who produces new opera, heard the piece for the first time at New York City Opera's 2009 VOX festival. "I just fell in love with it," she said in a phone interview, comparing the scope of its concerns to David Little's Soldier Songs, which is about contemporary warfare.

"When there's a social element to the work that feels important," Ms. Morrison said, "it tends to grab me in an even deeper way."

She called Mr. Hearne soon after VOX to talk about his plans for the piece, which involved an accompanying film by Bill Morrison (not related to Beth), who works frequently with new-music composers and who, in works like Decasia, has explored the eerie beauties of aging, degrading film stock. Mr. Hearne and Mr. Morrison originally talked about making the film impressionistic and abstract, but as the project progressed, the film began to feature more and more of the footage with which Mr. Hearne was working.

"I worked with a researcher who had worked on Spike Lee's film When the Levees Broke," Mr. Morrison said in a phone interview, "and went back to the source material that Ted worked with and started culling tapes from those interviews and press clips."

Unlike most of Ms. Morrison's opera projects, this one did not have a separate director; she envisioned the directorial role as shared by the collaborators, serving herself as a kind of broker. The team shopped the project around to several venues which would have been large enough to present a fully-staged version, but funding was an issue, and they ended up going with LPR, where Mr. Morrison's film&mdashwhich is still being completed and which even Mr. Hearne hadn't yet seen in its entirety&mdashwill act as a backdrop to a concert version of the piece.

Katrina Ballads is careful not to seem too obvious or melodramatic, qualities which plague music based on current events (treacly Transmigration again comes to mind). The piece makes limited, subtle use of easy gospel or jazz-band signifiers. While this restraint is mostly admirable, it has the occasional downside of making the piece a bit arid. Trying hard not to make a broad play for our emotions, the effect can be unemotional rather than just unemotive. But this may very well may be different in performance, especially with the addition of Bill Morrison's film, which looks to be elegantly melancholy and which will likely draw new depths of emotion out of the music and performers.

"I think it can promote change, promote people feeling connected to the people they live with," said Mr. Hearne about political music like Katrina Ballads, even if that connection is as simple as coming together "to remember how sad it was." And this won't be the last politically charged Ted Hearne piece; he's currently completing a commission for the Yale Glee Club that uses Edward Said texts to explore racial dynamics in New Haven.

"I think," he said, "it can be inspiring to see art that is directly connected to something."

UN-AMERICAN
by George Grella, The Big City, August 15, 2010

There is political art, and there is art that is political. The former is art whose raison d’être is to make an argument about how society should be ordered or governed, the latter is art that has ideas and concerns beyond the political, but that has a content or context that is intrinsically political. In a blunt sense, an example of the first type is the visual propaganda of Socialist Realism, while an example of the latter is Goya’s “Disasters of War.” I’m a fan of Goya.

I’m also a fan of HBO’s new series “Treme,” and Ted Hearne’s CD Katrina Ballads , which will be released on August 31. Each is about New Orleans, the first not explicitly political but full of political argument and fury nonetheless, the second seemingly explicitly political but at it’s core a real work of art, a narrative of a disaster that most of us saw unfolding before our eyes but that is still difficult to accept.

The political idea at the heart of each work is what it means to be an American, and thus what is American and what isn’t. It’s a timely question, with a federal election coming in the fall and angry crowds and cynical figures tossing off claims here, hints there and floating “trial balloons” with hearts of burnt, compacted coal. As an American with an enduring love for this country, I always find the question easy to answer; an American is a person who embraces the values and ideas that created this country, and who accepts the responsibilities of citizenship that come with them. In terms of art, the America that is Goya can be seen in New Orleans, a city that has been a polyglot for centuries and out of which came so much of the synthesis, the originality, of this country and culture. America speaks English, French, Spanish and dialects thereof, America enjoys a drink and a party, America prays and mourns, America eats exotic spices and taps its foot to the mixed-race/culture beat of the Blues, Calypso, Spanish dances and French chansons. America is democratic, multi-racial, uninterested in the limits of blood and geography.

Un-America, though is the complete, ugly opposite. It makes absurd claims about the origins of this country in hope of spreading a pall of bland monotony across society. It ignores its own foundation in non-conformity and, under the desperately false claim of piety and moral righteousness it makes and worships idols of the most material sort; men, money, property. Its only joy is in following orders, and it resents anyone who might exercise the most basic American virtue of free-thinking, and, in a country built from the start on international immigration, both voluntary and forced, and an expansionary idea of geographic, for good and ill, it is obsessed with borders, with the purity of language and the purity of blood. It is a part of the country that we Americans accept in hopes it will join us in the true and good things, but that detests and fears us, and wishes we would go away. Except for brief moments when there is a political advantage or an easy sloganeering opportunity, it hates New York City. And it hates New Orleans.

Fortunately, Americans love New Orleans, and so does “Treme” and so does Katrina Ballads. The show will be back for another season, but the way it ended was totally satisfying and appropriate. It’s the story of a demolished city and demolished lives and the success and failure of trying to put them back together mostly against an indifferent government. Because that’s the way it happened. Katrina hit the city and the government didn’t look away, it never looked in the first place. Bush woke up the next morning and someone conveniently told him that they “dodged the bullet,” because it fit better into their imaginary view of themselves, their un-Americanness. Michael Chertoff claimed that everything was okay, because that’s what the filter of political governance allowed him to be told, Brownie did a heckuva job because to the un-Americans getting the sinecure is the same as doing the job, the personal achievement is the sole goal and responsibility. Heckuva job cashing checks and receiving benefits. Of course they never looked at New Orleans, because it is one of the quintessentially American cities.

People died, lives were disrupted, the city shambled to a halt. America looked on in shock, un-America didn’t give a shit. And yet people held on, put some of it back together, kept America alive in the city. The show shambled along in the last few minutes, wonderfully. Some of the characters, like Jeanette, did their best but didn’t have enough to overcome circumstances, some, like Creighton, could not re-dream their dreams, and imploded, some, like Sonny, were in love with a false, clichéd America, and fell apart. But others made it from one point to the next, like Batiste, Chief Lambreaux, and especially LaDonna. Batiste scraped together enough gigs to survive, Lambreaux scraped together enough of his tribe and enough will and enough family to take to the streets and keep the spark of the St. Joseph’s night parade. Lambreaux may not have enough screen time, and the tribal rituals may be unfathomable to non-natives, but he, and they, are an intrinsic feature of New Orleans, and the city needs their cultural, local uniqueness.

The very last two scenes of the season were breathtaking. As the funeral service for LaDonna’s brother, Daymo, proceeds, the narrative unobtrusively drifts back to the city the day before the hurricane hit. The combination of the character’s blithe confidence and what we have seen of the aftermath is expressively unsettling, filling in the sense of disequilibrium that many of them have inhabited during the previous episodes. We also see just what happened to Daymo, or rather, the unfortunate mistake that puts him in jail, where, once the storm hit, he was doomed. Doomed because in a country where the governing institutions were either indifferent or hostile to the citizens of New Orleans (the police not only prevented citizens from passing through and into public property but apparently murdered some as well), a young black man in jail has already so completely disappeared from America that his physical death comes as some kind of afterthought. But seeing Daymo, alive and unaware of what is going to happen to him, is eviscerating and moving. And then, the Treme neighborhood brass band ambles back home, playing “Didn’t He Ramble” and “I’ll Fly Away,” and the parade breaks up, people chatting, shaking hands, making plans for later. Life goes on, because people are going to live it, and civilization continues because Lambreaux takes his tribe into the streets, Batiste cadges gigs all over the city, and LaDonna tends bar, a place people can gather where there is literally a roof over their heads. I’m looking forward to seeing more Treme, but nothing more needs to be said. Music brings people together and makes ritual, and so civilization.

Hearne’s Katrina Ballads is political by way of context and inference. It’s a song cycle with text for all ten vocal pieces taken from the public record, things like Anderson Cooper’s contentious interview with Senator Mary Landrieu, statements citizens made to journalists, appalling displays from Barbara Bush and Dennis Hastert, and of course “heckuva job.” It’s a marvelous, deeply impressive work, full of musical skill, knowledge and an understanding of people and events that goes so far beyond the blather of politicians and pundits that one is again left to puzzle why it is that artists are not running things (and another in a series of terrific releases from New Amsterdam this year – their list of itsnotyouitsme, Matt Marks, Corey Dargel and William Brittelle CDs must be the envy of every record company). It’s also a deeply American work, not just in the superficial sense but one possible only because of the accumulated history of American music.

This is contemporary classical in a theatrical style, supporting ideas and emotions with music that is right for the words and the moment. Hearne describes it as a fusion of styles, but I think it makes more sense to call it a polyglot style, one that makes the music quintessentially American. There are elements of gospel, show music and rock, for example, but there’s no sense of pastiche, no awkward dumbing down to give this populist appeal. It’s a balancing act that many composers try and few succeed at and I admire how well Hearne accomplishes it. It can be boiled down to how he sets the words and how he chooses and selects his singers. Working with found text is hard, the elements of diction, phrase length and rhythm that make words singable are there only accidentally. He’s set them so that they sound both musical and natural, every word clear, and there’s some quality of Harry Partch in it, especially the challenging scanning of “Anderson Cooper and Mary Landrieu.” The musically radical elements of the piece are the most surprising and satisfying, a demonstration of how appealing music can be made out of all kinds of parts.

It works from the start; the first sound is the strings of a piano, strummed like in Henry Cowell’s Aeolian Harp, and then Abby Fischer sings “New Orleans is sinking,” and in that moment one can hear how well this is going to work. Along with music that uses bits of accessible styles as a point of common experience without every pandering or sounding phony, singers like Fischer balance the color and richness of their tone with a direct, clear understanding of the words they are singing. The music has a pop appeal without being pop, without vapid “cross-over” formulation, and the singers are uniformly fine; Fischer, baritone Anthony Turner, tenor Isaiah Robinson and soprano Allison Semmes express themselves unselfconsciously in the classical vocal tradition, confident of the beauty and appeal to all listeners. There’s a rigorous, even ruthless sense of craft underlying the work, with a combination of the just-the-facts selection of the texts and clear, forceful music that never editorializes or underlines the easy and the obvious. The salient example is “Brownie, You’re Doing A Heck Of A Job,” with Hearne himself handling the vocal part. The phrase is now an idiomatic expression, a way to damn laziness, incompetence and indifference with sarcastic praise, a way to remind whoever says it or hears it what that indifference wrought. Hearne sets and sings it as a riff, playing around with it like a scat-singer, the entire lyric just that phrase. It’s musically hip but one never forgets what it’s about. Instead of trying to tell us what the words mean he simply gives them to us in musical form and trusts that we’ll know. It’s the difference between political art and art itself.

Katrina Ballads is an act of bearing witness to a collective memory. It lays out what happened on a timeline and tells us how we got to “Treme,” to a demolished America. Hearne is a thinking, feeling human being, so he does have his own view of things, but he keeps intellectual and emotional directives out of sight. The act of making the piece is his main statement, and while there is a feeling of rage throughout the work, his control over his materials, his expressive power and his fluid handling of elements of style from Cowell to Partch to Bernstein, Berio, Gil Evans, Meredith Monk and Ben Johnston makes it supremely musically compelling. These are powerful, integrated songs with no hectoring or lecturing, songs that meet the listener as an equal and with sympathy. The subject has an intrinsic political context and the music cannot be free of that, but all Hearne does is remind us of what happened and what we saw and heard, each step of the way. He reminds us how incomprehensible it is, still, that the government of this country was fundamentally indifferent and uninterested in the drowning of a great American city and its people, indifferent because the leaders of that government were themselves fundamentally un-American, and he reminds us with each impassioned note that we, who care and are moved by Treme and Katrina Ballads, are Americans, and that we will, hopefully, endure. Katrina Ballads and “Treme” are great Americans.

TED HEARNE: KATRINA BALLADS
review by Mark Saleski, All About Jazz, August 13, 2010

In the late 1970's, Chanel, Inc. took a bold step in advertising for their flagship fragrance, Chanel No. 5. Employing a cool bland of arthouse elan and surreal literary images, the campaign set a new standard for advertising creativity. The Ridley Scott-directed “Share the Fantasy" ad—"I am made of blue sky and golden light...and I will feel this way forever" remained in viewers minds for years to come.

You might not think that there would be much of an intersection between a natural disaster and the world of television advertising, but hurricane Katrina managed to push the envelope of human suffering and non-entertainment surrealism. The stream of images was endless—from people stranded on rooftops to bodies floating down fully submerged streets. The stories amplified the darkness that descended over the shattered lives—certain deaths, disappearances of loved ones, houses destroyed, rising anger at the failure of plans (and the inevitable finger-pointing that followed). The sense of hopelessness and despair was overwhelming.

Observing this from afar was surreal enough. My heart went out to all involved. Not long after the incident, I read an article describing the efforts to round up people who were determined to stay in their homes, despite the unsafe conditions. One man had already lost his wife, and the rescue personnel were trying to convince him to get in their boat. The man didn't want to leave his dog behind. In the end, he did walk away from his storm-ravaged house...and his dog. Your wife? Your home? And your dog? There's almost nothing left. I'm not sure I could have stepped into that boat.

Ted Hearne's Katrina Ballads brings back all of the tragedy and all of the surrealism inherent in such an epic event. Written for an ensemble of eleven musicians (piano, horns, woodwinds, strings, electric guitar, bass, and drums) and five voices, the work uses as source material many of the words we came to identify with Katrina. With quotes from Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert, Anderson Cooper, Senator Mary Landrieu, Barbara Bush, George Bush, and Kanye West, the unhinged nature of the event is brought back into full relief. Yes, it was not easy to forget things like “Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job" (President Bush) and “George Bush doesn't care about black people" (Kanye West). I tried to forget them, but they wouldn't go away. And maybe they shouldn't.

Perhaps the most moving Katrina Ballads piece is “Hardy Jackson 8.30.05." This, from an interview on ABC Television:

My wife, I can't find her body, she gone. The house just split in half. We got up the roof and the water came and just opened up, divided. I held her hand tight as I could and she told me “you can't hold me." She said, “take care of the kids and the grandkids."

Surreal, indeed.

The musical presentation is wide-ranging and provides a wealth of commentary via sly aural asides. The opening “Prolog: Keeping Its Head Above Water" features mezzo-soprano Abby Fischer singing words from the Houston Chronicle, set to music that morphs from minimalist soundscape (the spooky piano string-rake at the start) to a kind of chamber jazz to a moving and scary vocal presentation that uses the word “lulled" (from “To some extent, I think we've been lulled to sleep") as a pivot point. Fischer completes the sentence and then the complement of voices begin to sing “lulled" using an dark, descending ostinato. Fisher repeats the entire sentence over this and the resultant harmonic collisions are stunning.

The choices of musical “density" are quite interesting. The conversation between Anderson Cooper and Mary Landrieu is presented mostly in acapella, while “Brownie, You're Doing A Heck Of A Job" reminds the ear of Philip Glass if that composer took a short step away from his signature repetition. At the less serious end of the scale is “Barbara Bush: 9.5.05," again sung by Abby Fischer and accompanied by a slightly goofy country swing. Kanye West's comments need rock, third-stream jazz, and a kind of busted Thelonius Monk vamp. They needed all of that, though I'm not sure they deserved it.

There so many intriguing moments on Katrina Ballads that it's difficult to take them all in during a single session. The first run through, lyric sheet in hand, was more than enough to bring back all of those memories, both of the actual weather event and of the successes and tragic failures to follow. Clearly, this the kind of work that will reveal more of its inner detail as time passes. It will make you remember, even if you don't want to.

Katrina Ballads debuted at Charleston's Piccolo Spoleto Festival in 2007. To commemorate Katrina's 5th anniversary, this recording will be released on August 31, 2010.

TED HEARNE: KATRINA BALLADS
review by Stephen Eddins, AllMusic / FredMeyer / Sears Entertainment, August 2010

Ted Hearne's Katrina Ballads, scored for five singers and eleven instrumentalists, uses prose fragments from the public record in the days following Hurricane Katrina's destruction of New Orleans. It's a brilliant concept that Hearne executes with sensitivity and brash indignation. The work was premiered in Charleston, SC, at the 2007 Piccolo Spoleto Festival and was the 2009 winner of the prestigious Gaudeamus International Composers Award. The songs and interludes are strongly jazz influenced and many have a driving rock beat. The musical core of the piece is Hearne's devastating setting of quotes by two members of the Bush family. George W. Bush's infamous pronouncement, "Brownie you're doin' a heck of a job," is a dazzling improvised-sounding vocal jazz solo performed by Hearne himself, in which the single phrase is fragmented and repeated maniacally for almost three minutes. The second is Barbara Bush's observations on the hurricane's refugees housed in Houston's Astrodome; she finds it "sort of scary" that they want to remain in Texas but concludes "this is working out very well for them." Hearne sets it as a bitterly ironic torch song, bluesy, and seductive. The moments when the solos blossom out into vocal ensembles are hugely effective. The interludes, mostly instrumental but some with voices, are fiercely or eerily evocative and the first, featuring horn player Nathan Koci, is simply gorgeous. In some of the songs, though, such as Anderson Cooper's confrontational interview with Senator Mary Landrieu, Kanye West's angry speech that concludes "George Bush doesn't care about black people," and a painfully vivid recollection of the tragedy by an 18-year-old survivor, the urgency of the words carries the listener along, but Hearne's settings for the most part tend to ramble and lack the musical distinctiveness that the texts demand. The work's cumulative power is impressive, but a more nuanced and musically focused setting of those texts could have made it overwhelming. The piece receives a terrific performance by the soloists and ensemble, led by the composer. The singers are all splendid, bringing a ferocious intensity and depth of feeling to the songs. The sound is clean and present, with excellent ambience. Katrina Ballads is an important and maybe even seminal work that deserves the attention of anyone interested in developments on the new music scene.

Siegfried Vs. Vox
by Karren Alenier, Scene4 Magazine, June 2009

VOX 2009 - Here is the list of the operas showcased in the order of presentation:

Katrina Ballads by Ted Hearne
Mosheh by Yoav Gal
The Rat Land by composer Gordon Beeferman and librettist Charlotte Jackson
Séance on a Wet Afternoon by Stephen Schwartz based on the novel by Mark McShane and the screenplay by Bryan Forbes
Invisible Cities by Christopher Cerrone
Armide by composer Jonathan Dawe and librettist Heather Raffo
Car Crash Opera by composers Michaela Eremiásová and Jairo Duarte-López and librettist-animator Skip Battaglia
Crescent City by composer Anne LeBaron and librettist Douglas Kearney
A Bird in Your Ear by composer David Bruce and librettist Alasdair Middleton

Of the ten works showcased, I liked Ted Hearne's Katrina Ballads best. I could literally hear the composer working the music out of the unadorned text that was often drawn from news reportage. Hearne's setting of George Bush's comment to FEMA director Michael Brown after the Katrina Hurricane ("Brownie, you did a heck of job.") best illustrates this. Baritone James Bobick deserves high praise for a stunning delivery of Hearne's extremely challenging setting based on the repetition of this text.

I also loved the bluesy opening "New Orleans [she pronounced New Orleans as n'orleans) is sinking" by mezzo Abigail Fischer. Her musical accentuation made me feel the pain again about what was going on in New Orleans during and after Katrina. Hearne created an entire musical landscape of compelling voice textures, some moving together sounded like a storm, some like keening that lead to phrases such as "I can't find her body." The close by Isaiah Robinson, a special guest tenor associated with the development of Katrina Ballads, brought in a gospel element to Hearne's jazz thread to accentuate the Katrina disaster message that "George Bush doesn't care about black people."

WHO ARE YOU ANGRY AT?
review by Isaac Butler, Buzzine, September 2008

At the beginning of Katrina Ballads, Ted Hearne’s remarkable, omnivorous musical masterpiece, a finger slides along the strings on the inside of a piano. A woman’s voice hauntingly warns us: “Nawlins… Nawlins is sinking.” The full band gradually joins in, adding keening strings and an uptempo percussion line tapped out like morse code on a high hat. The woman’s voice continues:

And its main buffer from a hurricane
The protective Mississippi River Delta
Is quickly eroding away
Leaving the historic city
Perilously closer to disaster

Wait a moment, you might be asking yourself at this point. These are lyrics? Well, yes and no. This remarkable song cycle’s libretto is taken entirely from found text surrounding the events that shook our nation three years ago.

The flooding of New Orleans is such a dense and complex moment in contemporary American history that completely unpacking it may take decades. On one level, we have the disaster itself, the raw human drama, and epic tragedy of a city underwater. On the next, you have the unspeakable way our nation treats its poor — the disaster that the hurricane both revealed and exacerbated. Then you have the second disaster of those urban poor attempting to survive in the midst of flooding and bureaucratic incompetence. Woven throughout, you have the media reporting on and becoming the story: Anderson Cooper projecting his empathy in full HD, weathermen being knocked down by Katrina’s wrath, photographs of George W. Bush observing aloof on Airforce One, and the unforgettable heckuva job that Brownie did.

Katrina Ballads provides new space for us to investigate all of the above and our feelings surrounding it, by setting the events to music. The 11 songs utilize text of both famous moments and lesser-known first-person accounts of the storm. Most haunting of these is Hardy Jackson, who lost his wife in the storm and was unable to find her body. It is one thing to read someone discussing his wife’s death; it is quite another to experience Anthony Turner singing, “I held her hand tight as I could / And she told me / You can’t hold me / You can’t hold me / She said / Take care of our kids,” as the music gradually breaks apart, leaving just his rich Baritone climbing into its upper register, the melodic equivalent of a man breaking down into tears.

Lest you think that the entire album is nothing but difficult, off-kilter harmonies, arrhythmic string arrangements, and grief, there’s a wide variety of musical and emotional experiences within Katrina Ballads. Like the city of New Orleans itself, Hearne’s songs treat music expansively, breaking down the boundaries of genre with little regard for rules or trends of music. When a song needs to switch genres, it does. When pure beauty is called for, it happens. The wordless “When We Awoke, It Was To That Familiar Phrase – New Orleans Dodged a Bullet” uses electronic looping of a French Horn track to slowly build a beautiful, haunting jazz rendition of a giant storm that is both thrilling and terrific (in the literal sense) at once. The song “Barbara Bush – 9.5.05″ hilariously renders her out-of-touch assertion that things are “working out pretty well” for Katrina refugees as a light jazz softshoe number, heightening the irony.

Two tracks stand out for their formal ambition and balls-to-the-wall power. The first is “Brownie, You’re Doing a Heck of a Job,” in which Hearne himself sings different configurations of George Bush’s inept phrase over and over again. It changes from hilarious to outrageous to ugly to angry and back, as the band punctuates with horn and percussion stabs, while the piano (played, full disclosure, by an old friend of mine) launches us briefly into more straightforward jazz territory before the whole thing wrecks itself all over again. What seems at first to be barely controlled chaos is revealed in under three minutes to be a tightly controlled mini-masterpiece. Like Bush’s statement, the song is horrifying and outrageous while remaining shot throughout with gallows of humor.

The second standout is “Kanye West – 9.2.05″ in which West’s impromptu speech — you know, the one that ended with “George Bush doesn’t care about black people” — is rendered in a tour de force that must be heard to be believed (you can hear a live excerpt here). What starts with simple, lilting piano and a monotone voice builds gradually into a huge spectacle of echoing harmonies complete with hand claps, foot stomps, and complex spiraling horn arrangements that call to mind Quincy Jones’s score for In Cold Blood and 1970s Stevie Wonder. The song is held together and kept aloft by Isaiah Robinson’s crystal clear tenor vocals, and although we’ve heard West’s indictment before, the musical recontextualizing demands that we listen in a new way.

What follows is the album’s final track, “Ashley Nelson,” a first person account of (barely) surviving the storm amidst dehydration and delirium. Taken from an episode of This American Life, Ashley Nelson’s story functions as a kind of epilogue, as it looks back on the storm and her experience in the past tense. After the catharsis of Kanye West’s outrage rendered in jubilant vocals and full band, “Ashley Nelson” also functions as a corrective, deliberately frustrating our desire to wrap up the album with a tight little bow and dismiss it. The song never settles on a groove for very long. Hearne keeps the listener off balance, never knowing quite what’s around the corner — his music mimicking Nelson’s madness as she hallucinates “water bottles” and as she tells us, “I would sit and rock and think, `is the world going to turn to hell and we all gonna burn?’” Ending with the heartbreaking — and heartbroken — question for George Bush: “What do you mean by that? He’s doing a good job?” The reeds echo the keening melody written for Nelson for a minute and then, just as suddenly as the album begins, its over.

Hearne’s denial of closure for the listener is vital to the album’s success. Katrina Ballads finishes with an open-ended question that, to this day, has never been resolved, just as the disaster of Katrina has left our society with a number of questions it doesn’t want to face. How should we treat our poor? What role should the government play in the survival of its citizens? Who should be held accountable? As we move forward with the reconstruction of New Orleans, even more questions arise. Who will benefit from the rebuilt city? Why is the Government destroying public housing? Why will we spend $85 billion dollars without blinking to save AIG while New Orleans seeks foreign aid to rebuild? Have we no decency, at long last?