[ Biography ]

TED HEARNE is an active composer, conductor, and performer of new music in the New York and Chicago areas. He is Artistic Director of Yes is a World, a nonprofit organization working to promote peace and social change through musical diversity and the collaboration of young artists. Since their inception in January 2002, Yes is a World has produced seven performances integrating music and text from different artistic traditions, including a production of Tony Kushner's one-act play, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, and Kiss the Speaker Wire, an exploration of protest music from America and South Africa. Yes is a World most recently produced Body Soldiers, a concert about the ways South Africans are using choral music in the fight against HIV-AIDS. 

Ted's piece Katrina Ballads was premiered to rave reviews at the 2007 Piccolo Spoleto Festival in Charleston, South Carolina. This hour-long work is scored for 5 singers and 11 instrumentalists, and sets entirely primary-source texts from the week following Hurricane Katrina, including the words of Barbara Bush, Dennis Hastert, Mary Landrieu, Kanye West, Anderson Cooper, and George W. Bush's emblematic "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job," as well as testimonies from survivors and relief workers. 2008 saw first performances of Katrina Ballads in New York and Chicago, and in May 2009, was included alongside the works of seven other composers in New York City Opera's contemporary opera series VOX 2009: Showcasing American Composers. A professional recording, produced by Lawson White, was released in August 2008 as a digital download on New Amsterdam Records, and the work will be featured at the 2009 Gaudeamus Festival in Amsterdam.

Ted was a recipient of the 2008 Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters. He was also chosen for participation in the 2008 Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, during which his work Patriot was performed on a subscription concert under the direction of Osmo Vänskä. Performances in 2009 include a new commission from Chicago’s Third Coast Percussion and the New York premiere of his work Cordavi and Fig by The Knights on the 2009 MATA Festival. Upcoming commissions include a trumpet concerto for Chris Coletti and the Hunstville Symphony, works for the Calder Quartet, Volti Choral Arts Laboratory, and the Yale Glee Club and Yale Symphony Orchestra. His band Your Bad Self debuted at The Stone in Septmber 2008, performed at the 2009 Bang on a Can Marathon and recently completed a tour to North and South Carolina.

Ted was the music director for the premiere of David Lang’s opera Anatomy Theatre in 2005 (performed by ICE), and the premiere of Michael Gordon's Lightning at our Feet as part of the 2008 Next Wave Festival at BAM. He was musical director and keyboardist for an October 2006 production of The Carbon Copy Building in Liverpool, UK, the Obie-winning opera co-composed by Michael Gordon, David Lang and Julia Wolfe and produced by Ridge Theatre. Ted is also the resident conductor of New York’s Red Light Ensemble, specializing in contemporary music. Performances have included Grisey’s Vortex Temporum, Beat Fürrer’s Gaspra, Fabien Levy’s a small treatise of love and geometry and premieres of works by many young American composers. In Fall 2009, Ted will be conducting the American premiere of Constantine Koukias's Prayer Bells with Opera IHOS, and the world premiere of a new ballet by Bryan Senti.

The choir has premiered several of his works, including Cantata: Songs of the Divided in June 2004. Performed with a select ensemble from the Chicago Youth Symphony, this twenty-minute work weaves together texts and melodies from five embattled regions around the world - Chechnya, Rwanda, Ireland, Palestine and Korea into a meditation on the struggle for home and identity. His newest commission from the CCC, Because, was performed on their 2007 Civil Rights Tour. Ted is a singer himself, having recently premiered the role of Justin Timberlake in Jacob Cooper's Timberbrit.

Ted holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and Yale School of Music, where he studied composition with Julia Wolfe, Nils Viegland, Aaron Jay Kernis, Martin Bresnick, and David Lang. Ted was the composer-in-residence of the Chicago Children's Choir from 2003-2008. He was a composition fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Institute 2004, served as adjunct faculty at Manhattan School of Music from 2004-06, and adjunct faculty at Yale School of Music fom 2008-09. Ted sings regularly with the choir of St. Mary the Virgin (New York) and has worked with ICE, TACTUS, Bang on a Can, Ridge Theatre, Newspeak, New Music Collective (Charleston), J.G. Thirlwell and Peter Schreier, among others.