Partition (2010, 20 min.)

October 27, 2015

2024 program note The text for Partition comes from a 1996 conversation between Palestinian-American scholar Edward Said and the Jewish-Argentinian conductor Daniel Barenboim, included in their book Parallels and Paradoxes. Speaking about the dehumanizing effects of postcolonial rule, Said says: “[T]he legacy of empires. In the case of the British, whenever they were forced to leave a place, they divided it up. It happened in Palestine. It happened in Cyprus. It happened in Ireland... It’s like someone telling you, ‘Okay, the way to learn a piece of music is to divide it into tinier and tinier units, and then suddenly you can put it all together.’ It doesn’t work that way. When you divide something up, it’s not so easy to put it all back together.”

I have always been interested in the way music can reframe political speech, or unlock curiosities around it that our understanding of language alone may curtail. I love this text by Said because it literally invites music into a conversation about borders, identity conflict, and the right to self-determination. How can music (the respect and fluidity required to make it, the collaboration that is generated, the ineffability of the whole) model something different?

As is true when this piece was written, the Palestinian people in the West Bank and Gaza are living in a state of occupation and blockade, subjected to arbitrary detention and ill-treatment, land and property seizure, severe restrictions on freedom of movement, and limited access to health care, food and clean water. These dehumanizing conditions are made possible by, and enforced through, partition.

Two additional movements (not a part of this performance) set the texts of street maps — street names and addresses — of New Haven, Connecticut. One question this juxtaposition was meant to pose to the audience and musicians who premiered the piece: What artificial borders do we draw in our own minds through and around the places we live?

Partition

ensemble large chorus with orchestra (3.2.3.3, 3.4.3.0, timp, 3 perc, 8.8.6.5.3)
duration 20 minutes
commissioned by Yale Glee Club
written fall 2010
premiere April 2011, Carnegie Hall, New York; Yale Glee Club and Yale Symphony, Jeffrey Douma, conductor
additional performances November 2015, Northwestern University Choir and Orchestra, Donald Nally, conductor
text from two sources: Edward Said, Parallels and Paradoxes; names of streets and businesses on a three mile stretch of road in New Haven, CT
publisher Unsettlement Music

Purchase Score and Rent Performance Materials from Unsettlement Muisc

listen live recording by the Yale Glee Club and Yale Symphony Orchestra (Jeffrey Douma, conductor)

WORKS

LARGE WORKS WITH VOICES

Farming (2023, 60 min.)
24 voices, 6 instruments
Place (2018/2020, 80 min.)
6 voices, 18 instruments
In Your Mouth/Dorothea (2019)
voice and ensemble; voice and piano
Sound from the Bench (2014/2017, 40 min.)
mixed choir with 2 electric guitars and percussion
Coloring Book (2015, 30 min.)
vocal octet
The Source (2014, 65 min.)
7 instruments, 4 voices
Partition (2010, 20 min.)
mixed choir with full orchestra
Katrina Ballads (2007, 60 min.)
11 instruments, 5 voices

ORCHESTRA

In Thrall (2019, 15 min.)
wind ensemble
Brass Tacks (2018, 6 min.)
large orchestra
Miami in Movements (2017, 35 min.)
large orchestra with video
Dispatches (2015, 18 min.)
large orchestra
Respirator (2015, 13 min.)
chamber orchestra
Stem (2013, 25 min.)
large orchestra
Law of Mosaics (2012, 30 min.)
string orchestra
Erasure Scherzo (2012, 6 min.)
large orchestra
Word for Word (2011, 10 min.)
large orchestra
Shizz (2010/2017, 4 min.)
versions for large orchestra and chamber orchestra
Build a Room (2010, 20 min.)
concerto for trumpet and orchestra
Patriot (2007, 9 min.)
large orchestra

SOLO WORKS

Lobby Music (2021, 7 min.)
solo cello, with electronics
Inheritance (2021, 5 min.)
solo piano
The Luminous Road (2020, 2 min.)
solo piccolo
Distance Canon (2020, 3 min.)
solo violin
Another National Anthem (2019, 5 min.)
solo piano
DaVZ23BzMH0 (2016, 7 min.)
solo cello, with electronics
Parlor Diplomacy (2011, 20 min.)
solo piano
Nobody's (2010, 4 min.)
solo violin or viola

CHAMBER MUSIC
(2-5 instruments)

Exposure (2017, 18 min.)
string quartet
To Be the Thing (2017, 10 min.)
voice, electric guitar and percussion, with live electronics
The Answer to the Question That Wings Ask (2016, 11 min.)
string quartet and narrator
Furtive Movements (2013, 14 min.)
cello and percussion
Interlude for Fingers (2013, 4 min.)
two vibraphones
Candy (2011, 8 min.)
electric guitar quartet
Thaw (2009, 12 min.)
percussion quartet
Ghostspace (2009, 8 min.)
mixed quartet (accordion, electric guitar, piano, drums)
Vessels (2008, 10 min.)
trio (violin, viola, piano)
Crib Dweller (2007, 8 min.)
mixed quintet (bass clarinet, elec. guitar, trumpet, trombone, horn)
23 (2005, 8 min.)
mixed quintet (flute, horn, elec. guitar, piano, drums)
Warning Song (2006, 7 min.)
voice and cello, with electronics
One of Us, One of Them (2005, 8 min.)
piano and percussion
Forcefield (2004, 5 min.)
viola and vibraphone

MEDIUM TO LARGE ENSEMBLE MUSIC
(6-16 instruments)

To Be Whole Is To Be Part (2021, 7 min.)
14 musicians
Authority (2019, 30 min.)
10 musicians
Time is forever dividing itself toward innumerable futures [Speed is Pure] (2019, 40 min.)
for Pam Tanowitz Dance 4 horns, electric guitar, voice with live processing
One Like (2016, 7 min.)
14 musicians
For the Love of Charles Mingus (2016, 9 min.)
6 violins
Baby [an argument] (2016, 11 min.)
10 musicians
By-By Huey (2014, 10 min.)
sextet (fl, bcl, vln, vc, pno, perc)
"The Cage" Variations (2014, 20 min.)
6 instruments (fl, cl/bcl, vln, vc, pno, perc) with baritone solo
Crispy Gentlemen (2012, 15 min.)
7 instruments (fl/picc, cl/bcl, vln, vla, vc, pno, perc)
But I Voted for Shirley Chisholm (2012, 8 min.)
11 instruments+tape
Randos (2012, 8 min.)
7 instruments (L'Histoire septet)
Cutest Little Arbitrage (2011, 12 min.)
6 instruments (2 sax, trombone + rhythm section)
Is it Dirty (2010, 8 min.)
16 instruments with 2 singers
versions for 10 instruments and 6 instruments
Eyelid Margin (2009, 12 min.)
10 instruments (brass quintet + 5 double-reeds)
Snowball (2008, 6 min.)
8 instruments (bcl, tpt, tbn, vln, acc, egtr, pno, dr)
version for 7 instruments (bcl, bn, tpt, tbn, vln, db, perc)
Illuminating the Maze (2008/2016, 15 min.)
6 instruments (tpt, hn, tbn, egtr, pno, dr)
version for 11 instruments
Music from "Body Soldiers" (2008, 10 min.)
5 instruments + singer
Cordavi and Fig (2007, 8 min.)
13 instruments
Antiphon (2003, 8 min.)
9 instruments (3 cl, bcl, 3 tpt, tbn, pno)

CHORAL MUSIC

Texting With Your Dad in the Anthropocene (2019, 12 min.)
Animals (2018, 9 min.)
Fervor (2018, 3 min.)
What it might say (2016, 5 min.)
Coloring Book (2015, 30 min.)
Consent (2014, 7 min.)
Ripple (2012, 10 min.)
Privilege (2009, 14 min.)
Mass for St. Mary’s (2008, 10 min.)

Music for youth choir:
The Definition of Crisis (2020, 2-5 min.)
Room for Something (2011, 8 min.)
Away (2010, 6 min.)
Because (2006, 6 min.)
Murder on the Road in Alabama (2003, 6 min.)

SONG AND SOLO VOICE

Freefucked (2022)
voice and solo cello, with vocal processing and fixed electronics
Translation: Two Cigar Butts (2021)
two singers with electronics (optional piano and/or bass)
In Your Mouth/Dorothea (2019)
voice and ensemble; voice and piano
To Be the Thing (2017, 10 min.)
voice, electric guitar and percussion, with live electronics
Intimacy and Resistance (2010, 5 min.)
voice and piano
Charleston Songbook (2008, 20 min.)
voice and piano w/ lead sheets
I Remember (2007, 8 min.)
for three sopranos, or one soprano with electronics
I Carry Your Heart (2007, 5 min.)
voice and piano
Warning Song (2006, 7 min.)
voice and cello, with electronics

COLLABORATIVE WORKS

We Are Radios (2018)
Miami in Movements (2017)
The Answer to the Question That Wings Ask (2016,)
Hand Eye (2015)
New Dances for the League of David (2014)
You're Causing Quite a Disturbance (2013)
R WE WHO R WE (2013)
Histories (2012)

Consent (2014, 7 min.)

October 27, 2015

Consent

ensemble 16 voices (SSSSAAAATTTTBBBB)
duration 7 minutes
written May 2014
commissioned by Yale Choral Artists (Jeffrey Douma, director)
premiere June 2014, Int'l Festival of Arts and Ideas, New Haven, CT
publisher Unsettlement Music
recording Sound from the Bench (Cantaloupe Music, 2017)

purchase scores from Unsettlement Music

text culled by Ted Hearne, from the following sources:
love letters I wrote in 2006
love letters my father wrote in 1962

The Catholic Rite of Marriage
Traditional Jewish Ketubah (Wedding contract)

text messages by Trent Mays and Lucas Herrington,
used as evidence in the Steubenville Rape Trial, 2013

note

"The purpose of these untranslated and mystical utterances was to sidestep the Devil and to reach God directly."
- Teju Cole, in an essay about Loquebantur Variis Linguis and the
tradition of "speaking in tongues."

"There is a gestalt that orders things together, and if you pull back further, there's another order there; the things are arranged they are for some reason, it might not be a rational reason, but there is a reason."
- David Byrne, regarding his album with Talking Heads, Speaking in Tongues

I originally wrote Consent to be paired with a performance of the remarkably beautiful motet Loquebantur Variis Linguis by Thomas Tallis, in which the composer sets the text "the apostles spoke in different tongues."

The above ideas — that to communicate with the holy spirit one had to bypass language entirely, that the structure and meaning of language is inextricably linked to the power structures and hierarchies that created it —set me on a journey to explore language that might have a duplicitous role in my own life.

The text for Consent is a juxtaposition of passages from five different sources: love letters I wrote in 2002, love letters my father wrote in 1962, the Catholic Rite of Marriage, the Traditional Jewish Ketubah (wedding contract), and text messages by high-school students Trent Mays and Lucas Herrington that were used as evidence in the infamous Stuebenville Rape Trial in 2013. I set these words in order to explore my personal relationship to gender inequality and our connection to language that justifies sexual violence.

text:
i want you
i want to

i want you
i want to

I do.

I was thinking penetrating thoughts about you
It will be good, we can do it, and we need it.

It can be taken from me - even from the shirt on my back.

I was thinking penetrating thoughts about you
It will be good, we can do it, and we need it
I miss you too, in a heart-aching kind of way.

All of it shall be mortgageable and bound as security -
It can be taken from me - even from the shirt on my back.

I do.
I just took care of your daughter.

* * *

Declare your consent
The missing you hurts
You’ll be in it soon
What a way to feel
Who gives this woman

* * *

i want you
i want to

                  All of it shall be mortgageable -
                                    I just took care of your daughter
                  and bound as security -
                                    she said you could take a picture

i want you
i want to

                                    I just took care of your daughter and made sure she was safe
                                    she was so in love with me that night
                  I ask you to state your intentions

                  All of it shall be mortgageable and bound as security -
                  it can be taken from me, even from the shirt on my back -
                  during my lifetime and after this lifetime,
                  this day and forever.

                                    I just took care of your daughter and made sure she was safe
                                    she said you could take a picture
                                    she looks dead lmao

* * *
I do.

I was thinking penetrating thoughts about you
It will be good, we can do it, and we need it.
I miss you too, in a heart-aching kind of way
I’m really looking forward to adding to it

                  All of it can be mortgageable and bound as security -
                  it can be taken from me - even from the shirt on my back -
                  during my lifetime and after this lifetime
                  this day and forever

                                    How have you been holding out on me with that picture for so long?
                                    she said you could take a picture
                                    oh i am looking at all my pictures of you

You don’t even want to know what I’m imagining you doing right now
she was so in love with me that night
Declare your consent before God

I just took care of your daughter when she was drunk

* * *

                                    This original amount, I accept upon myself and my heirs after me -
                                    It can be paid from the best part of my property and possessions
                                    that I own under all the heavens.
                                    All of it shall be mortgageable and bound as security -
                                    it can be taken from me - even from the shirt on my back -
                                    during my lifetime and after this lifetime -
                                    from this day and forever.

                  even from the shirt on my back
                  she said you could take a picture
                  I refuse to get excited

Will you accept children lovingly from God?
Declare your consent before God and the church.

I felt knowing what was right
she looks dead lmao
i just took care of your daughter

but i also know we are equal to almost any…
she said you could take a picture

Who gives this woman?

WORKS

Katrina Ballads (2007, 60 min.)

October 25, 2015

KATRINA BALLADS

ensemble 5 singers (SATTB), 11 instruments (flute, clarinet, trumpet, horn, violin, viola, cello, electric guitar, electric bass guitar, piano, drums/percussion)
duration 60 minutes
written 2006-2007, revised 2008
premiere May 28, 2007, Piccolo Spoleto Festival, Charleston SC; New Music Collective/Yes is a World, Ted Hearne, conductor
publisher Unsettlement Music
recording Katrina Ballads, New Amsterdam Records (2010)

additional performances
Katrina Ballads ensemble, Ted Hearne, conductor:
Fine Arts Building, Chicago, Illinois, January 2008
Greenwich Music House, New York, NY, March 2008
Trinity Lutheran Church, New Haven, CT, March 2008
(le) Poisson Rouge, New York, NY, August 2010
Hobby Center, Houston, TX, August 2010

New York City opera; Mark Mandarano, conductor, May 2009

De Ereprijs; Wim Boerman, conductor,
Gaudeamus Festival, Amsterdam, September 2009

Bienen Contemporary Ensemble; Alan Pierson, conductor,
NUNC2, Northwestern University, November 2015

San Francisco Conservatory New Music Ensemble; Alan Pierson, conductor,
San Francisco, November 2016

awards
winner, 2009 Gaudeamus Prize, Amsterdam
selection, VOX 2009 competition with New York City Opera
winner, 2009 ASCAP Morton Gould Award

selected reviews
6.2.07. The Charleston Post and Courier | "A Deeply Moving Tribute"

8.25.10. The New York Times | "A Flood of Songs Washing Over The City"

8.20.10 Capital New York | "When Political Music is Good: Ted Hearne's Katrina Ballads"

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

purchase score and rent performance materials from Unsettlement Music

excerpts

WORKS

Law of Mosaics (2013, 30 min.)

October 25, 2015

"Law of Mosaics" score cover design by Emily Weidenhof — "Law of Mosaics" score cover design
by Emily Weidenhof

The Law of Mosaics: music of Ted Hearne and Andrew Norman (Crier Records, 2013) album art by Rachel Perry Welty design by Laura Grey — *The Law of Mosaics: music of Ted Hearne and Andrew Norman*
(Crier Records, 2013)
album art by Rachel Perry Welty
design by Laura Grey

stream the entire piece here, or on my bandcamp:

@afarcrymusic shreds a little Law of Mosaics before our show with @roomfulofteeth tonight at Sanders Hall in Boston pic.twitter.com/WdoSCqfPpu
— ted hearne (@hearnedogg) April 13, 2017

LAW OF MOSAICS

ensemble string orchestra (5.4.4.3.2 or greater)
duration 30 minutes
written fall 2012
written for A Far Cry
commissioned by the Barlow Endowment for Music Composition
premiere May 12, 2013, The Gardner Museum, Boston
publisher Unsettlement Music
recording The Law of Mosaics: Music of Ted Hearne and Andrew Norman, Crier Records (2014)

additional performances:
Chicago Symphony Orchestra (Chris Rountree, conductor)
Harris Theater, Chicago
Nov. 21, 2015

San Francisco Symphony
Soundbox at Davies Hall, San Francisco
April 9-10, 2015

Wild Up and The Colburn Orchestra
Zipper Hall, Los Angeles
November 2, 2014

Ensemble LPR
le Poisson Rouge, New York
May 28, 2014

Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group
Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles
April 17, 2018

purchase score / rent performance materials from Unsettlement Music

notes
"Thomas Jefferson went through the New Testament and removed all the miracles, leaving only the teachings."

"Meaning is a matter of adjacent data."

"The law of mosaics: how to deal with parts in the absence of wholes."

These passages, along with many others, are appropriated from a variety of sources and arranged by David Shields into his 2010 book, Reality Hunger: A Manifesto. It is a patchwork treatise on art and digital culture, and is an inspiration for Law of Mosaics - a new 30-minute piece for A Far Cry.

The musical material from the first movement, Excerpts from the middle of something, is lush and climactic - but it is also a fish out of water, removed from surrounding music that might help it be better contextualized. It could follow a tense build-up, or precede a climax and resolution, but instead we hear it repeated and revised. As the material circles in on itself, it begins to make sense on its own, but never really "goes" anywhere.

The second movement, Palindrome for Andrew Norman, is constructed entirely of samples lifed from other pieces of music. Each plays an important or climactic role in the piece from which it is lifted, but is used here as a single building block in the construction of a symmetrical (and rather arbitrary) formal structure: the palindrome. Each sample is altered from its original composition in some way: it may appear backwards, or revoiced, or as a canon with itself, but an element of its essential character is always preserved. Andrew Norman is a contemporary composer from New York whose 2010 string trio The Companion Guide to Rome is heard among the many snippets of source material in this movement.

In some way, the rich history of works written for the string orchestra informs and influences every performance by every individual string orchestra active today, whether they choose to perform those works or not. Climactic moments from "Adagio for Strings" and "The Four Seasons," slowed down and layered on top of one another explores what can happen when two "staples" of the repertoire (likely to be found on a Best Classical Hits CD) are stretched out and mashed up.

The fourth movement, Beats, is derived from a song written by Philip White and Ted Hearne as part of their collaboration vocal/electronics duo R WE W WHO R WE. The explosive palette of White’s mixer feedback is used as inspiration for pushing the sonic and timbral limitations of the string orchestra.

Climactic moments from movement three, three times as slow as before is simply a reframing of music you have already heard.

The warp and woof refers to the lengthwise (warp) and crosswise (woof) threads that together create the texture and foundation of a woven fabric. It is a fitting end for a piece that imagines the framing of musical content to be as integral to the structure of a work as the way that content is framed.

WORKS

Dispatches (2015, 16 min.)

October 25, 2015

Dispatches

ensemble full orchestra
duration 16 minutes
written fall 2014
commissioned by San Francisco Symphony and New World Symphony
premiere January 2015, Miami, FL, New World Center
September 2015, San Francisco, CA, Davies Hall
Christian Reif, conductor
publisher Unsettlement Music
recording coming soon

purchase score and rent performance materials from Unsettlement Music

notes Sometimes I feel like I’m a stranger in a strange land when I visit an orchestra. The air at an orchestral concert is rarefied, culturally and sonically removed from so much of the music I hear every day. These five short Dispatches are a response to this removal—my official reports from a distant location.

Each movement of Dispatches takes music I first heard in a much different setting, filters it through my own musical language, and turns it into a short work for orchestra. Each movement is derived from strongly melodic source material, though for most of the piece only fragments of melodies peek through. I wanted to find a way to “hear” the distance between the music’s original context and an orchestral one.

Dispatches opens with obsessive reiterations of one isolated moment from Stevie Wonder’s “If It’s Magic,” a song I heard Stevie himself perform movingly on the Songs in the Key of Life tour. Many colors of the orchestra are spliced and shuffled in rapid succession, though none are capable of recreating the magic of that singular moment. From here the music launches into a neo-soul ballad inspired by the simple and elegant keyboard voicings of Erykah Badu. In this second movement, both the melody and rhythmic pulse are created through the subtraction of notes and instruments, one at a time, from every chord.

In the central movement, the cello section gradually undergoes a strange metamorphosis: one by one, each member “prepares” their instrument by sticking a wine cork in between the second and third strings. This transforms the sound of their simple melodies into something distorted and brash when bowed, mysterious and gong-like when plucked. The electric guitar's music is transformational in nature too, as triadic harmonies gradually become overtaken by feedback and amp noise.

The fourth movement ("wheezing; industrial") folds these cello and guitar techniques into a relentlessly pulsing rhythm and explores the full spectrum between noise and pitch. This music is, more than anything, inspired by the fact that we are sitting politely in a room with 50+ individuals who have the capacity to join forces to create a giant sound monster.

The final movement paints the dense overlay of voices in the city with superimposed fragments of docile melodic progressions, added and subtracted from the composite texture at regular intervals.

Throughout the piece, two amplified instruments (electric guitar and electric bass guitar) act as timbral remnants of a distant world, unable to fully assimilate with their classical classmates, prone to noisy interruptions that seem to have been lost in translation.—

WORKS

New Dances for the League of David (2015)

October 25, 2015

The pianist David Kaplan commissioned 16 composers to write small pieces, acting as excursions and interludes, to be interspersed between movements of Robert Schumann's imaginative piano suite Davidsbündlertänze.

My contribution is a 3-minute ditty which calls for David to take a hands-on approach with the piano strings themselves. Other composers on the project include Timo Andres, Caroline Shaw, Gabriel Kahane, Marcos Balter, Andrew Norman, Hannah Lash, Sam Adams, Martin Bresnick, Augusta Reed Thomas....

David premiered the entire night at Poisson Rouge in New York in March 2015, and has been touring it around the country ever since. More info on this project here.

WORKS

Coloring Book (2015, 30 min.)

September 19, 2015

The Source (2014, 65 min.)

September 19, 2015

The Source

ensemble 4 singers (SATB) with live electronics, 7 instruments (violin, viola, cello, electric guitar, electric bass, drums/percussion, keyboard/sampler)
duration 65 minutes
libretto Mark Doten
commissioned by Beth Morrison Projects, Judy and Allen Freedman, Justus and Helen Schlichting
premiere October 22-25, 2014, BAM Next Wave Festival (Daniel Fish, director)
publisher Unsettlement Music
recording The Source, New Amsterdam Records (2015)

PURCHASE SCORE from Unsettlement Music

Mellissa Hughes sings in The Source, BAM Next Wave Festival 2014 — Mellissa Hughes sings in *The Source*, BAM Next Wave Festival 2014

notes The Source is a modern-day oratorio, and a patchwork of songs based on American primary-source texts. The subject is Chelsea Manning, the US Army Private who infamously leaked hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks in 2010.

The text, culled and arranged by librettist Mark Doten, sets Manning's words and sections of the classified material known as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary.

The music, like the text, draws from diverse sources. Auto-tuned recitatives, neo soul ballads, icy string trios and moments of cracked-out musical theater are peppered with (and sometimes structured around) samples that bridge sonic worlds.

The Source was premiered at the BAM Next Wave Festival in October 2014 - in a production by Beth Morrison, directed by Daniel Fish, with video designed by Fish and Jim Findlay - to four sold-out performances and rave reviews. (More about this production below). The Source was released as an album on New Amsterdam Records in October 2015.

“‘The Source’ prompts dinner table conversation. It offers a fresh model of how opera and musical theater can tackle contemporary issues: not with documentary realism - film and television have that covered - but with ambiguity, obliquity, and even sheer confusion.”

— Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times

Excerpt from the 2014 production of THE SOURCE at BAM Next Wave Festival in Brooklyn; directed by Daniel Fish, with video design by Jim Findlay and Daniel Fish

“[S]ome of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory—from any genre.”

— Seth Colter Walls, Pitchfork

notes on the text from librettist Mark Doten The central fact of the classified materials that Chelsea (formerly Bradley) Manning leaked is their almost ungraspable scope. They include 483,000 Army field reports from Iraq and Afghanistan and 251,000 diplomatic cables; these were released, along with video of a U.S. airstrike in Baghdad, by WikiLeaks and its media partners in 2010. The reporting at the time focused less on what the leaks revealed about America’s conduct of wars and diplomacy, than on the personalities involved.

The libretto for The Source is made from a patchwork of primary-source documents, including:

The US military documents leaked by Pfc Manning and released by WikiLeaks: these are known as the "Iraq War Logs" and "Afghan War Diary"
Internet chats between Manning and former hacker Adrian Lamo, later published by Wired.com (see below for more information)
Tweets from Lamo regarding his decision to turn in Manning
an array of questions that journalists have posed to Julian Assange
selections of interviews, radio, social media and popular music, drawn primarily from the same time period as the leaks

“And as the texts felt cut up, a la Naked Lunch, and reassembled, so did Hearne’s music sound like myriad influences exploded and roughly pasted back together, the work of a true twenty-first century polyglot.””

— Henry Stewart, Opera News

THE SOURCE - ALBUM RELEASED OCTOBER 2015
produced by Nick Tipp, Jesse Lewis and Ted Hearne
recorded by Jesse Lewis at Avatar Studios (Manhattan) and Systems Two Studios (Brooklyn)

Nathan Koci, music director
Ted Hearne, Mellissa Hughes, Samia Mounts, Isaiah Robinson, Jonathan Woody, vocalists
Courtney Orlando, violin
Anne Lanzilotti, viola
Leah Coloff, cello
Taylor Levine, electric guitar
Greg Chudzik, electric bass
Ron Wiltrout, drums

The interactive use of auto-tune in The Source was developed by Philip White
and Ted Hearne in their work as the vocal/electronics duo R WE WHO R WE.

PRODUCTION
Jesse Lewis, editing, recording engineer
Philip White, vocal processing design
Kyle Pyke, recording engineer
Tom Kennedy, engineering assistant
Nick Tipp, mastering
Ryder Bach, mix assistant
Carl Saff, mastering
Seth Gadsden, art
Laura Grey, graphic design

WORKS

Sound from the Bench (2014/2017, 40 min.)

September 19, 2015

SOUND FROM THE BENCH

ensemble SATB choir, two electric guitars, drums/percussion
commissioned by The Crossing and Volti
text Jena Osman
premiere May 16, 2014, San Francisco: Volti, Robert Geary, conductor
June 15, 2014, Philadelphia: The Crossing, Donald Nally, conductor
with Taylor Levine and James Moore, electric guitars, and Ron Wiltrout, drums
premiere new version February 2, 2017, The Gardner Museum, Boston;
February 3, 2017, National Sawdust, Brooklyn:
The Crossing, with Taylor Levine, James Moore and Ron Wiltrout
publisher Unsettlement Music
recording The Crossing (Cantaloupe Music, 2017)

Purchase score and rent performance materials from Unsettlement Music

“The piece is scored for two electric guitars and drums alongside the chorus, and the relations between the two groups — the mechanized, scarily protean sounds of the instruments on one side and the distinctly human singing on the other — turns into a deft and fertile metaphor. It helps that Hearne writes with such technical assurance and imaginative scope. The cantata ranges widely in approach, from sculptural pastiches to vast dramatic anthems to utterances of limpid tenderness (one late movement is a gentle, lovely pop song whose rhythms slowly drift out of phase.)”

— Joshua Kosman, The San Francisco Chronicle (5.19.14)

“In ‘Sound from the Bench,’ Hearne confronted big-picture issues with a huge variety of ideas bumping into each other... Two electric guitars and a percussionist resembled emergency alarms, often with a vocal obbligato that kept the piece from being merely industrial. Compelling, densely packed harmonies were served up by female voices. ”

— David Patrick Stearns, The Philadelphia Inquirer (6.18.14)

Featured as Q2's album of the week for the week of April 17, 2017

notes Sound From the Bench is a 35-minute cantata for chamber choir, two electric guitars and drums, with a libretto by Jena Osman. It was co-commissioned by Volti and The Crossing.

why these texts?
Sound From the Bench is a reaction to Jena Osman's incredible book "Corporate Relations," a collection of poems that follows the historical trajectory of corporate personhood in the United States. The five movements combine language taken from landmark Supreme Court Cases with words from ventriloquism textbooks.
I was instantly drawn to Osman's work because of its rich intertextuality: she appropriates a variety of texts from diverse sources and assembles them into a powerful bricolage. I strive toward a similar polyphony of oppositional voices and perspectives in my music, and to bring the chaotic forces of life into the work itself. It was this impulse, and the unabashedly political tone of Osman's poetry, that made me want to set some part of "Corporate Relations" to music.

why electric guitars?
Sound From the Bench is built around the tension between the human voice and electric guitar. The electric guitar can sound like literally anything. Through circuitry, programming, and analog and digital manipulation, the pitches and rhythms a guitarist plays can be utterly transformed, erasing all human touch. It speaks through an amplifier and could easily drown out any voice. These cyborg-esque qualities contrast the human voice, both in its inescapable limitations and the complex differences found in every individual vocal timbre.

what does "no mouth" mean?
No mouth is Osman's paraphrase of the central reasoning behind the majority in Bellotti v. First National Bank, the 1978 case upon which Citizens United is based: because corporations don't have a literal mouth, they cannot literally speak, therefore advertising is their only available method of communication and must be considered speech (and is entitled to First Amendment protections as such).

The phrase the very heart, also found in the second movement, is excerpted from Justice White's dissent in this case: "It has long been recognized, however, that the special status of corporations has placed them in a position to control vast amounts of economic power which may, if not regulated, dominate not only the economy but the very heart of our democracy, the electoral process."

about the third movement
The central movement sets words from the oral argument to Citizens United. My brain started firing when I realized this poem of Jena's was a literal erasure of the Supreme Court document – every phrase appeared in order, and in a position approximating the horizontal spot it appeared on the page. When I printed out the full 83-page oral argument and blacked out every phrase that Jena hadn't included, the remaining words jumped out at me and started to take on new meanings and inferences. That strange, new energy helped propel the decontextualized text into music.

The time at which the phrases appear approximate and in some way preserve the place at which they appear in the original document. The music between Osman's text, that which fills the "blank pages," sometimes includes a quote from Thomas Tallis's motet Loquebantur Variis Linguis (the text is: "The Apostles spoke in different tongues – Alleluia.") Aside from loving this music, I liked the image of our Justices as apostles.

"personhood"
What could this word even mean when it is applied to non-human things? The courts have systematically granted constitutional rights to corporations since the Civil War - we concede that a corporation can "speak" even though it has no mouth – and these rights have come at the expense of both the private citizen and the government.

a corporation is to a person as a person is to a machine

friends of the court we know them as good and bad, they too are sheep
and goats ventriloquizing the ghostly fiction

a corporation is to a body as a body is to a puppet

putting it in caricature, if there are natural persons then there are those
who are not that, buying candidates. there are those who are strong on
the ground and then weak in the air. weight shifts to the left leg while
the propaganda arm extends.
(Jena Osman, from Corporate Relations)

- program notes by Ted Hearne, with passages after Eric Howerton's review of Corporate Relations for "The Volta Blog"

listen:

Hear the whole piece on Bandcamp

WORKS

CHORAL MUSIC

Texting With Your Dad in the Anthropocene (2019, 12 min.)
Animals (2018, 9 min.)
Fervor (2018, 3 min.)
What it might say (2016, 5 min.)
Coloring Book (2015, 30 min.)
Consent (2014, 7 min.)
Ripple (2012, 10 min.)
Privilege (2009, 14 min.)
Mass for St. Mary’s (2008, 10 min.)

Music for youth choir:
The Definition of Crisis (2020, 2-5 min.)
Room for Something (2011, 8 min.)
Away (2010, 6 min.)
Because (2006, 6 min.)
Murder on the Road in Alabama (2003, 6 min.)

SONG AND SOLO VOICE