PLACE with Saul Williams and Patricia McGregor
Viewing entries by
Ted Hearne
I love conducting contemporary music of all styles. I was the resident conductor of New York's Red Light Ensemble for seven years, and have guest conducted with the Wet Ink Ensemble, TILT Brass, Bang on a Can and International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE), among other groups. I love working with composers and ensembles to bring new works to life, and have conducted many premieres, including American premieres of works by Beat Furrer, Michael Gordon, Tiziano Manca, David Lang and Simon Steen-Anderson.
Red Light New Music's album Barbary Coast (2015, New Focus Recordings) features a collection of works written for the group:
"Cirques" by Vincent Raikhel
"Chamber Concerto" by Liam Robinson
"The Night Mare" by Chris Cerrone
"Crispy Gentlemen" by Ted Hearne
"Brontal No. 3" by Scott Wollschleger
Red Light New Music
Erin Wight, viola
John Popham, cello
Yegor Shevstov, piano
Kevin Sims, percussion
Christa van Alstine, clarinets
Roberta Michel, flutes
Esther Noh, violin
Ted Hearne, conductor
SAN FRANCISCO CONSERVATORY NEW MUSIC ENSEMBLE
October 1, 2015
San Francisco Conservatory
Ted Hearne conductor
LJ White Step
Caroline Shaw Entr'acte
Michael Gordon Cold (American premiere)
Ted Hearne But I Voted for Shirley Chisholm
Jen Hill in memoriam my liver subtitled i hate that you're stoned all of the time subtitled Coldness And Cruelty: The Art of Masoch subtitled i have dozens of titles subtitled $1 lone star and i'm sry=
Andrew Norman Try
Read the San Francisco Examiner's skeptical review!
ABOUT THE SOURCE
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 Beth Morrison Production, directed by Daniel Fish, with video designed by Fish and Jim Findlay and vocal processing design by Philip White - 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.
Purchase THE SOURCE
released October 2015 on New Amsterdam Records
NOTE FROM LIBRETTIST MARK DOTEN
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 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.”
“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.””
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
ABOUT THE TEXT
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
EXCERPTS FROM THE LIBRETTO
The text for this movement comes from the Afghan War Diary. "Smoke when bird nears" is a phrase that appears after it has been noted that US forces have called for an air evacuation. The music for this movement uses samples from the soundtrack to Alfred Hitchcock's classic film The Birds, as well as a classic American rendition of the song Smoke gets in your eyes.
![from movement 1: [EXPLOSIVE HAZARD] This text is drawn from the Iraq War Logs and describes an incident that occurred on December 21, 2007.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55fb3df7e4b021ff7ff1079d/1444517552773-TU14BED8KQQ6FCH4GP15/image-asset.jpeg)
from movement 1: [EXPLOSIVE HAZARD]
This text is drawn from the Iraq War Logs and describes an incident that occurred on December 21, 2007.
![from movement 1: [EXPLOSIVE HAZARD] This text describes an incident on August 10, 2008 in which 2 Iraqi civilians were killed and 3 were wounded.](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55fb3df7e4b021ff7ff1079d/1444517570662-HPCZ1I76ILOT0MXNVS58/image-asset.jpeg)
from movement 1: [EXPLOSIVE HAZARD]
This text describes an incident on August 10, 2008 in which 2 Iraqi civilians were killed and 3 were wounded.
from movement 4: "s/as boy/as a boy"
This text is drawn from the internet chats between Chelsea Manning and Adrian Lamo.
![from movement 9: [smoke when bird nears]](https://images.squarespace-cdn.com/content/v1/55fb3df7e4b021ff7ff1079d/1444517611219-N5V8JISWEHME7FQM4Q1F/image-asset.jpeg)
from movement 9: [smoke when bird nears]
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, mix engineer and mastering
Ryder Bach, mix assistant
Carl Saff, mastering
Seth Gadsden, art
Laura Grey, graphic design
R WE WHO R WE is my ongoing collaboration with composer and electronic musician Philip White.
We put our first set together for Kathleen Supove's Music With a View Festival in 2011 and have been working together ever since.
Our first album R WE WHO R WE came out in 2013 on New Focus Recordings. Our second album "I Love You" was released in November 2017.
R WE WHO R WE, "I Love You"
album cover image by Seth Gadsden
"I LOVE YOU"
RELEASED NOV. 21, 2017
BANDCAMP
On our debut album, we deconstructed pop songs: Madonna’s “Material Girl”, Eminem’s “Hi My Name Is” and of course Ke$ha’s “WE R WHO WE R” (from which we cribbed our name). The album paid uneasy tribute to the way these songs offered a sense of self for the listener, while maintaining a constant push undermining each song's exploitative potential.
With that, R WE WHO R WE became a project about how we sculpt and perform our identities.
”I Love You” shifts these ideas about identity onto a fractured set of cultural narratives about relationships, love and masculinity; honing in on the inevitable collisions. In nine original songs, the duo works through disturbed desire (“Song and Dance,” “Kristin”), adolescent projections (“I Just Want U II”, “Womb”), disintegrating relationships (“Silence”, “Valentine’s”, “Cutaway”) and violence (“Two Trees”, “Firestarter”).
Philip plays his mixer at our first performance in 2011.
He never performed an R WE show sitting down again.
Our first album was released on New Focus Recordings in 2013.
"R WE WHO R WE mixes the free theft/collage style of Girl Talk with the raw noise of Merzbow. Philip White's mixer feedback, controlled through a homemade rig of circuits and lo-fi electronics, conjures the sound-world of legendary experimental musician David Tudor, but becomes something entirely new when fused with the production aesthetics of pop pioneer Dr. Luke. Ted Hearne's voice - inflamed, athletic and powerfully stark, with the operatic drama of a latter-day Jeff Buckley, the experimentalism of Mike Patton and party chic of Ke$ha herself - does furious battle with his own auto-tune. A tribute and commentary to both classic and ephemeral artists of the pop landscape, R WE WHO R WE uses pop music like graffiti uses public space, exploiting the tension between theft and tribute, much as collage artist John Oswald did 30 years ago with his seminal and mischievious album Plunderphonic."
From Doyle Armbrust's five star review of our first album in Time Out Chicago:
"Listening to Ted Hearne and Philip White’s R We Who R We is a bit like attempting to force the beaters of an electric hand mixer through one’s nostrils and into the brain, then flipping the power on…and this is an unequivocally good thing. Using Top 40 hits like Ke$ha’s “We R Who We R” and Madonna’s “Material Girl” as a point of departure, vocal hellion Hearne and electronic conjurer White hook listeners with the familiar while hurtling through often confrontational and exceptionally potent sonic deconstructions. Other than the lyric content, almost nothing remains of the source material, offering not pop-tune covers but compositional reinventions.
Hearne, who honed his classical chops at the Manhattan and Yale Schools of Music, drags his vocal cords through their paces. “Hi Is My Name” revs up Eminem’s ubiquitous flow to breakneck speed, tearing through syllables and forcing the listener to play catch-up. On “Original Self,” an original track, it’s as if the Chicago native is attempting to argue with Auto-Tune, railing against its magnetism as he wails atop a chorus of dental drills. Hearne’s inventive reimaginings of the lyrics draw you in, while White’s self-described “non-linear feedback system” similarly cloaks the deliberately provocative sound world of noise music in the shiny bluster of pop production. The result is something eminently, if weirdly, danceable and utterly gripping."
Since 2010, I've collaborated with five friends and fellow composers as Sleeping Giant. (above, pictured from left: Robert Honstein, Timo Andres, Jacob Cooper, <me>, Chris Cerrone, Andrew Norman)
We've presented concerts of our music and written new collaborative works together. Sometimes our differences cause schisms, sometimes our similarities are depressing, but through everything it's still rewarding to work through musical and aesthetic ideas with your friends. Here are some of the projects we've made together:
HAND EYE
We recently premiered Hand Eye, an evening-length concert featuring new works by each of the six of us. It's a collection of responses to pieces of contemporary art in the incredible yet privately housed collection of Maxine and Stuart Frankel, who were the chief commissioners of the concert. Each of our works also features one of the six members of eighth blackbird. (My piece, By-By Huey, spotlights their ever-gutsy pianist Lisa Kaplan.) A more colorful take on the project can be gleaned from the above trailer.
Hand Eye's New York premiere took place at Carnegie Hall on January 18, 2016. Read the review.
Eighth blackbird's album Hand Eye was released in Spring 2016 on Cedille Records.
Listen to an excerpt of my piece By-By Huey:
ASH
Cellist Ashley Bathgate commissioned Sleeping Giant to compose a new solo suite. Based in varying degrees on single movements of Bach cello suites, these movements are designed to be played consecutively, on their own, or integrated with Bach. Ashley will premiere the project at le Poisson Rouge in New York in January 2016, in a concert presented by the Metropolis Ensemble.
REQUIEM
The performance portion of Sleeping Giant's partnership with the Albany Symphony, as a Music Alive residency from NewMusicUSA, kicked off with a concert the ASO marketed as Requiem Reimagined. This piece used Mozart's Requiem and Süssmayr's completion as a canvas to create an unsettling but reverential love song to the ritual of classical music. With video design by Daniel Fish and Josh Thorson projected on the stunning pipe organ of Troy Savings Bank, the Albany Symphony and singers of Albany Pro Musica gave committed and daring performances.
SONGS WITH THEO BLECKMANN
Our second project as part of NewMusicUSA's residency was an evening of vocal music with Theo Bleckmann, backed by the Albany Symphony's resident chamber ensemble Dogs of Desire.
I first worked with Theo on a tour to Liverpool of Ridge Theater's Carbon Copy Building (the first collaborative theatrical work of David Lang, Michael Gordon and Julia Wolfe). His voice is smooth but direct, and he is a musician's musician. It felt great to have him anchor a night of songs. Read the review here.
HISTORIES
Our first collaborative work was Histories, a 45-minute collection of interwoven movements based on Stravinsky's seminal 1918 septet l'Histoire du Soldat. Some of us wrote music that used l'Histoire as a canvas to scrawl on, or as samples to cut up and rearrange, while some of us accessed Stravinsky's timbral inventions only ephemerally. One of my contributions to the project, "Randos III," is posted above, as played by Brooklyn's fabulous Deviant Septet.