HHP - Liner Notes

TED HEARNE | HAZY HEART PUMP liner notes by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti For the Love of Charles Mingus (2016) Last and least is me. Mingus. I wrote the music for dancing and listening. It is true music with much and many of my meanings.

— Charles Mingus, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963) Inspired by Mingus’s album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Ted’s For the Love of Charles Mingus “imagines some echo of that artifact living and breathing under layers of distortion and interference.” Written for six violins, the work begins with a fast downward motion in all the voices, as though we are falling into a bed of sound. Beneath it, we uncover a hushed groove.

The subtitle of the second track on Black Saint is “Hearts’ Beat and Shades in Physical Embraces.” Ted writes in the score for the players to make a “hazy heart pump sound”—a low, barely pitched glissandi played with a “light and dusty” bow. This underlying rhythm references the compositional technique Mingus uses in the opening of his album. In a recent interview, Ted said: I love that opening where Mingus is really playing with the perceived downbeat. What first sounds like a simple pattern in 4 is soon recontextualized in a totally other way. So I was trying to capture that essence of rhythmic multiplicity and simultaneity, but also to fill in that frame with other sounds, sounds you wouldn’t hear in Mingus.

These “other sounds” are breathy, earthy—the sounds of touching, rubbing, stolen breaths. Ted asks for “throaty” sounds and requires the violinists to play all the way up the neck of the instrument, behind the bridge, and on various parts of the body of the instrument. The violin writing is sensuous, messy, sticky.

For this album, Miki-Sophia Cloud recorded all the violin parts. This means that these six voices are all projections of one person. When we dance with others are we projecting our own heartsound onto them?

When we interact with a person are we ever hearing their voice fully? Is the way we think of them just a reflection of what we want to hear from them? Ted writes in his program note for the work that the sounds of the piece are overheard: Like the sound of voices singing from inside a church when you’re passing on the street, or a song you’re barely picking up on a distant radio signal, you are drawn to imagine this music in a more complete form than you can actually hear. But you know it’s there.

The Answer to the Question That Wings Ask (2016) Saul Williams speaks in poetry. When I asked him about The Answer to the Question ThatWings Ask—set by Ted for string quartet and voice—Saul said, It is a pondering of questions and a birdseye view on all of those things that are running through the mind—and that societal mind. The questions surrounding identity, the questions surrounding society, the questions surrounding time. All of those questions, all of that pondering—while simultaneously being dazzled by birds, the question of The Butterfly Effect. And it has to do with kind of what I’m doing now: sitting in the park, watching this guy walk his dog . . .

Saul begins to describe his surroundings and I feel as though I am sitting on the bench next to him, listening to the resonance of his voice, stopped in time. He’s describing such basic things, and yet the way he observes, the way he leaves space for me to be in that same place of observation draws me into the world on the other end of the phone. Saul continues, “That’s the goal of the writer: to find a universal means of expression that can work in different settings, in different means of interpretation.”

Ted wrote this setting with Saul’s voice in mind, supporting it with various framings. Often the quartet reflects the iterative nature of the text. Other times a single player supports Saul’s voice by mimicking the speech rhythms, then all at once the floor drops out and the quartet hovers in a fragile sustained chord with light bow pressure as though doubting their own sound. Saul adds: At the end of the day it has to do with our ability to dance through things. This is life and life is a dance. And it’s a dance through all these wonderful and not so wonderful realities.

And I have some questions.

Furtive Movements (2015) Furtive movements is a phrase found in many reports from the New York City Police Department: it is the most commonly cited reason individuals were detained under the Stop and Frisk policy. This phrase is striking to me, because it claims to describe a person's movements but really speaks more to the expectations of the officer observing them. The phrase conveys the assumption of guilt—furtiveness—based on appearance or demeanor in a given moment.

Ted describes impetus for the title of the piece, which explores what happens when expectations meet reality. His work Furtive Movements pairs a cellist and a drummer. In it, both musicians are set up to struggle with (and sometimes confound) the role they are “supposed” to fulfill. The cello is prepared with a wine cork between the middle two strings. This preparation distorts the sound, making it sound like a gong at times, or a shrieking cymbal at others. Meanwhile, the drummer is asked to play with expressive pitch-bending, and to voice internal lines on differently tuned toms.

Ron Wiltrout—who plays on this recording and has worked on many pieces with Ted, developing a vocabulary of sounds and gestures over the past decade—says: It’s interesting for me to play my part and think about the physicality involved: the awkwardness of the simple gestures that sound complicated and the complicated gestures that sound simple—to have all of that in my mind and then hear Ted talk about the piece made sense in the physicality of the piece.

Furtive Movements demands scrutiny of the connection between physical gesture and apparent result. Who is making the sound, and how? What specific choices need to be made, and how does these choices reveal themselves in both players’ efforts? What are your assumptions of intentions?

Nobody’s (2009, Viola version 2018) Nobody’s plays with the refraction and reception of American folk music. Inspired by Fluxus musician Henry Flynt and his avant-garde approach to Appalachian fiddle playing, Nobody’s freezes a few referential patterns and gestures, stitching them into an obsessively repetitive and dizzying form.

While the version on this album is played by violist Diana Wade, the work was originally commissioned by violinist Nicholas DiEugenio. In personal correspondence, Nick wrote to me:

I commissioned Ted to write a piece for solo violin in 2009 as part of a collaboration with quilting artist Janet Stafford and the Quilts of Valor initiative at the Wounded Warrior Project in San Antonio, TX. At that time, I was interested in bringing together various threads of my own life; four of my brothers have served at various points as officers in the US military, my mother is a quilter, and I was excited about what my friend and colleague Ted Hearne might hear in the patterns, textures, and colors of Janet’s work. I’m grateful and moved to have given its premiere at the Brooke Army Medical Center alongside Ms. Stafford’s quilt.

Ted takes the idea of quilting patterns—blocks of material overlaid with details in how they are stitched together—to structure Nobody’s. Elements of bluegrass violin playing such as movement over open string drones and repeated melodic gestures are treated as blocks of material. The player is asked to stamp their feet as percussion in time with these gestures, as a quilting needle holding the patterns together.

Vessels (2008) Around the time this piece was premiered, there was a day that Ted and I took the MetroNorth train together from New Haven to New York. We were sitting on the right side of the car, the seats were red, and we huddled together doing The NewYork Times crossword puzzle. Or was it the left side of the car? And were the seats dark blue?

When Miki and I first performed Vessels, Ted wrote that he was inspired by the idea that the more we revisit a memory, the more we change it: If this is correct, it means the most potent recollections of the past are the memories that lay dormant for a long time. Their appearance to us in a flash brings us much closer to the truth of our past experiences than the comforting stories we tell ourselves over and over.

The memories that we have left alone—for whatever reason stored deep in our mind— may be the clearest representation of time passed.

Do we selectively guard particular memories in order to protect ourselves, to protect certain important events from our past? Or is it the other way around—are our personal identities constructed by romanticizing merely those past events we happened to have forgotten for a while? [This trio] imagines the uncovering of a buried memory and its role as a vessel to the past.

Harmonic trills in the violin and viola evoke the ephemeral nature of these protected memories. Through the sheen of glittering harmonics, the viola is made more ominous by detuning the lowest string and occasionally employing an octave pedal. In doing so, the performer is also in a memory game, reading pitch and having to misremember its physical placement due to the different tuning. The piano enters toward the end of the piece—a dormant voice uncovered as an active element—but its strings are almost entirely muted, single notes ringing out longingly in a field of nearly pitchless taps. Each member of the ensemble is trying to uncover something they lost. Like the collective memory of a group of old friends, the piece explores the many sides of shared experience.

Exposure (2017-2019) I. Adjacencies II. Everyone keeps me III. Overlay (for David Lang) IV. Everyone keeps me “The beautiful thing is not really attainable, it only exists in a memory.” Ted says, his voice slightly distorted over the phone. It’s taken us months to find time for this interview and now the connection is going in and out. Often the only moments we have to catch up are while he’s driving—uninterrupted time exists only in memory.

Exposure is a piece built from fragments, their overlays and adjacencies telling a story of past experiences remembered, processed, lost. In the first movement, different types of material are laid next to each other, bleed into each other and sometimes fight for space. In the third, two bits of material (drawn, as a tribute, from two pieces by my teacher David Lang) are overlaid and combined—the harmonic progression of one superimposed upon the rhythmic scheme of another. The second and fourth movements are like verses of a song.

The “beautiful” hidden song Ted references is drawn from another work: his setting of a text by the poet Dorothea Lasky. This type of self-reference is an important part of Ted’s work: the emotional content of the song has a personal meaning to Ted, and therefore the manipulation of the other parts—through juxtaposition, overlay, fragmentation, and nonpitched sounds—reframe, distort, scrawl on that unspoken text.

“Which is why the ‘beautiful music’ is never really ‘there,’” Ted adds.

While we hear remnants of the song throughout the piece, Ted never really lets us hear it in an unaltered way. Instead, its melody comes and goes too quickly to grasp onto or is forced into the frame of a sped-up and intensified scherzo, the tenderness of its push-pull drained and calcified. At the other extreme, when the quartet tries to slow down enough to hear the underlying song as in the last movement of Exposure, it is too slow, in Ted’s own words “glacial, and still out of context.” Groans from slow overpressure in the quartet distort what could have been beautiful. Or is it only “beautiful” because it’s distorted? The music exposes these conflicts of intention.

The piece ends with the hint of the dance at the beginning of the album from For the Love of Charles Mingus.

But there is nothing left to develop—the memory of the dance is just the raw “hazy heart pump sound” itself. In the words of Saul Williams, “your heartbeat is enough to dance? Dance.”