September 10, 2019 | Steven Swartz , Dotdotdotmusic – steven@dotdotdotmusic.net, t. 646/206-3966 Lisa Bellamore, Crescent Communications – lbellamore@gmail.com,.t. 323/500-3071
TED HEARNE: Hazy Heart Pump Oct. 25 on New Focus with Ashley Bathgate, Argus + Mivos Quartets, Saul Williams, Diana Wade, Miki-Sophia Cloud + more ALSO IN 2019/20: EXPOSURE Choreographed by Pam Tanowitz for Royal Ballet, Oct. 10 + 11 at ROH Plus new ballet for NYCB, Apr. 24 + 25
LIVE THINGS New multimedia song cycle at Walker Art Center with Daniel Fish (director) + Rachel Perry (real-time art installation), Nov. 21 + 22
PLACE West Coast premiere with LA Phil New Music Group, Mar. 24 Out on New Amsterdam with COLORING BOOK (Roomful of Teeth)
”[Hearne's music] holds up as a complex mirror image of an information-saturated, masssurveillance world, and remains staggering in its impact.” – Alex Ross, The New Yorker
For composer/singer/conductor Ted Hearne, the 2019/20 season is exceptionally fruitful,
bringing three new recordings and a series of high-profile premieres across multiple disciplines – debuts for the Royal Ballet and New York City Ballet, a multimedia song cycle titled Live Things at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, and a new production of his evening-length music-theater work Place in Los Angeles, with Hearne conducting the LA Phil New Music Group. Leading the way is Hazy Heart Pump, out Friday, October 25 on New Focus Recordings. It is Hearne’s first album of solo and chamber works, mostly for strings. The stellar lineup includes cellist Ashley Bathgate (Bang on a Can All-Stars), Argus Quartet, Mivos Quartet with poet Saul Williams, violist Diana Wade, violinist Miki-Sophia Cloud, percussionist Ron Wiltrout, and the composer himself on piano. Hazy Heart Pump was produced by Nick Tipp. For those who know Hearne primarily as a vocal composer, his restlessly inventive instrumental writing is ripe for discovery. Says Hearne, “In talking about this album, I find myself using words such as sensuous, messy, sloppy, overlaid, fragmented Romanticism, digging into the strings, the wedding of dirt/grit/grime and beauty, the opposition of reference and abstraction, the pulse you can't see but you know is there.” The evocative title comes from a playing technique he developed in collaboration with Miki-Sophia Cloud: “It’s a faint gesture, pitches and contour barely heard over the white noise created by a bow playing on a string that’s almost fully (but not entirely) deadened,” says Hearne. “[We] found this sound after months of searching for the perfect texture to communicate a soulful pulse in the distance. Miki coined it a hazy heart pump, a term which rings true for me in many contexts.” T.R.A.C.K...B Y...T.R.A.C.K 1) The “hazy heart pump” technique can be heard on the opening track, For the Love of Charles Mingus. Inspired by Mingus’s album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Hearne’s piece “imagines some echo of that artifact living and breathing under layers of distortion and interference.” Scored for six violins, all played by Cloud, this technically challenging piece calls for “earthy, breathy” timbres. Says Hearne, “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.” 2) The Answer to the Question That Wings Ask for string quartet (played by Mivos) is based on a renowned poem by Saul Williams, whose resonant speaking voice is heard here. Williams poses a series of questions re identity, society, time – profound musings in everyday surroundings. “Ted wrote this setting with Saul’s voice in mind, supporting it with various framings," remarks Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, who wrote the album’s insightful liner notes. "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.” 3 – 6) Hearne composed Furtive Movements for two of his frequent collaborators, cellist Ashley Bathgate and percussionist Ron Wiltrout. The title refers to a phrase found in many NYC Police Department reports as a supposed justification for “stop and frisk” searches. Says Hearne, “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 cello is prepared with a wine cork between the middle two strings, making it sound like a gong at times, while the percussion writing is highly melodic, blurring the timbral lines between the two players and creating uncertainty re cause and effect, intention and action. 7) Nobody’s, scored for solo viola (here, Diana Wade), was inspired by Fluxus musician Henry Flynt and his avant-garde approach to Appalachian fiddle playing. The piece is punctuated by foot stomps, referencing Appalachian clogging. Writes Lanzilotti, “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.” 8) Hearne composed Vessels for the unusual combo of violin, viola, and piano (Cloud, Wade, and the composer). “This trio imagines the uncovering of a buried memory and its role as a vessel to the past,” says Hearne. Notes Lanzilotti, “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.” 9 – 12) At eighteen minutes, Exposure (played by Argus Quartet) is the most expansive composition on Hazy Heart Pump. It contains tantalizing fragments of another piece by Hearne; the original is never clearly heard. Observes Lanzilotti, “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... The piece ends with a 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."
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Additional highlights of Hearne’s 2019/20 season: Exposure, the closing piece on Hazy Heart Pump, forms the basis of a new ballet of the same title by acclaimed choreographer Pam Tanowitz for The Royal Ballet (UK). The ballet makes its debut on October 10 + 11 at the Royal Opera House; a London-based quartet will play the score. Exposure is Hearne’s third collaboration with Tanowitz, who is now choreographing Hearne's Law of Mosaics for New York City Ballet, premiering April 24 + 25 at the New York State Theatre. Earlier this year, they collaborated on a 40-minute work titled Time is Forever Dividing itself toward innumerable futures (or, Speed is pure) for NYC's River to River Festival. On November 21 + 22 at the Walker Art Center in Minneapolis, Hearne sings the premiere of Live Things, a new suite of twelve songs to texts by Dorothea Lasky, co-commissioned by the Walker with Carnegie Hall. Directed by Daniel Fish (The Source, Oklahoma!, Aquanetta), Live Things brings Hearne together with rising visual/conceptual artist Rachel Perry, who will create an art installation onstage with the performers in real time. Hearne will be accompanied by Nathan Koci, piano/ keyboards; Ron Wiltrout, drums/percussion; Taylor Levine, electric guitar; Ashley Bathgate, cello; and Diana Wade, viola. In March 2020, New Amsterdam will release the debut recording of Place, an evening-length music-theater piece created in collaboration with Saul Williams, "a fiery meditation on gentrification and displacement," in Williams' words. The LA Phil New Music Group will anchor a new production for the work’s West Coast premiere, March 24 at Walt Disney Concert Hall. In addition to singing, Hearne will conduct an ensemble featuring many artists heard on his previous recordings, including Katrina Ballads, Sound from the Bench, and The Source. Vocal soloists include Isaiah Robinson, Sol Ruiz, Josephine Lee, and RC Williams. Place, scored for eighteen instrumentalists and six vocalists, was commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Barbican Centre and Beth Morrison Projects. The piece made its debut to critical acclaim in October 2018 at the BAM Next Wave Festival. Wrote The New York Times, “Place takes shape in songs that emerge like a graffiti mural as repetitive gestures gradually bloom into vibrant, brash statements in high-volume color… It always felt as if Hearne was questioning his own comfort and — in the final moment — his own power” (The New York Times). Also forthcoming on New Amsterdam, in early 2020: vocal octet Roomful of Teeth's recording of Hearne's Coloring Book, setting texts by three great black American writers of different generations – Zora Neale Hurston, James Baldwin, and Claudia Rankine. Varied as they are, each of these projects bears the stamp of Hearne’s vivid artistic personality: his passion for engaging with urgent social issues, his commitment to multidisciplinary collaboration, and his insistent drive to capture the texture of life in our super-connected yet fragmented times.
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Composer, singer, bandleader and recording artist Ted Hearne (b.1982, Chicago) draws on a wide breadth of influences to create intense, personal, and multi-dimensional works. His creative strategies are fresh and sophisticated; his messages, heartfelt and urgent. The New York Times has praised Mr. Hearne for his "tough edge and wildness of spirit," and "topical, politically sharpedged works." Pitchfork called Hearne's work "some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory -from any genre," and Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that Hearne's music "holds up as a complex mirror image of an information-saturated, mass-surveillance world, and remains staggering in its impact." Hearne's Sound From the Bench, a cantata for choir, electric guitars and drums setting texts from U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments and inspired by the idea of corporate personhood, was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. Hearne most recently collaborated with poet Saul Williams and director Patricia McGregor to create Place, a fiery meditation on the topic of gentrification and displacement, through music. Hearne's oratorio The Source sets text from the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs, along with words by Chelsea Manning (the U.S. Army private who leaked those classified documents to WikiLeaks), and was premiered to rave reviews at the 2014 BAM Next Wave Festival. The New York Times called The Source "a 21st Century masterpiece," noting that the work “offers a fresh model of how opera and musical theater can tackle contemporary issues: not with documentary realism, but with ambiguity, obliquity, and even sheer confusion.” During the 2016-17 season, the original production of The Source (directed by Daniel Fish) was presented by both the LA Opera and San Francisco Opera. Hearne’s piece Katrina Ballads, another modern-day oratorio with a primary source libretto, was awarded the 2009 Gaudeamus Prize in composition and was named one of the best classical albums of 2010 by Time Out Chicago and The Washington Post. A recent collaboration paired him with legendary musician Erykah Badu, for whom he wrote an evening-length work combining new music with arrangements of songs from her 2008 album New Amerykah: Part One.
Law of Mosaics, Hearne’s 30-minute piece for string orchestra, has been performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic. His album of the same name, with Andrew Norman and A Far Cry, was named one of The New Yorker’s notable albums of 2014 by Alex Ross. A charismatic vocalist, Hearne performs with Philip White as the vocal-electronics duo R WE WHO R WE, whose debut album (New Focus Recordings, 2013) was called “eminently, if weirdly, danceable and utterly gripping.” (Time Out Chicago). R WE's sophomore release I Love You was named one of the Best Albums of 2017 by The Nation. Other recent albums of vocal music of various stripes include The Source and Outlanders (New Amsterdam Records) and The Crossing's acclaimed recording of Sound From the Bench (Cantaloupe Music).
Ted Hearne was awarded the 2014 New Voices Residency from Boosey and Hawkes, and is a member of the composition faculty at the University of Southern California. Ted's many collaborators include poets Dorothea Lasky and Jena Osman, visual artists Sanford Biggers and Rachel Perry, directors Daniel Fish and Patricia McGregor, and filmmakers Bill Morrison and Jonathan David Kane, and his works have been conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, John Adams and Gustavo Dudamel. He recently conducted the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, and appeared as a vocal soloist with the National Symphony Orchestra. Recent and upcoming commissions include orchestral works for the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, New World Symphony, Los Angeles Chamber Orchestra and A Far Cry, chamber works for Eighth Blackbird, Ensemble dal Niente and Alarm Will Sound, and vocal works for The Crossing and Roomful of Teeth.
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