by Liquid Music blog contributor Trever Hagen
Photo by Jen Rosenstein
“I think I’d like to call it In Your Mouth, actually,” Ted says, pondering a last minute name-change. We are discussing the composer’s forthcoming piece – originally titled Live Things – which will be performed at Minneapolis’s Walker Art Center November 21-22, 2019. One’s imagination attempts to portray what might take place based on Mr. Hearne’s brief description of the process of creating the piece. However, as with many other Ted Hearne performances, your mind’s eye will never be prepared for what is to come. Anticipation and expectation are difficult to conjure up when you are exploring unfamiliar aesthetic worlds. Partly this is due to Hearne’s up-ending of genre definitions but also in addition to his readiness to collaborate across media in order to realize wholly new performance experiences (and thereby illustrating a depth of expression that necessitates multiple forms of affect). Conveyed across multiple intersecting media currents – sound, language, visuals – and directed by theater veteran Daniel Fish, In Your Mouth calls out the promise of the unexpected.
This is Ted’s first full-length piece for Liquid Music, although he has performed and composed previously for the series. Liquid Music has highlighted the challenging and provoking world of contemporary composition in the Twin Cities, offering artists the opportunity to premiere new work. “I wanted to write my voice into the piece,” Ted explains. “This is the first time I have done this,” he continues. For the text to vocalize, Ted was attracted to the radical openness of the poetry of Dorothea Lasky. “I started really falling for Dottie's poetry in 2016, and it came to be something really special for me over the next year. I wrote a few individual songs before I started to think that I needed to dig deep and make a whole song cycle, and it wasn't until last year that I decided it needed to be an evening-length theatrical work.”
The twelve-song cycle of In Your Mouth will be performed by a quintet, which as Hearne admits, is basically like a rock band performing an album. Put this way, we already can imagine how Hearne draws on a wide range musical references to create a type of meta-language of music. Along with Hearne on voice and electronics, the composer will be joined by Ashley Bathgate (cello), Taylor Levine (electric guitar), Nathan Koci (keyboards), Diana Wade (viola) and Ron Wiltrout (drums).
Together with the quintet and Lasky’s poetry, the performance will incorporate a real-time installation by artist Rachel Perry and stage direction by Daniel Fish, who has collaborated with Hearne on previous occasions. “In terms of working with these three incredible artists, they've each brought a different approach to my understanding of the poetry and of the project. Rachel's analogies in color, material and light; Daniel's patience in experiencing and processing the work in time, and looking to the text and the music to determine how the piece should be structured; and Dottie's big woolley ideas and colorful, sometimes contradictory, always poetic associations that really connected me to the sensuality and timeliness of her work.”
Young Voices
Mr. Hearne grew up in Chicago. His mother was a classically trained vocalist steeped in Baroque performance, which Hearne experienced as a child. Ted joined the Chicago Children’s choir where he learned and sang in a multi-cultural ensemble of voices and compositions. “My mom encouraged me to learn and perform music, but she didn't push me to do it even though it's the thing she loved most in the world. I credit her for getting me involved, but she knows me well enough to know I would probably balk at the time commitment and steep hill of work I'd have ahead of me if she had applied pressure,” Hearne states.
In addition to the fulfilling and grueling regimen of a composer-conductor (e.g., commissions, curations, teaching duties, writing and collaborations), Mr. Hearne finds time, as he will in Minneapolis, to perform as a vocalist. The nature and intent of how Ted sings is immediately gripping. For instance his 2007 Katrina Ballads features him performing the piece “Brownie you are doing a heck of a job” – as much as it is the musical materials that are captivating it is the execution that captures a sardonic energy, which serves to remind listeners of the out-of-touch FEMA response to the 2005 disaster. The place from where he is performing these words seems antagonistic, tongue-in-cheek: a curious vibe reminiscent of Frank Zappa’s disruption of expectations and the status quo. A crowning achievement for the social potential of new music. In this manner, Hearne’s patterned ability for taking mundane or everyday speech and musicalizing it recalls Harry Partch’s vocalisms transformed into musical worlds and phrases.
In addition to his score-writing credits, Hearne also performs in the duo R WE Who R We. “R WE WHO R WE is a band I have with Philip White – we co-write all the songs, so this is very different from almost anything else I do. Also, as a band, everything we write for R WE is for us and only us to perform, and actually we don't "write" anything down at all, although it's just as specific as any other compositions I've written.”
Most recently, in 2019 Mr. Hearne released the album Hazy Heart Pump, which begins with the composition “For the Love of Charles Mingus”. Ted asserts: “Charles Mingus is one of my favorite composers and has been a huge inspiration for me – the way he controlled chaos, harnessed a feel and employed it abstractly, the beautiful sloppiness. My piece For the love of Charles Mingus for six violins, which is the first track on my new instrumental album, is inspired by the way the opening of "The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady" pulls the rug out from under you – setting you up to believe you're existing in one 'feel,' only to discover the music is actually being governed by a different time, one you can't hear at first. This underlying pulse that you can't always hear is a source of poetic inspiration for me.”
The Inspiration of Injustice
Being raised in Chicago certainly lends itself to the urban experience of inequality – homelessness next to skyscrapers. Segregation and access to education. Where life expectancy in one affluent neighborhood is ninety and 9 miles away residents live to sixty. Even though urban centers may offer the world’s residents greater economic opportunities and the potential to sustain large groups of people efficiently, we have still yet to uncover how to provide fair access to resources as governments attempt to organize people. As consistent with the history of the civilization, race, class and gender continue to be the lines upon which inequality falls. And for these reasons Hearne has been inspired by musical communication (more than the technical wizardry of virtuosi per se) and the potential for sharing human experiences through sound.
Clearly these forms of injustice move Hearne’s compositions. Not by moralism but rather by Hearne’s witnessing of injustice – particularly social inequality and stratification – is the departure point from which he composes. How might the experience of gentrification be expressed in a score? How might reading the gruesome details of military conflict be composed? These musically-mediated emotional and cognitive responses to the contemporary world are manifest in Hearne’s work. The musical-social mélange of Mr. Hearne’s upbringing sensitized him to the plight of modern daily survival like many processors before – from John Steinbeck to Sebastião Salgado.
“Hearne has been inspired by musical communication (more than the technical wizardry of virtuosi per se) and the potential for sharing human experiences through sound. ”
Plunderphonics and Compositions
We speak for a moment about using samples within orchestral arrangements – taking a listen to Hearne’s 2015 The Source we hear samples from “Mac the Knife” and Soul II Soul’s “Back to Life”, popular sounds that filled the ambient radio waves of those years. These plunderphones – recognizable audio bits – serve to ground listeners by using the bits to reference the time of creation and consumption. It is a real-time experience of how culture builds on culture, how memory and associations provide context and coherency for the future. How plunderphonics runs counter to intellectual property and capital. This in itself makes Hearne’s pieces decidedly political by how and which sounds are used.
The use of samples shows how genre material is used to reference genre as a frame of perception. Ted draws on genre at the meta-level – using some of the signs and sounds of genre while using other musical languages. For example, electric distorted guitars sounds against a string quartet. The result is an intriguing soundscape of associations and the juxtapositions are entirely new contexts – the samples and composition create a type of infoscape (to borrow from Appadurai’s thoughts on how we encounter information, an Ives-ian presence of all materials happening at once) that remove the listener from the initial work into a more reflective and considered point of receiving information.
(Absolute) Truth
“Truth isn’t truth” – the phrase uttered by former New York mayor Rudy Giulliani sticks in one’s mind as emblematic of the 21st century social-techno reality of perception management. Indeed, ideas of absolute truth have been dissipating for nearly a century as scholars have brought to our attention fragmented realties and multi-centered universes of the post World War post-modernism world.
What might truth mean in contemporary times? Has it lost its absolute value? This leads us to the question, “Can music lie?” which perhaps might feel like an absurd thought but one that is perhaps relevant in the so-called post-truth world of media and information. “Language can be weaponized versus sound,” Ted comments with a slight pause at the end to reflect on his thought. “Musical languages point a finger back at you,” he continues. Hearne speaks about how music has allowed him to explore notions of truth and explore other cultures. Indeed, music is precisely this pathway between peoples, places and cultures. And for this reason, music has the propensity to be movingly political.
“Language can be weaponized versus sound,” Ted comments with a slight pause at the end to reflect on his thought. “Musical languages point a finger back at you.”
Hearne is not hesitant to call his work political. His labeling of his music is an indication of the hyper self-awareness that comes with contemporary identity politics, news cycles, pastiche ideologies, and an informed sense of political agency. Hearne’s work has decidedly fallen upon what many call ‘political’ because of the content it uses: 2015’s The Source, 2018’s Sounds from the Bench. Political, as such, emerges as a comment or presentation upon information and events. ‘Political music’ occupies a different social space than the ‘politics of music’ – the latter being the zone of censorship, discrimination and stigma. The sometimes unintended social reactions to music. In addition to the content, Hearne reveals where the politics emerges from: his response to information. The role of the witness.
Sounds from the Bench, 2018
The Source reveals an emotional response to the information leaked by Chelsea Manning (as opposed to say a composer taking this information and then writing a piece that is intently conveying a political position). Sounds from the Bench is a piece based on the Supreme Court oral arguments of Citizens United, which gave corporate entities personhood by granting them legal rights as people. Sounds from the Bench was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize, which was given that year to Kendrick Lamar’s ‘Damn.’ Hearne, no doubt grateful for the placement in the prestigious prize’s shortlist, commented, however, about the exclusionary practice of the award against people and music of color.
Aesthetically, Sounds from the Bench uses voices and electrified instruments to underpin the line between humans and non-humans. That is novel about Ted’s politics: it is something fresh but also reflected in political discourse nowadays – the subjective nature of truth or rather how we respond to truth, how machines are entering further into our daily lives, how political governance is failing at organizing social needs of communities. In other words, Ted’s music is not a truth-claim but an impression of the truth, and this impression is what is communicated musically.
Musical Pathways
So what is socially engaging music? Is there any music that is not? Or is it that Mr. Hearne’s music attempts to connect the fields of society and aesthetics in a way that we do not commonly encounter? Ted’s music has been touted as such. The label is curious because Ted’s music seems to highlight that however we once thought of the autonomy of music from social forces (that 19th century notion), it clearly shaped and is shaping, of the social forces around. In other words, every music is socially engaging by virtue of it being music – music being a social practice.
Music leads the way for our social explorations. Aesthetic risks, challenges and comfort involved in much of Hearne’s music. To dwell on the trope of being “ahead of one’s time” asserts music’s bullish properties: Hearne’s music is not reflecting society, it is actively showing us a way forward. That finger that music is point back at us is, in fact, leading the way.
Still from Blue Falling ©2019 by Rachel Perry
BUY TICKETS TO IN YOUR MOUTH
NOVEMBER 21-22 AT WALKER ART CENTER
Co-presented with the Walker Art Center
Co-commissioned with the Walker Art Center and Carnegie Hall
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