Ted Hearne - The Source (2015)

"More than a few of the vicious old debates in "new classical" music have been settled. In 2015, a composer isn’t obliged to choose melodic minimalism over atonal complexity, or vice versa. If she wants to write something that "addresses the times," there’s no set aesthetic to follow. Execution is what the community of listeners has (generally) pledged to judge.
You can hear this relatively new, pan-stylistic freedom quite clearly in the music of Ted Hearne. As a political animal, he’s a liberal populist; as a composer, he’s a fan of preexisting texts and musical maximalism. His 2010 protest song-cycle Katrina Ballads set real life excerpts from an American tragedy—think of George W. Bush’s famous assessment "Brownie you’re doing a heck of a job"—to a richly textured musical backdrop that blended jazz and classical vocal approaches with aggrieved electric guitar and frenetic chamber scoring. In 2013, Hearne provided Erykah Badu with well-judged orchestrations of songs from New Amerykah: Part One (4th World War), which Badu performed live with the Brooklyn Philharmonic. (We’re still waiting for a proper studio recording of those.)
With this album, Hearne gives us a distillation of an experimental stage work about Chelsea Manning (and WikiLeaks) that was presented in 2014 at the Brooklyn Academy of Music. Composing once again atop found texts—including logs of Manning’s chats and leaked government documents that were selected and edited by the novelist Mark Doten—Hearne’s latest project gives us some of the composer’s most intriguing music yet.
In the song "s/as boy/as a boy", Hearne scores one of Manning’s haunting pre-arrest concerns—"i wouldn’t mind going to prison for the rest of my life/ if it wasn’t for the possibility of having pictures of me.../ plastered all over the world press.../ as boy"—by way of a somber cello-and-guitar riff that is frequently interrupted by percussive slaps. (The discrete instrumental parts swirl together with an affecting unease, circa Manning’s line, "I'm just kind of drifting now.")
Another highlight is "Julian in a Nutshell", in which Doten creates lyrics from shards of questions delivered to Julian Assange by reporters. At first, Hearne pairs Doten’s documentary cut-up fragments with airy individual string and vocal lines. As the journalistic narrative is better established—demanding that Assange define himself as either a "journalist", an "anarchist", or the victim of a "smear campaign"—the vocal lines settle into sunnier harmonies. It’s the sound of the press finding an angle, though Hearne’s subtly clattering orchestration isn’t as sold on the quality of the conversation.
Inevitably, this audio-only version of The Source also omits some key aspects of the "multimedia oratorio", occasionally rendering an abstract production even more conceptually opaque. In director Daniel Fish’s filmed excerpts from the original staging, we can see that The Source originally included a chorus of silent observers that surrounded the audience, on video-projection screens. Looming large over the proceedings, that visual chorus adds a measure of ghostly gravity to the long chunks of leaked military cables that Hearne’s actors recite through vocal filters.
These bureaucratic passages certainly deserve grimly robotic accompaniment. (Think of lyrics like: "An IED detonation was reported by C co 1-327 INF to Task force SPARTAN, in the Salah Ad Din Province, Ad Dawr, vicinity. 38S LD 8930 1490.") But on the album version, these long stretches of war-euphemism can wear thin. Without the ability to conjure the silent witnesses on a recording, Hearne instead references the wider culture by inserting drops from pop songs. At best, these feel unnecessary. At worst, they’re distracting: Liz Phair’s "Girls! Girls! Girls!" isn’t contemporaneous with the WikiLeaks era, nor is its consideration of gender politics particularly relevant to Chelsea Manning’s worries about being misgendered while serving some future prison sentence. This version of The Source could have benefitted from some stronger editing, though when it connects, it can still resonate as some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory—from any genre."