Difficult Grace | Cedille Records
Released April 2023
featuring Freefucked
music by Ted Hearne
text by Kemi Alabi
1. Freefucked I
2. A Wedding, or What We Unlearned from Descartes
3. Freefucked II
4. The Lion Tamer’s Daughter vs. The Ledge
5. After We Ruin
Produced by Ted Hearne and Chris Botta
Place | New Amsterdam Records
Released April 2020
Music by Ted Hearne
Libretto by Saul Williams and Ted Hearne
Conceived by Ted Hearne, Saul Williams, and Patricia McGregor
1. BALLOONS Ted Hearne
2. BOUNDARY
3. INTERVIEW Steven Bradshaw
4. MAPS (APPROPRIATION) feat. Josephine Lee, Steven Bradshaw, Isaiah Robinson, Chicago Children’s Choir
5. BREAKUP LETTER feat. Ayanna Woods, Philip White
6. GUILT Steven Bradshaw
7. Is it ok to say Sol Ruiz feat. Rage Thormbones
8. What About My Son?
9. Displacement Bloop Saul Williams
10. This Land Was Worth Every War Sol Ruiz
11. The Tales You Tell Your Children Isaiah Robinson, Ayanna Woods
12. New Faces Sophia Byrd, Josephine Lee, Isaiah Robinson
13. Running to Us All (written for hands over mouths) feat. Chicago Children’s Choir
14. Hallelujah in White feat. Isaiah Robinson
15. A Thought Saul Williams, Ayanna Woods
16. The Guilt That I Feel Is Freedom Ayanna Woods, Steven Bradshaw
17. You Were Never Comfortable With Intimacy Sophia Byrd feat. Taylor Levine
18. Beneath the ruins are older ruins
19. Colonizing Space Isaiah Robinson feat. Saul Williams
Vocalists
Steven Bradshaw, Sophia Byrd, Ted Hearne, Josephine Lee, Isaiah Robinson, Sol Ruiz, Ayanna Woods
Orchestra
Guitar: Taylor Levine
Bass Guitar: Braylon Lacy
Drums: Ron Wiltrout
Keyboard, Fender Rhodes, Hammond B3: RC Williams
Piano: Ted Hearne
Clarinet and Bass Clarinet: Eileen MackBass
Clarinet and Contrabass Clarinet: Christa Van Alstine
Trumpet: Jonah Levy
French Horn: Rachel Drehmann
Tenor Trombone: Matt Barbier
Bass Trombone: Weston Olencki
Viola: Diana Wade
Cello: Ashley Bathgate
Additional Cello: Eric Byers
Percussion: Clara Warnaar
Mixer Feedback: Philip White
Featuring Chicago Children’s Choir, Josephine Lee, artistic director
Produced by Nick Tipp with Ted Hearne
Engineering: Nick Tipp
Mixing: Nick Tipp
Editing: Nick Deyoe, Ryder Bach, Nick Tipp
Additional editing: Hiro Goto, Giosue Greco, Wolfgang Woodcock
Mastering: Andrew Garver
Potential Differences | New Focus Recordings
Released November 2019
Dither electric guitar quartet performs:
“The Garden of Cyrus” by Eve Beglarian
”The Tar of Gyu” by Gyan Riley
”but because without this” by Paula Matthusen
”Ones” by Jascha Narveson
”Mi-Go” by Joshua Lopes
”Mannequin” by James Moore
”Candy” by Ted Hearne
”Renegade” by Taylor Levine
”Swell Piece” by James Tenney
Ash | New Amsterdam Records
Released September 2019
“For Ashley” by Andrew Norman
”On Being Wrong” by Christopher Cerrone
”Small Wonder” by Timo Andres
”Ley Line” by Jacob Cooper
”DaVZ23BzMH0” by Ted Hearne
”Orison” by Robert Honstein
ASH features a six-movement suite of cello works written expressly for Ashley Bathgate by the American composer collective Sleeping Giant, which includes Timo Andres, Christopher Cerrone, Jacob Cooper, Ted Hearne, Robert Honstein, and Andrew Norman.
The ASH suite was completed in 2016 and then honed during tours throughout the US and abroad. The final album version is a dynamic collection of pieces driven by Bathgate's hope that they may bring joy and insight to other listeners and players out there; perhaps even inspiring them to create new works the way the Bach suites inspired her.
Hazy Heart Pump | New Focus Recordings
Released October 2019
I’m obsessed with what happens when known quantities are placed in unfamiliar settings. When our comfort is confronted with a whole new range of disquieting associations. When sounds you recognize are used in a different way, when your viewpoint changes, when the boundaries that defined your thinking are exposed. Hazy Heart Pump is music about context and origin, familiarity and displacement. It’s about the thing that made the thing that’s in front of you, the bones that you don’t see.
1. For the Love of Charles Mingus - Miki-Sophia Cloud, violin
2. The Answer to the Question That Wings Ask - Saul Williams and Mivos Quartet
3. Furtive Movements - Ashley Bathgate, cello; Ron Wiltrout, drums and percussion
4. Nobody’s - Diana Wade, viola
5. Vessels - Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti, viola; Miki-Sophia Cloud, violin; Ted Hearne, piano
6. Exposure - Argus Quartet
Liner notes by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti
Producers: Nick Tipp and Ted Hearne
Engineers: Nick Tipp (tracks 1, 2, 7, 9, 10, 12);
Ryan Streber (tracks 3-6, 8);
Adam Abeshouse (track 11)
Editing: Mike Tierney, Nick Deyoe, Ryan Streber, Adam Abeshouse and Nick Tipp
Mixing: Nick Tipp
Liner Notes: Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti
Artwork: Seth Gadsden
Graphic Design: Traci Larson
Sound from the Bench | Cantaloupe Music
Released March 2017
performed by The Crossing (Donald Nally, conductor)
with Taylor Levine and James Moore, electric guitar
and Ron Wiltrout, drums
Produced by Nick Tipp
The four featured works on this album are, in the words of Donald Nally (Artistic Director of Philadelphia’s miraculously talented contemporary music chamber choir, The Crossing), “fundamentally about asking questions—questions about the world we live in, about art, and about language and music." I have never worked with a choir who understands me like The Crossing does, and together we worked to bring that synergy to life with this record.
This album features four of my choral works:
Sound from the Bench (2018 Pulitzer Prize finalist)
Consent
Ripple
Privilege
Album art by Seth Gadsden
Album design by Traci Larson
Listen to (and purchase) the entire album here
46 Likes, 2 Comments - ted hearne (@hedtearne) on Instagram: "love The Crossing. pretty sure we all geeked out at choir camp together in a past life."
from our recording sessions with The Crossing at Morningstar Studios outside Philly
Hearne’s virtuosic and hauntingly beautiful musical settings entice, repulse, and surprise in turns, as he interweaves texts from the Iraq War Logs (Ripple), Bill Moyer’s 2009 interview with The Wire creator David Simon (Privilege), the 2013 case of rape by high school students in Steubenville, Ohio (Consent), and the Supreme Court’s Citizens United decision (Sound from the Bench). The latter is, according to Hearne, “a reaction to Jena Osman's incredible book Corporate Relations, a collection of poems that follows the historical trajectory of corporate personhood in the United States. The five movements combine language taken from landmark Supreme Court Cases with words from ventriloquism textbooks. I strive toward a similar polyphony of oppositional voices and perspectives in my music, and to bring the chaotic forces of life into the work itself. It was this impulse, and the unabashedly political tone of Osman's poetry, that made me want to set some part of Corporate Relations to music.”
“Hearne’s Sound from the Bench, which comes out this week on the Cantaloupe label, represents a breakthrough, having been produced almost in the manner of a pop album, in a recording studio rather than in a church with microphones. The barely controlled chaos of Hearne’s opening moments take on a more revealing sense of control than chaos in a piece that explores how the U.S. judicial system has increasingly granted corporations power over an unsuspecting human population.
The church acoustic in which the piece was first heard inevitably had a homogenizing effect on Hearne’s poly-stylistic richness, whose words are set to harmonies that sound like an ironic version of the Beach Boys one minute and strident hellish voices in another... On the recording produced by Nick Tipp, guitars make perfect sense.”
“Sound from the Bench lays bare rape culture, Citizens United, military-sanctioned murder, and white privilege … somehow fusing entertainment and bewilderment, beauty and hideousness in a sonic space in which it is safe to laugh, cry, foam at the mouth and rejoice … all within an hour.”
Sound from the Bench is Q2's album of the week for the week of April 17, 2017
Unbound | New Amsterdam Records/Sono Luminus (2017)
The Jasper String Quartet performs:
"Valencia" by Caroline Shaw
"Death Valley Junction" by Missy Mazzoli
"The Blue Horse Walks on the Horizon" by Annie Gosfield
"Four on the Floor" by Judd Greenstein
"Almost All the Time" by David Lang
"Pushpulling" by Donnacha Dennehy
"Excerpts from the Middle of Something" (from "Law of Mosaics") by Ted Hearne
Wild Cities | Francesca Anderegg and Brent Funderburk | New Focus Recordings
Violinist Francesca Andegegg and pianist Brent Funderburk perform:
"Remix" by Ryan Anthony Francis
"Adjoining" by Hannah Lash
"On the Road" by Clint Needham
"Nobody's" by Ted Hearne
"Imagined Archipelagos" by Reinaldo Moya
““...a refreshingly optimistic sense of the future, full of adventure and possibility...””
““...a fabulous record...a spellbinding, twisting, intoxicating 49 minutes of incendiary violin...” ”
This album is a collaboration between the six composers of Sleeping Giant (Rob Honstein, Chris Cerrone, Timo Andres, Andrew Norman, Jacob Cooper and myself) and the six musicians of eighth blackbird.
THE SOURCE | Ted Hearne | New Amsterdam Records, 2015
Music by Ted Hearne
Text culled from various sources by Mark Doten
vocalists:
Ted Hearne
Mellissa Hughes
Samia Mounts
Isaiah Robinson
Jonathan Woody
band:
Courtney Orlando, violin
Anne Lanzilotti; viola
Leah Coloff, cello
Taylor Levine, guitar
Greg Chudzik, bass
Ron Wiltrout, drums
Nathan Koci, music director
more info on The Source here.
video by Daniel Fish, Juliet Lashinsky-Revene and Jim Findlay
album art by Seth Gadsden
“...some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory — from any genre.”
“It is a refutation of literal meaning, an assault on sense. It evokes our time, the age of atomized digitized information, more potently than any piece of music I’ve heard, and in its volatile nonsensicality, it brings us the sound of a once-promising composer in the act of becoming a major one.”
BARBARY COAST | Red Light New Music | New Focus Recordings, 2015
Red Light Ensemble performs
"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
John Popham, cello
Yegor Shevtsov, piano
Kevin Sims, percussion
Christa van Alstine, clarinets
Erin Wight, viola
Roberta Michel, flute
Esther Noh, violin
conducted by Ted Hearne
REVIEW by Ethan Iverson, "Do the Math"
SOME PHOTOS from the old days of Red Light (fond memories there):
R WE WHO R WE | New Focus Recordings (2013)
Music by Ted Hearne and Philip White
Our debut album offers a noisy take on songs from the pop landscape. More about the project here.
Review from 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 electric hand mixer through one's nostrils and into the brain, then flipping the power on... and this is an unequivocally good thing." READ THE FULL REVIEW HERE.
THE LAW OF MOSAICS | Crier Records (2014)
A Far Cry performs
"The Companion Guide To Rome" (2010) by Andrew Norman
"Law of Mosaics" (2013) by Ted Hearne
REVIEWS:
Alex Ross, The New Yorker
<Notable Recordings of 2014>
"Climactic moments from Adagio for Strings and The Four Seasons, slowed down and layered on top of one another" from LAW OF MOSAICS (2013) by Ted Hearne
album art by Rachel Perry Welty
PURCHASE
Crier Records | Amazon | iTunes
Katrina Ballads | New Amsterdam, 2010
Music by Ted Hearne
Abigail Fischer, mezzo-soprano
Isaiah Robinson, tenor
Allison Semmes, soprano
Anthony Turner, baritone
with Ted Hearne, tenor
Christopher Coletti, trumpet
Nathan Koci, horn
Kelli Kathman, flutes
Eileen Mack, clarinets
Batya MacAdam-Somer, violin
David Medine, viola
Jody Redhage, cello
David Hanlon, piano
Taylor Levine, electric guitar
Kris Saebo, electric bass
Ron Wiltrout, drums
conducted by Ted Hearne
film by Bill Morrison
"When we awoke, it was to that familiar phrase: New Orleans dodged a bullet" from KATRINA BALLADS by Ted Hearne
Your Bad Self: Live At The Stone 2008 | Limited Edition
Music by Ted Hearne
includes Illuminating the Maze, Touch, We Didn't Know, Snowball, Wanderer, Last Man Standing, All the Things, Crib Dweller and Never Said Nothing; along with interludes by Ron Wiltrout, Nathan Koci and Bill Carson.
Featuring
Miki-Sophia Cloud - violin
Chris Coletti - trumpet/keyboard
Ted Hearne - piano/voice
Nathan Koci - horn/accordion/keyboard
Taylor Levine - electric guitar
Eileen Mack - clarinets
Ron Wiltrout - drums
Matthew Wright - trombone
with Bill Carson on vocals
album art by Nathan Koci
listen / purchase on Bandcamp
Manorexia: The Mesopelagic Waters | Tzadik Records, 2010
Music by the brilliant and enigmatic composer J.G. Thirlwell (Foetus, Manorexia), featuring six arrangements for acoustic ensemble by Ted Hearne.
The tunes are played by David Cossin (percussion), David Broome (piano), Felix Fan (cello), Elena Moon Park (viola) and others, with Thirlwell himself on electronics.
Available on Tzadik Records.
Amazon | iTunes
J.G. Thirlwell
New Music Collective, Vol. 1 | 2007
New Music Collective, Charleston
featuring 23 by Ted Hearne - performed by Laura Ball, piano; David Heywood, flute; Nathan Koci, horn; Philip White, guitar; and Ron Wiltrout, drums
contact New Music Collective to purchase
