European American Music Distributors Company is a member of the Schott Music Group
Katherine Balch Joins PSNY
2018 announcement (blog size)
Soper IPSA banner USE
Subotnick Greenroom banner
Norman Trip to the Moon Greenroom

Composers

Blog Archive

2023202220212020201920182017201620152014201320122011

Newsletter

Posts tagged 'Roomful of Teeth'

Ted Hearne's "Coloring Book" On Tour with Roomful of Teeth

Grammy Award-winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth is currently touring the country, with stops in Colorado, New Mexico, Washington, DC, Rochester, and many more in between. Their program features Ted Hearne's  Coloring Book, which they commissioned and premiered in 2015. Coloring Book consists of five songs, which set text by Zora Neale Hurston, Claudia Rankine, and James Baldwin.

Hearne's musical and political work is tied deeply to current issues surrounding power, identity, and resistance in contemporary America. After premiering in 2014 at BAM, his ambitious "modern-day oratorio" The Source, which sets texts from Wikileaks and deals with the life of Chelsea Manning, has been performed at the LA Opera, reviewed by Pitchfork, and released as an album on New Amsterdam Records. With Manning's recent presidential pardon by Barack Obama, Hearne's music is more powerful and topical than ever. 

Hearne's music will also be heard at National Sawdust on February 3rd, in an evening of music performed by The Crossing and produced by Beth Morrison Projects. Sound from the Bench collects works by Hearne that set legal and judicial texts to music, directly addressing the affective power that the American justice system has over our everyday lives. Sound from the Bench includes a performance of Hearne's Consent, for 16 voices. An album of Hearne's choral works recorded by The Crossing will be released via Cantaloupe Music on March 24. Check out an excerpt of Consent below. 

Ted Hearne's "The Source" Released on New Amsterdam Records

Ted Hearne's The Source, an immanently engrossing work based on the story of U.S. Army Private Chelsea Manning, will be released by New Amsterdam Records in late October of this year. The work, a "modern-day oratorio", sets texts made available via WikiLeaks to Hearne's charactaristically powerful musical language. Hearne emphasizes that the work "never asks the audience to pretend the musicians are fictional characters," and also "approaches its subject matter through discrete movements with tangentially related texts, rather than through traditional narrative storytelling"—two features of oratorios stretching back to the 18th century. 

Hearne will also see the West-coast premiere of Dispatches, a co-commission from the New World Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony. The new work will be performed on programs from September 30th-October 3rd, paired with Tchaikovsky's Symphony No. 6 (Pathétique). In addition to an interview with I Care If You Listen, Hearne has also done a video interview with the SF Symphony, with some previews of the piece itself: 

Finally, Hearne will also have another premiere on the American Composers' Orchestra SONiC Festival by Grammy-award winning vocal ensemble Roomful of Teeth. The new work, Coloring Book, will premiere on October 17th at National Sawdust, a new venue for contemporary music in Williasburg, Brooklyn. Hearne is no stranger to writing for vocal ensembles; check out his Consent, for 16 voices, to get a taste for Hearne's cascading, generative, and powerful compositional voice.

Tag Cloud