 |
       |
 |
 mission Statement | text | press |
|
KATRINA BALLADS PIERCE THE HEART Composer and singer Ted Hearne led a performance of his "Katrina Ballads" that electrified his New Haven audience and powerfully reminded them that the tragedy in the Gulf Coast is far from over. Hearne, a graduate student at the Yale School of Music, assembled a dozen musicians and four singers at Trinity Lutheran Church on Orange Street Wednesday night for his Katrina Ballads, which set to music some of the most infamous words uttered in the days immediately after Katrina struck on August 29, 2005. Hearne wrote the music, conducted it, and sang a solo of a three-minute song using just the one sentence President George Bush uttered to his FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) director at the time, Michael Brown; "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job." Click here to listen. Baritone Anthony Turner sang the shocked and shocking words of a resident of Biloxi, Mississippi that began, "My wife, I can't find her body, she gone…I held her hand tight as I could and she told me, 'You can't hold me.'"Shocking in another way was Barbara Bush's comment that the thousands who sought shelter at the Houston Astrodome were "underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." Click here to listen to mezzo-soprano Abby Fischer belt out the words set to Texas-swingy music The audience, which included many connected with the School of Music, gave the performers a standing ovation. The applause trailed off and then burst out in another long round of enthusiastic clapping and hollering. John Sipher said, "It was really powerful. I got chills through my body countless times. It's a really mature work." Katrina Ballads was presented by Yes is a World, an organization that works "to promote peace and social change through musical diversity and the collaboration of young artists," and the New Music Collective, a South Carolina-based organization "devoted to the composition, production, and promotion of new music," quoting from the program notes. The former takes its name from the e.e. cummings' poem that appeared on the back cover: yes is a world Hearne said Katrina Ballads has been performed at the Spolleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., in Chicago, and in New York City in addition to the two performances in New Haven. The musicians and singers will be recording the performance next week in New York. Selections from Katrina Ballads will be performed free tonight at Yale's Sprague Hall at 8 p.m. as part of the New Music, New Haven concert series. http://newhavenindependent.org/Arts/archives/2008/03/katrina-ballads.html LYRICS RIPPED FROM THE HEADLINES As the musicians tune up before the March 5 concert at New Haven's Trinity Lutheran Church, the electric guitarist playfully pretends to whack the bassist next to him with his instrument. A red-haired pianist in a corduroy jacket is reaching inside the piano, plunking and thumping the wires by hand -- as he will do moments later during the performance. On the stage are some instruments you don't often find in a small ensemble: a French horn, a vibraphone, and -- critically -- a man working the knobs of a sound board to make sure some sounds don't wash away the others. This is a melting pot, all right. What the audience doesn't know yet is the boiling point. Katrina Ballads is a ten-part impression, by School of Music composition student Ted Hearne, of the devastation of New Orleans and the uncomfortable social truths it uncovered. The prelude starts with vaguely connected, increasingly upset chords, toots, piano tinklings, and an ominous knocking -- all combining to create more of an imagined cultural calamity than a literal recreation of a flood. A plaintive blues refrain -- "New Orleans is sinking" -- comes into play, with the beauty and theatricality of the opening of Porgy and Bess. Then Hearne, the composer, takes the microphone: he's saved the evisceration of George W. Bush '68 for himself. Hearne turns Bush's praise of FEMA director Michael Brown ("Brownie, you're doin' a heck of a job") into a punchy, jumpy bout of scat singing, with implications of madness and desperation. Then comes a sort of delusional torch song from Bush's mother, Barbara, taken from her remarks after visiting Katrina evacuees at the Astrodome: "So many of the people in the arena here, you know, were underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them." Then hip-hop activist Kanye West gets his say -- "I hate the way they portray us in the media" -- in a stark musical context completely different from his own chart-topping records. After the full 70-minute song cycle was performed at Trinity Lutheran, three sections of the work were played the following night at that month's New Music New Haven concert at Yale's Sprague Hall. Two days later, the ensemble went to New York to perform the entire cycle at Greenwich House. Hearne is shopping a recording of the piece to labels; he hopes to have a CD released by the third anniversary of Hurricane Katrina in September. He also hopes to keep his band together and tour the piece while it's hot. Hearne sees Katrina Ballads as a community-building work about collaboration and diversity. "When I wrote it," he explains, "I knew I needed a sound engineer with it. When you have string instruments playing against trumpets, it makes it more complicated, right? But New Orleans is all about different cultures, many styles of music." http://www.yalealumnimagazine.com/issues/2008_05/arts_katrina.html
A deeply moving tribute Hearne's amazing quartet of four vocalists—soprano Allison Semmes, mezzo Abby Fischer, tenor Isaiah Robinson, and baritone Anthony Turner — were just as adept at crossing between so-called serious and popular styles as Hearne. Turner and Semmes brilliantly recreated Anderson Cooper's well-publicized interview with Sen. Mary Landrieu, in which Cooper blasted politicians who were busy thanking each other, while Landrieu remained maddeningly unflappable. Robinson sounded glorious delivering then-House Speaker Dennis Hastert's tone deaf suggestion that maybe we should bulldoze the whole place—it was a rolling, rhythmic rock number, punctuated by angry chords from electric bass and guitar, and gradually submerged in instrumental chaos. To a deliberate but cheerful groove with music-hall style piano tremolos, the deft, versatile Fischer implicitly skewered Barbara Bush for her infamous remarks on how lucky the refugees were to be in the Astrodome. Hearne, who conducted his own complex work with great skill, saved for himself an extended bravura riff on "Brownie, you're doing a heckuva job," repeating the phrase obsessively and in wild, stuttering transformations while the razor sharp, eleven-piece ensemble lurched rhythmically on around him. "Don't forget those poor folks down there," Hearne is urging us, in the best way he knows how. The audience responded with an instant standing ovation. http://www.charleston.net/news/2007/jun/02/a_deeply_moving_tribute/ 'Ballads' reawakens aftermath of Katrina Ted Hearne's "Katrina Ballads," was given its world premiere Thursday afternoon to popular response at Circular Congregational Church by the New Music Collective and Yes Is a World. The texts for the Piccolo Spoleto Spotlight performance are from interviews following Hurricane Katrina — ranging from survivors of the storm to Barbara Bush. They are brought to life by a quartet of singers and 11 instrumentalists, with some sounds electronically altered and enhanced. Mezzo-soprano Abby Fischer began with "Prelude: Keeping Its Head Above Water," delivered in a near-perfect N'awlins accent. Nathan Koci's horn solo (with electronic enhancement) powerfully evoked "When We Awoke, It Was to That Familiar Phrase: New Orleans Dodged a Bullet." Baritone Anthony Turner brought me to tears with the lament "Hardy Jackson: 8.30.05." His rich tone was like heavy cream as he sang, "My wife, I can't find her body, she gone." Tenor Isaiah Robinson shone in the hard-driving "Dennis Hastert: 9.1.05." His voice mounted with intensity to climax at "that place could be bulldozed." The bleak "Bridge to Gretna" featured electric guitarist Taylor Levine and bass clarinetist Eileen Mack. "Anderson Cooper and Mary Landrieu: 9.1.05" brought together Turner and soprano Allison Semmes, with Turner calm and Semmes giving robotic responses. Only here musical balances went awry, with instrumentation briefly swamping the voices. Hearne provided the star turn, performing the frenetic "Brownie, You're Doin' a Heck of a Job." This take on President Bush's notorious phrase, taken at top speed, covered the extremes of vocal range. A bluesy interlude featuring trumpeter Christopher Coletti led to "Barbara Bush: 9.5.05." Fischer had the accent down to perfection. "Kanye West: 9.2.05" was Robinson in a strong quasi-sermon; the other singers joining in a Chicago gospel-style shout. Semmes closed with "Ashley Nelson," a gripping meditation from an 18-year-old New Orleans resident that brought me to tears, again. http://www.charleston.net/news/2007/jun/01/ballads_reawakens_aftermath_katrina/ SPOLETOBUZZ podcast by Patrick Sharbaugh: NPR Charleston: SPOLETO TODAY
A Heck of a Show: Charleston's New Music Collective brings Katrina Ballads to town It's been almost two years since Hurricane Katrina destroyed a vast chunk of New Orleans, but the devastating aftermath of the negligence that led to the broken levees continues to resound across America. While opinion poll numbers for our seated federal government careen into a self-created abyss, creative works like Spike Lee's HBO documentary series and this week's groundbreaking New Music Collective presentation, Katrina Ballads, weave facts that are so horrific as to seem untrue into a living record of one of our country's biggest, ugliest fuck-ups. As he watched the tragedy unfold, Katrina Ballads composer and performer Ted Hearne, who created and heads a nonprofit fund-raising organization called Yes is a World that "works to promote peace and social change through musical diversity and the collaboration of young artists," found an unexpected source of inspiration. "I was incredibly affected by Katrina," Hearne says. "I know everyone sort of was, but it really fucked me up a lot, and when it happened I was trying to experiment with putting different kinds of music together — rock elements and popular music elements with some more modernist classical elements. At some point I realized I had been thinking about Katrina for months, and it became clear to start setting the texts from what people said to music, and all of a sudden the music that I was writing and sort of failing at writing started to make sense when I put those words to it." For Katrina Ballads, Hearne sets primary-source texts — quotes taken from New Orleans residents, government officials, journalists, and celebrities (including a large chunk of rapper Kanye West's oft-quoted tirade against the portrayal of blacks in the media) during the harrowing days following Katrina's landfall — to his stirring, diverse original compositions, resulting in songs like the unsettling, staccato "Brownie, You're Doin' a Heck of a Job," in which Hearne repeats and cuts up the infamous sentence spoken by George W. Bush, to rousing effect. The show, which debuts in full for Thursday's one-night-only Piccolo performance, is a cutting-edge, massively collaborative work that features 11 instrumentalists and five singers, plus production assistants. Hearne's dedicated ensemble will converge on Charleston from New York City, Chicago, and San Francisco — and from right here in town, with New Music Collective founder/director Nathan Koci and assistant director Ron Wiltrout playing horn and percussion, respectively. "Ted's a pretty infectious, positive kinda guy, and he has a lot of people who would clear their schedules to fly down to Charleston for a week," Koci says. "I think everyone really believes in the project. We did a preview in New York in March, and it's such an emotionally-charged piece ... the message that it sends and the awareness that it raises of Katrina as something that still isn't finished, that a lot of things are still not OK down there. It's a good time to really take a look at what happened, and it's really telling of sort of where we are as a nation, for better or for worse." http://www.charlestoncitypaper.com/gyrobase/Content?oid=oid%3A27818 |