In the wake of the annual media exposure brought to New Orleans in connection with Mardi Gras, it's like a splash of cold water to be reminded of the events of August 2005, when a whole lot of water breached the federally built levee system designed to protect the city, leading to widespread flooding, death and destruction.
Hurricane Katrina turned New Orleans upside down, displacing over 1 million residents from the central Gulf Coast and causing well over $100 billion dollars in damage. The ripple effects for the nation were mindboggling, economically, environmentally, and in terms of human cost.
Composer Ted Hearne, like most Americans, experienced the tragedy from a distance, by way of television reports, radio interviews and newspaper articles. These formed the raw material for what became "Katrina Ballads."
"The idea is that I was in New York experiencing this, just like most Americans, experiencing it in a very removed way," Hearne says. "You know, seeing this tragedy unfold and being totally distanced from it. I think that heightened our awareness of the problem, or of the inequality in society, that Katrina exposed. Anyway, it's really not a piece about portraying the experiences of the people there, necessarily. It is portraying the experience of seeing it unfold from a distanced position, as an American."
The 65-minute dramatic song cycle, often described as an oratorio, will be performed twice this weekend, by the contemporary music ensemble X Trigger, at the College of New Jersey, Friday at 8 p.m. and Saturday at 1 p.m. Hearne will present a free guest lecture Friday at 12:30 p.m.
The performances will cap a week of related events, looking back and assessing the impact of Katrina on the American experience. These include lectures and panel discussions, screenings of the Spike Lee documentary, "When the Levees Broke: A Requiem in Four Acts," and a celebration of New Orleans in food and music. The interdisciplinary series is presented by the college's Institute for Social Justice in the Arts and Humanities.
On Saturday, the college will offer a full day of workshops for high school students, focusing on discussions about citizenship, economics, democracy, media and systemic injustice, as related to the disaster.
Hearne composed "Katrina Ballads" for a band of eleven instrumentalists and five singers, set to primary source texts harvested from the week following the hurricane's landfall. The words are those of politicians, celebrities, survivors and relief workers, taken directly from footage experienced by those outside the Gulf Coast, as it unfolded in real-time over national media. These include comments made by Anderson Cooper, Kanye West, Dennis Hastert, and Barbara Bush.
President George W. Bush's statement, "Brownie, you're doing a heck of a job" (in reference to FEMA director Michael D. Brown, a Bush appointment), is subjected to a particularly intense riff. Government response to the disaster was widely perceived to be unconscionably slow, poorly coordinated, and insufficient. Brown was pressured to resign from his post due to his controversial handling of the recovery effort.
"It was astounding how unprepared all sorts of government entities were," Hearne says. "It's astounding how a natural disaster can highlight the ways in which poor people and not poor people are left with help and resources after. You know, it exposed socioeconomic fractures, in a way. So it wasn't really just about the government not administering aid, although there were problems there, but it was also about many public figures' tone deafness to racial and socioeconomic inequity that the response to the hurricane exposed."
Hearne's multi-stylistic score, described by at least one critic as "post-genre," combines gospel, jazz, classical and electronic musical elements. A recording of the work was issued on New Amsterdam Records in 2010 and was chosen as one of the year's best classical albums by the Washington Post and Time Out Chicago.
"I like to play with genre, just as another musical parameter, really thinking about how you can manipulate genre and the cues that surround genre and put that into the composition of the piece," Hearne says, "just because we live in such a pluralistic society, culturally, now, where we have access to so many things and we all listen to sort of a personalized playlist. I think part of the joy of art music is really playing with the cues surrounding genre and melding them together."
"Katrina Ballads" was given its first performance at the 2007 Piccolo Spoleto Festival, in Charleston, S.C. It received its New York premiere in 2008. In 2009, it was included in the New York City Opera's VOX Festival. Also in 2009, the work became the recipient of the Gaudeamus Prize for composition.
A theatrical production of the piece, incorporating a film by Bill Morrison, was given its debut at New York's (le) Poisson Rouge in 2010. The film will be a part of this weekend's performances.
Hearne, born in Chicago in 1982, is also active as a singer and conductor. He has been commissioned to write works for the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, and New World Symphony, for the chamber groups Yarn/Wire, the Flux Quartet and eighth blackbird, and for the vocal ensembles Volti, The Crossing, and Roomful of Teeth.
He attended the Manhattan and Yale Schools of Music, where his teachers included Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis, Ezra Laderman, David Lang, Nils Vigeland and Julia Wolfe. He is currently on the composition faculty of the University of Southern California.
"Katrina is something that I know a lot of people experienced on their own," he says. "We all experienced it. It's something that's a big part of our culture. I'm just very sensitive to the idea that 'Katrina Ballads' is about making the people who experienced that tragedy characters. It's really not about that at all. It's sort of about the way that we, as people who don't live in New Orleans, how we looked at this event from afar. It's really more a piece about the media or Washington than it is piece about New Orleans."
For a full schedule of the week's events, visit www.tcnj.edu/katrinaballads.
IF YOU GO
"Katrina Ballads"
What: X Trigger performs Ted Hearne's "Katrina Ballads"
When: Friday, 8 p.m.; Saturday, 1 p.m. (composer lecture Friday, 12:30 p.m.)
Where: Mayo Concert Hall, The College of New Jersey, 2000 Pennington Road, Ewing Township
How much: Free, but tickets required
Contact: www.tcnj.edu/boxoffice, or 609-771-2065
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