Singing History—Politics of Idiom and Genre in Ted Hearne’s Music(al)-Theatre

David Roesner*

Abstract

In his productions, The Source (2014) and over and over vorbei nicht vorbei (2024), composer Ted Hearne deals with explicitly historio-political subjects and the memories of violent past(s). The pieces explore questions of documentation and representation, the authentic and the ‘fake’, the virtual and the real. This article examines how Hearne and his collaborators deconstruct political content, how they (re-)arrange, compose, and stage it using an eclectic mix of styles, employing various vocal characteristics, and staging words, video, and music in unconventional arrangements. Their productions thus foster empathetic acts of witnessing (see Kopf 2009), which I suggest to be a key characteristic of Hearne’s works.

Keywords: Ted Hearne, music theatre, history, politics, witnessing

Introduction

One of the first things to note about American composer Ted Hearne (*1982), is that his work is not easily categorised. It is often described as eclectic, innovative and fluid regarding genre.^[1] The brackets in my title are an expression of this genre-defiance, even though I suspect Hearne would call his works neither music theatre nor musical theatre. But in conjuring up both the former with its operatic tradition, but also the experimental innovations from the 1960s onwards—“serious” festivals, commissions, scores and publishers—, and the equally clichéd connotations of the latter—Broadway, West End and “frivolous” entertainment—I try to point at a perceived tension, which I will come back to in this article.

Hearne himself offers a similarly ambiguous descriptor by calling one of the works this article features a “modern‑day oratorio” (The Source, 2014—he also used this description for Katrina Ballads from 2007)—thus hinting, on the one hand, at the tradition of “oratorio” as a genre with choir, soloist(s) and orchestra, involving narrative and the potential for scenic elements, but being usually presented as a concertante performance in concert hall or church settings. On the other hand, it breaks with the tradition by being “modern-day”: both in terms of its contemporary, historical, social and political but non-religious subject matter, and through employing a compositional style that gives some of its formulas a significant update, incorporating elements from classical music, jazz, rock, electronic music and hip-hop.

Rather than attempting a holistic portrait, I am interested at taking Ted Hearne’s work as an incentive to explore a particular constellation, which is not very common in contemporary music(al) theatre: interweaving history and its (re-)presentation with a mix of musical styles that straddles different idioms of music in a unique way seeking to destabilize any certainty we might have about what we call “history” or, in fact, “music.”

Based on the two case studies, I will focus on three key elements, which, I suggest, are central to Hearne’s approach to history in music performance. These can be characterised as:

a deconstructing use of historical documents as material for composition rather than presenting a story with sung characters;
the already mentioned polystylistic mix of musical idioms, that explicitly questions the history and politics of their traditional segregation into “high” and “low” (Savran 2009), popular and serious, and thus in the context of the USA: Black and White. It deconstructs their binarity rather than re-affirming it.
a juxtaposition of music performance with video, highlighting acts of witnessing.

The two works I will refer to are The Source (New York 2014) and over and over vorbei nicht vorbei (Berlin 2024), both collaborations with director Daniel Fish, who has also directed musical theatre classics such as Candide (Lyon 2022) and Oklahoma on Broadway (2019).

Deconstructing History

By using the word “deconstruction,“ I am already involving a portmanteau word, in other words: a hybrid (of destruction and construction). In the tradition of this concept’s most influential proponent, Jacques Derrida, “deconstruction” is inextricably linked to the notion of “difference.” I will not attempt to summarise Derrida in the space given in this contribution—this has been done expertly elsewhere (see e.g. Royle; Lüdemann). But it is worth pointing out a few select notions associated with his writings, which I find relevant in relation to Ted Hearne’s works:

Firstly the idea, that deconstruction is a “practice of reading” (Lüdemann 27) and an eminently political undertaking. It is meant, as Derrida puts it, “not to remain enclosed in purely speculative, theoretical, academic discourses but rather [ …] to aspire to something more consequential, to change things and to intervene in an efficient and responsible […] way” (Derrida cit. in Lüdemann XIII). Deconstruction does this “by contesting the authority of linguistics, language, and logocentrism” (Derrida cit. in Lüdemann 26). We will find this exercised very directly in Hearne’s works.

Secondly, the concept of deconstruction contests, as Catherine Belsey puts it, “that meaning is an effect of language, not its cause” (79). Meaning also always depends on difference, according to Derrida, an idea that is also quite tangible in the libretti, as we will see.

Thirdly, the notion of “trace” and the discovery of the “other in the self-same” therein (Belsey 83) applies, I would argue, to Hearne’s use of samples and musical citations.

And, finally, the assertion, encapsulated in Derrida’s neologism “différance,” meaning both to differ and to defer (see Royle 62), points us to the enigmatic in Hearne’s work: the impression that meaning arises not merely from othering, but also “from the pushing away and postponing of finding the signified in the signifier” (Belsey 83).

So, how does this actually play out in the two works? The Source is a form of documentary music theatre based on the hundreds of thousands of secret documents from the so-called Iraq war logs and on the chat between the US soldier Bradley (now: Chelsea) Manning and the hacker Adrian Lamo, with whom Manning discussed the publication of the documents in 2010 via the WikiLeaks platform. The libretto does not attempt to present the immense flood of documents in an even remotely representative way, nor to tell Manning’s story in a coherent manner. Instead, Hearne and his librettist Mark Doten, seek out almost poetic motifs, individual images and isolated sentences that can awaken associations and subjective resonances. Themes such as military or hacker jargon, Manning’s gender identity crisis, the ethics of whistleblowing or asymmetric warfare are alluded to, usually in just a few words. The associative moment is reinforced on the one hand by the deliberately eclectic music, which quotes and contrapuntally interweaves a variety of idioms, and on the other by the use of sound samples from well-known pieces of popular culture such as Jerome Kern’s “Smoke Gets in Your Eyes” (1933) or the Dixie Chicks’ “Easy Silence” (2006).

This is exemplified quite clearly in the following short excerpt of the second track “Oh the Shark,“ which makes heavy use of samples, such as quoting a recording of Clay Aiken‘s 2010 rendition of Bertolt Brecht/Kurt Weill’s “Mack the Knife“ (“Die Moritat von Mackie Messer,” 1928). At a glance, this seems to merely leap off associatively from the word “shark”, which is included not only in the song, but also in statements from the war logs like these: “1st Platoon/Aco/1st STB was traveling north on Route Shark when an IED detonated on their convoy“ or “Tiger Shark 57 has been pushed to support,” both quoted in the libretto (Doten 1–2).

Using the above-mentioned idea that “meaning is an effect of language, not its cause,” what seems to be a mere association here, is really a play on the evocative image of the shark, we have come to read as an effective, unflinching natural predator: applied to the criminal Maceath by Brecht/Weill but in the war logs a testament to an oddly inconsistent use of a word that merely evokes a vague combative feeling. A “route” is Shark and a support system is even further specified as the large and statistically particularly lethal “tiger shark.” But does this refer to a military equipment (such as the F-5 Tigershark fighter aircraft) or does the file reference the liquid support of “Velier Royal Navy Tiger Shark Rum 57,18,” an expensive Jamaican Rum?

NYT Critic Zachary Woolfe describes the result of these techniques of sampling and layering as a “powerful meditation on our recent moment in history” —a meditation that is particularly thought-provoking and disturbing due to its focus on the misconduct of US soldiers made public by Manning’s leaks, including in the form of “[c]ollateral murder” (NYT title for one of the damning videos) of civilians.

“Collateral Murder” (2007). *New York Times* Multimedia, posted 24 January 2010

In over and over, the libretto—now complied by the composer himself—is similar and different. Similar, in that it is also a bricolage of found material, which it then often deconstructs to the point of extreme fragmentation, rendering it evocative rather than explanatory. Different, as the libretto reconfigures its materials and juxtaposes new and old, US American and German sources and histories—in particular songs from the Hitler Youth, imagery from Concentration camps, as well as racist songs, such as the Confederates’ unofficial hymn “I Wish I Was in Dixie’s Land” (1859), and footage from the events surrounding the lynching of Emmett Till in Mississippi in 1955.^[2] While Hearne himself refers to his work as a “collage” (see below), the notion of “bricolage” as introduced by Claude Lévi-Strauss in 1962 in his book La pensée sauvage [The Savage Mind, 1966] seems to capture what Hearne does better: In a collage, found materials are assembled planfully into a new whole. While in a bricolage, according to Lévi-Strauss, there is also the “new arrangement of elements” (13), there is, however, a more ongoing sense of a “wild” and improvised but resourceful process, the “continual reconstruction from the same materials” (13) and the creation of “structures by means of events” (15). Bricolage is an engagement with a “a heterogeneous repertoire, which, even if extensive, is nevertheless limited” (11). The bricoleur, in dialogue with the repertoire, then “interrogates all the heterogeneous objects of which his treasury is composed to discover what each of them could “signify” and so contribute to the definition of a set which has yet to materialize” (12). Both the process and the result can be considered the bricolage.

In over and over, the “repertoire” consists explicitly of objects that evoke cultures of violent collective memories, and the creative team did not shy away from confronting very controversial source material. Already in The Source they used classified documents that had been made public by Wikileaks leading to the imprisonment of Chelsea Manning and the US’s indictment of Julian Assange. In contrast, the controversial songs used in over and over are well-known but so politically tainted, that they are either now widely rejected due the racism they betray („Dixie“) or even prohibited under German law⁠ under §86a Strafgesetzbuch “Dissemination of Means of Propaganda of Unconstitutional Organizations“ („Vorwärts! Vorwärts!“). So, here, the ban is not trying to suppress historical awareness but prevent a repetition of history by people who are unaware of what songs and symbols mean, but not unaware that they exist. The use in works of art is covered by respective laws on the freedom of artistic expression. So, at first sight, one might assume that Hearne’s approach to history and its documents might fall under what in German would be called—as so often with one big compound noun—Vergangenheitsbewältigung, or: “coming to terms with the past.”

Hearne does not, however, give us clear instructions on how to come to terms with the past. Instead, he confronts us with a deconstruction in Derrida’s sense; a term Derrida often preferred to define by what it is not: It was not a method, a critique or an analysis. Perhaps one could describe the way Hearne and his collaborators present us with the highly varied materials as both a defamiliarizing dissection and an associative flooding: We get snippets (or perhaps more fittingly: “samples”) of materials, stripped of their contexts, but reassembled and then thrown at us in overwhelming layers and repetitions. This generates spaces of emotional memory: while as listeners we might be frustrated when attempting to fit all the pieces together coherently, the many samples, time capsules of memories that they are, perhaps trigger complex emotional responses in us: rejection, empathy, shame, nostalgia—at times even joy.

Let us look at a few examples: Hearne often disassembles and reassembles the lyrics of the songs he uses in over and over following alternative systems of structure. Words and short phrases from the “Alabama Song” by Brecht/Weill (1930), for example, are listed in alphabetical order (see figure 2); Hearne also sometimes works with visual structures, like a meshing/zip-like arrangement (see figure 3) and enforces dialogues between song-fragments that may only have the point in time in common, when they could be found in the respective pop charts as in this example (see figure 4) between Whitney Houston’s innocent “girl adores boy” song “How will I know?” (1985) and Austrian eccentric Falco’s creepy ballad “Jeanny” (1985), which caused one the biggest scandals in Germanophone pop history, as the songs seemed to be told from the perspective of a male predator about a girl he may have raped and killed. So: very different kinds of “trauma,” it seems, are being invoked and hinted at here.

These compositional practices—both with respect to libretto and music, resonate strongly, I would argue, with what Derrida listed as some of the “building materials” of deconstruction:

“That is what deconstruction is made of: not the mixture but the tension between memory, fidelity, the preservation of something that has been given to us, and, at the same time, heterogeneity, something absolutely new, and a break.” (Derrida and Caputo 6)

The resulting bricolage forms a new connection of highly disparate parts, the enigmatic relations of which we as audiences struggle to resolve into one clear meaning but instead need to experience with a range of emotions.

Politics of Idiom

Heterogeneity is a good descriptor for Hearne’s musical language as well—probably better than “eclectic,” not least because in certain contexts or traditions “eclectic” still has a negative aftertaste, bearing the scars of being used as a derogatory term (Kennedy et al.). Hearne employs this polystylistic musical language very deliberately not (just) as an exciting aesthetic surface, but as a political attitude.

In an on-stage conversation I hosted together with Jörn Peter Hiekel at the recent Munich Biennale—Festival for new music theatre (6 June 2024) with the composer about his piece Royal Wedding and Ballet premiered as one of the festival productions, I asked him how he responds to what I perceive to be a particularly German tradition of segregating compositional styles and genealogies into “serious music” (Ernste Musik) and “popular music” (Unterhaltungsmusik) (see Hagestedt), since it strikes me, that his work seems to ignore these distinctions with ease and “jouissance,” to borrow Roland Barthes’ phrase (10).

Hearne responded, according to my notes (Hearne 2024c), that these were “coded references,” explaining that the ideas around what constitutes “genre” are descriptions by academic cultures, in which Eurocentrism and ideas of White supremacy had filtered through centuries of assigning value to particular forms of cultural expression. He added that in the US, “popular” in fact often referred to music from a formerly enslaved population. The lineage of African music in the diaspora had developed, Hearne said, as an “American Music:” highly sophisticated music that values different things. He described the resistance in certain institutions to include these types of music, due to who makes this music, and the hierarchies which are present in these different strains of cultural thought.

He had developed this argument already in an interview he gave as part of the online promotion of the Berlin production over and over:

“I am interested in how cultural and/or ideological information is conveyed through music and how this can change over time. Different languages are brought into a dialog in this piece: German and English, past and present, the archival with the creative-recombinant. The musical material also enters into an exchange with the popular song. The result is a through-composed collage that incorporates different musical styles and practices, with remixing playing a role, as much of the music is based on historical material. The musicians have different aesthetic backgrounds and their (un)familiarity with the respective styles also shapes the music.” (Hearne 2024b)

To me, this echoed an in-depth analysis by Philip Ewell on “Music Theory and the White Racial Frame” (Ewell) which was later summarised and popularised by YouTuber Adam Neely in his video “Music Theory and White Supremacy“ (1,7m subscribers, 160k Likes and nearly 40.000 comments at the time of writing). In his article, Ewell dissects the “core beliefs” within ”the many mythologies of music theory’s white racial frame” (par. 2.4), which underpin the dominant, exclusive, often elitist and definitely “White” approach to music theory teaching which at the same time legitimize approaches, which marginalize or trivialize non-White musical traditions.

Adam Neely: “Music Theory and White Supremacy“

Hearne’s compositional style and his deliberate and sustained collaborations with Afro-American writers and musicians can thus be seen as a way of critically engaging with Euro-American legacies of composing, with politics of style, and hegemonies of institutions.

Staging Witnessing

A third aspect worth analysing—after looking at libretto and score—is the staging, which is authored by the same team for both productions and follows a similar concept. While there are differences in the audience and performer placement—with two groups of spectators facing each other with the four singers sitting amongst them in The Source (see figure 5) and a more traditional proscenium arch setting in over and over—there is always one or more large screens onto which video material is projected. In addition to short excerpts of text and photos, it is mainly human faces that can be seen here in close-up, all filmed in the same setting looking at something on a screen themselves.

Fig. 5: Staging arrangement in *The Source*. Photo: Stefan Cohen

Daniel Fish explains in the programme notes to The Source: “Jim Findlay [the video artist] and I filmed nearly 100 people as they watched a very small part of what Manning exposed. The resulting footage makes up the main visual element of the production.” In over and over this principle is similar, except that here it is the artists themselves, who were filmed watching documentary material.

Towards the end of each performance, the audience gets to see what the filmed citizens and artists had watched. In The Source, it is an approximately eight-minute excerpt from a so-called gun camera video published on WikiLeaks and still available on YouTube or the NYT website (see Video 1). The video shows the military deployment of a US helicopter from which Reuters journalists and Iraqi civilians were shot dead. The music is silent for this sequence. Only the original sound of the video can be heard. When the performance ends after this video and the audience lights come on, it takes a full 40 seconds (in the performance recording) for the audience to start applauding.

It is a deliberately staged moment of pushing the audience off balance—and here, I would argue, the lack of music, the lack of a reassuring genre framework adds to the effect.

In over and over, which as I mentioned was invested in the juxtaposition of German and US ways of remembering and confronting their violent pasts, the video, which we assume the filmed faces see, is a montage and superimposition of two distinct documentary sources: footage from Alain Resnais’ 1955 Nuit et brouillard (Night and Fog), which depicts the Nazi concentration camp Auschwitz, and footage from the reporting on the case of Emmett Till, who was murdered the same year, 1955, by racists. His mother’s decision to show his mutilated body in an open casket and the subsequent shocking acquittal of his murderers caused national attention and outrage and helped initiate the Civil Rights Movement. In contrast to The Source, this section is stirringly scored first with the hymn-like “Don’t let go” and in the end with rising repetitions of the line “How will I know,” sung by Eliza Bagg, Tom Erik Lie and Isaiah Robinson, who had tears streaming down his face throughout the finale in the performance I attended (see Video 3).

Over and over thus ends with a question: “How will I know?“—lifted from the Whitney Houston song about a girl’s uncertainly whether her boy crush will be returned. It is utterly transformed into the expression of a fundamental uncertainty: How can we “know“ our history, how can we face it, how can we prevent its repetition? As Lüdemann writes in her discussion of Derrida: “[…] new beginnings both in politics and in philosophy are difficult to make without working-through—or deconstructing—what has been handed down from the past. If this does not occur, repressed elements of history may return and change what was supposed to be new into involuntary and unrecognized repetition” (131–32). I would argue that this is precisely what Hearne does in this work.

“How Will I Know”. Excerpt from over and over vorbei nicht vorbei (2024a). Video: Jörn Hartmann

In addition to using repetition very consciously both with respect to historical materials, some of which even deemed unrepeatable in real world contexts, and by employing compositional techniques of loops, samples, recurring motifs and only gradually transforming repetitions of lines of text, Hearne introduces another layer of “working-through” the past: In both performances, the installation-like staging provides us with a complex constellation of witnessing. As mentioned, during most of each performance, what we see on the video screen(s) are faces in close-up: individuals who witness something and whose expressions we try to read. The videos we get to watch in the end are also mediated forms of witnessing: we see historic documents, in which, in contrast, people have been rendered faceless. In The Source, the low image resolution of the gun camera makes the civilians’ faces unrecognizable; they are not individuals, only “enemy combatants” for the purpose of the military operation. In over and over the concentration camps are shown as machines turning human beings into piles of bodies, and the footage of Emmett Hill shows the completely disfigured face of a once beautiful Black boy.

Daniel Fish thus stages a reflection on what Martina Kopf called “the potential of art as form of empathetic witnessing” (Kopf). As the audience, we observe others being filmed while watching documents, which capture images from historic events, while also watching performers, who sing written excerpts from further documents and who themselves pay witness by performing. On top of this, we as audiences, at least in The Source,also watch other audience members and are being watched. This creates a “chain of witnesses” (Felman), as Shoshana Felman has described such constellations. In addition, we can distinguish different levels of witnessing in this chain, borrowing from Dori Laub’s psychoanalytical theory of trauma: He identifies:

“(T)he level of being a witness to oneself within the experience; the level of being a witness to the testimonies of others; and the level of being a witness to the process of witnessing itself.” (75)

The seemingly simple, one-directional act of witnessing is thus deconstructed into a critical, self-referential and unfinalisable process. By making us witnesses and observers of witnessing, both productions urge us to look and take responsibility with our gaze (see also Roesner 2019).

Conclusion

In offering this short impression on Ted Hearne’s work, I hope I have been able to extrapolate a few configurations of how musical theatre, staging conventions, genre expectations and historical documents might be used to engage with political issues—not just by presenting political material, but by composing theatre in a political way (Deck and Sieburg).

Roger Ebert is often quoted with his attribution that film is a “machine that creates empathy” (in: Holmes). This statement is certainly true and can be extended in two ways: Firstly, musical theatre has often proven to be an equally potent empathy machine and, secondly, the mixture of cognition and emotion, that music theatre is able to stir in us, actually extends well beyond empathy. In being confronted with our histories, we may think and feel also sadness, shame, relief, disgust, rage, confusion, solidarity and responsibility. Being empathetic is only a start. Acting on the range of emotions and insights music theatre can evoke, should be the next step. In times, in which fascism, colonialism and racism rear their ugly heads again in shocking disregard of historical awareness and in a complete absence of moral integrity, this is more pressing than ever.

Endnotes

^[1] See Roesner (2017); Rebstock; and Zavros for further discussions on genre fluidity in contemporary music theatre.

^[2] Many thanks to Ted Hearne for generously providing me with valuable materials, to dramaturg Julia Jordà Stoppelhaar for allowing me to read her notes from her introduction to the performance and to the peer reviewer of this article, who offered excellent and highly constructive feedback.

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*David Roesner is Professor for Theatre and Music-Theatre at the LMU Munich. He previously worked at the Universities of Hildesheim, Exeter, and Kent. In 2003 he published his first monograph on Theater als Musik (Narr), followed by publications on Theatre Noise (with Lynne Kendrick, CSP, 2011), Composed Theatre (with Matthias Rebstock, Intellect, 2012), Musicality in Theatre (Ashgate 2014) and Theatermusik (Theater der Zeit 2019). He led a DFG research project on contemporary theatre music (see here) from 2018-2022 and also works as a theatre musician and sound designer. For a full list of publications and projects see here.