Ted was the music director for the premiere of David Lang's opera Anatomy Theatre (performed by ICE), the premiere of Michael Gordon's Lightning at Our Feet at the 2008 Next Wave Festival at BAM, and assistant musical director for Lang's The Difficulty of Crossing a Field. In the coming year, he will be conducting an Opera IHOS production of Constantine Koukias's Prayer Bells, and the premiere of a new ballet by Bryan Senti at the Brooklyn Lyceum. In his work with New York's Red Light Ensemble, Ted has conducted works by Gerard Grisey, Beat Fürrer, and Salvatore Sciarrino, alongside many premieres by young American composers.

Ted is Artistic Director of Yes is a World, a nonprofit organization working to promote peace and social change through musical diversity and the collaboration of young artists. Since their inception in January 2002, Yes is a World has produced seven performances integrating music and text from different artistic traditions, including a production of Tony Kushner's one-act play, Only We Who Guard the Mystery Shall Be Unhappy, and Kiss the Speaker Wire, an exploration of protest music from America and South Africa. Thanks to a generous grant from the Henry J. Kaiser Family Foundation, Yes is a World most recently produced Body Soldiers, a concert about the ways South Africans are using choral music in the fight against HIV-AIDS.

Ted holds degrees from the Manhattan School of Music and Yale School of Music. He has studied composition with Julia Wolfe, Nils Vigeland, Martin Bresnick, Aaron Jay Kernis and David Lang. He was a composition fellow at the Bang on a Can Summer Institute 2004, and served as adjunct faculty at Manhattan School of Music from 2004-2006. He is recipient of the ASCAP Morton Gould Prize, the Charles Ives Scholarship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, and will be in residence at the MacDowell Colony in Fall 2009. Ted sings regularly with the choir of St. Mary the Virgin (New York), and recently premiered the role of Justin Timberlake in Jacob Cooper's opera Timberbrit. More information about Ted Hearne can be found at his website - www.tedhearne.com
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A day later, Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert ruminates on the city of New Orleans: “A lot of that place should be bulldozed.”

A heated exchange between Anderson Cooper and Senator Mary Landrieu was seen live and immediately archived on YouTube.*

President Bush touches down on the Gulf Coast the next day and utters the emblematic words that would echo into posterity and prove impossible to live down: “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.”*

The story is told of those left in New Orleans, from their perception of that familiar phrase heard the morning after—“New Orleans dodged a bullet.”—to the scene of hundreds of citizens waiting for several nights on the bridge over the Mississippi River, refused entry to the neighboring suburb of Gretna, threatened by police, and afraid to return to the dangerous streets of the city in a state of emergency.

Evacuees who eventually made it to Houston are welcomed by former First Lady Barbara Bush, who remarked while visiting the Superdome: “So many of the people in this arena are underprivileged anyway; this is working very well for them.”

Late in the week, hip-hop artist Kanye West goes off-book on a live telethon for Katrina aid, struggling to put into words the widening racial gulf Katrina had come to expose, and signaling an important moment for those who could no longer accept a filtered spin on a national tragedy.

Finally, the words of 18-year old New Orleans resident Ashley Nelson close the opera, as she recounts her experience with the flood, speaks of starvation and hallucination, and defiantly delivers a pointed question to the President himself.
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