The Crossing Presents World Premiere of Ted Hearne's FARMING Outdoors at Kings Oaks Farm on June 22-25

FOR IMMEDIATE RELEASE
Contact: Leah Rankin | Morahan Arts and Media
leah@morahanartsandmedia.com | 646-378-9386

THE CROSSING PRESENTS WORLD PREMIERE OF
TED HEARNE’S FARMING
OUTDOORS AT KINGS OAKS FARM
ON JUNE 22-25

NY Premiere Held at Caramoor on July 9

View: FARMING Music Video
Created by Peter English, Ted Hearne, and Ashley Tata

“...consistently thrilling” - The New York Times

“[The Crossing] astonished with its accuracy and trademark purity of sound.”
- Philadelphia Inquirer

www.farming.crossingchoir.org

Philadelphia, PA (May 4, 2023) — Grammy Award-winning choir The Crossing presents the world premiere of FARMING, a stirring new work by Ted Hearne directed by Ashley Tata on Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.; Friday, June 23, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.; Saturday, June 24, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.; and Sunday, June 25, 2023 at 7:30 p.m. outdoors at Kings Oaks Farm in Bucks County, PA. Casual, comfortable clothes, layers, and hiking shoes are recommended, and seating will be on wooden benches and similar surfaces.

Written for and commissioned by The Crossing with support from The Pew Center for Arts & Heritage, FARMING is scored for 24 vocalists with guitars, percussion and electronics. Having been in development for four years, FARMING promises to be a major event showcasing Hearne’s trademark stylistic eclecticism, driving rhythms, and explosive energy. What began as an idea to create a piece about food, farming, money, and the environment evolved into a large-scale production about land and its ownership, transfer, and labor, incorporating lighting, sound, and costume design with a six-piece band. Read more about the evolution of FARMING on Donald Nally’s blog.

"When Bezos traveled into space last summer,” said Hearne, “he said the journey was necessary in order to solve all our problems here on Earth. He also thanked Amazon employees for financing it through their labor. With FARMING, we wanted to visualize our own corporation, whose mission falls nothing short of the creation of a new world, and whose employees are literally being milked."

View the FARMING music video created by Peter English, Ted Hearne, and Ashley Tata.

An intellectual audacity runs through FARMING. FARMING tackles the long-tail impact of settler colonialism and its philosophical motivations on agricultural degradation, big tech utopianism, labor alienation, corporate religiosity, and the abstraction of community. Its libretto extensively repurposes and recontextualizes texts, primarily pulled from the letters of colonial-era Quaker businessman (and Pennsylvania namesake) William Penn to and about the Lenape people living on the land he was colonizing, as well as assorted public addresses from Amazon founder Jeff Bezos. In examining the obfuscatory language and ethical contradictions of these texts, Hearne stares into a void of morality and takes heed of the yearning at its core.

FARMING’s music is, itself, daring and purposeful. Auto-tune choirs are twisted into unnatural harmonies as they detail the new human identification capabilities of artificial intelligence (“Is there a human in the picture?” they ask); a CEO’s recursive and contradictory origin story is cast as a mournful Sinatra torch song strewn with digital detritus; and a stack of voices, backed by an accompaniment that evokes a Richard D. James-authored soundtrack to The Jetsons, asks the seemingly self-evident but harrowing question of “What are greens, and how do they work?”

Throughout FARMING, every soulful element of human performance — a beautiful vocal phrase, a touching harmony — is threatened to be enveloped by the sinister application of technological processing. In conjuring this aural trip into the Uncanny Valley, Hearne synthesizes a melange of post-modern musics: Meredith Monk’s pioneering avant vocal ensembles, SOPHIE’s winkingly ersatz and elastic hyperpop, Jockstrap’s digitally damaged balladry, JPEGMAFIA’s information-overload approach to sampling, the caustic auto-tune fantasias of Bon Iver circa 22, A Million, and Daniel Lopatin’s long-running crusade against timbral fascism. While not techno-phobic, FARMING is certainly wary of how deeply intertwined we’ve become with services and tools whose primary purposes are surveillance and advertisement.

FARMING is a work haunted by capitalism and settler colonialism, but it’s also preoccupied with the mythological constructs humans erect to justify their participation in an economy’s unfeeling entropies. In FARMING, Ted Hearne confronts market technology’s ominous encroachment upon humanity’s very being.

Donald Nally adds, “We tell this story in an organically-farmed field. No plastic-wrapped vegetables, no synthetic fertilizers. Just the sounds and smells of living things, growing. Yet, the implied calm of the farm offers striking juxtapositions: the sounds of amplified singing; a heavily electrified band; the words of Penn, Bezos, and a variety of ads that we may feel don’t belong here. But, those words are inescapable. Hearing them in this bucolic landscape – the green, the sun setting, the buzz of insects – in Ted’s insistent and unapologetic settings, sung by the adventurous artists of The Crossing, promises to be revealing and inspiring.”

The free New York premiere performance of FARMING will be held at Caramoor next to the pastoral Sunken Garden on Sunday, July 9, 2023 at 4:00 p.m. with a conversation with Donald, Ted, and Ashley held at 3:00 p.m. A performance of FARMING will also be given at The Big Sing in Haarlem, Netherlands on Tuesday, July 4, 2023.

Performance Details
FARMING
The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor
Thursday, June 22, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.
Friday, June 23, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.
Saturday, June 24, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.
Sunday, June 25, 2023 at 7:30 p.m.
Kings Oaks Farm | 756 Worthington Mill Road | Newtown, PA
Tickets: $30-$90
Link: https://www.farming.crossingchoir.org/

Please contact shannon@crossingchoir.org for special circumstances requiring onsite shuttling.

Program:
Ted Hearne - FARMING (World Premiere)

FARMING
The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor
Sunday, July 9, 2023 at 4:00 p.m.
Caramoor Center for Music and the Arts | 149 Girdle Ridge Road | Katonah, NY 10536
Tickets: Free
Link: https://caramoor.org/event/farming-the-crossing-summer-2023/

Pre-concert conversation with Donald, Ted, and Ashley held at 3:00 p.m.

Program:
Ted Hearne - FARMING (NY Premiere)

Artists:
The Crossing
Donald Nally, conductor
Ashley Tata, director
Nia Easley, designer
Paul Vasquez, sound designer
Carolina Ortiz Herrera, co-lighting designer
Pablo Santiago, co-lighting designer
Rebecca Kanach, costumer
Kate Nelson, stage manager
Rohan Chander, keyboard/electronics
Viva DeConcini, guitar
John Grecia, keyboards
Taylor Levine, guitar
Clara Warnaar, drums/percussion
Ron Wiltrout, drums

About Ted Hearne
Ted Hearne (b.1982, Chicago) is a composer, singer, bandleader and recording artist. Inspired by the overlay of different viewpoints and their sonic possibilities, he creates personal and multi-dimensional works that often explore unconventional interactions of text and music, and are rooted in a sense of inquiry.

The New York Times has praised Mr. Hearne for his "tough edge and wildness of spirit," and "topical, politically sharp-edged works." Pitchfork called Hearne's work "some of the most expressive socially engaged music in recent memory -- from any genre," and Alex Ross wrote in The New Yorker that Hearne's music "holds up as a complex mirror image of an information-saturated, mass-surveillance world, and remains staggering in its impact."

Hearne's Sound From the Bench, a cantata for choir, electric guitars and drums setting texts from U.S. Supreme Court oral arguments and inspired by the idea of corporate personhood, was a finalist for the 2018 Pulitzer Prize. Place – Hearne’s work written with poet Saul Williams and director Patricia McGregor – was nominated for two GRAMMY Awards and was a finalist for the 2021 Pulitzer Prize.

Commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, The Barbican Centre and Beth Morrison Projects, and scored for 18 instrumentalists and 6 vocalists, Place was premiered to critical acclaim in October 2018 in Fall 2018 the BAM Next Wave Festival. “‘Place takes shape in songs that emerge like a graffiti mural as repetitive gestures gradually bloom into vibrant, brash statements in high-volume color. The six singers bring with them deep familiarity with diverse vocal styles… but it was impossible to ignore the presence of the real Mr. Hearne at his command post conducting the musicians, manipulating the sound and driving the auto-da-fé of his own orchestration… It always felt as if Hearne was questioning his own comfort and — in the final moment — his own power” (The New York Times).

Hearne's oratorio The Source sets text from the Iraq and Afghanistan War Logs, along with words by Chelsea Manning (the U.S. Army private who leaked those classified documents to WikiLeaks), and was premiered to rave reviews at the 2014 BAM Next Wave Festival. The New York Times called The Source "a 21st Century masterpiece," and included it on its list of the best classical vocal performances of 2014 and best albums of 2015, noting that the work “offers a fresh model of how opera and musical theater can tackle contemporary issues: not with documentary realism, but with ambiguity, obliquity, and even sheer confusion.” During the 2016-17 season, the original production of The Source (directed by Daniel Fish) was presented by both the LA Opera and San Francisco Opera.

Hearne’s ongoing collaboration with legendary musician Erykah Badu pairs newly composed music with arrangements of Badu’s work for orchestra, and was most recently presented with the Dallas Symphony Orchestra, whom Hearne also conducted. Hearne recently collaborated with theater artist and MacArthur fellow Taylor Mac on an orchestral version of his acclaimed work A 24-Decade History of Popular Music, which opened the 2022 Bergen Festival.

Law of Mosaics, Hearne’s 30-minute piece for string orchestra, has been performed by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony and Los Angeles Philharmonic. His album of the same name, with Andrew Norman and A Far Cry, was named one of The New Yorker’s notable albums of 2014 by Alex Ross.

A charismatic vocalist, Hearne’s newest project is Dorothea, a kaleidoscopic art pop collaboration embodying the tender, pathos-ridden, darkly funny words of poet Dorothea Lasky with synth beats, rhapsodic textures and the heavenly vocals of “Los Angeles-based polymath” Eliza Bagg. He has performed with Philip White as the vocal-electronics duo R WE WHO R WE, whose debut album (New Focus Recordings, 2013) was called “eminently, if weirdly, danceable and utterly gripping.” (Time Out Chicago). Other recent albums of vocal music of various stripes include The Source and Outlanders (New Amsterdam Records) and The Crossing's acclaimed recording of Sound From the Bench (Cantaloupe Music).

Ted Hearne lives in Los Angeles and is a member of the composition faculty at the University of Southern California. Ted's many collaborators include poets Dorothea Lasky and Kemi Alabi, visual artists Sanford Biggers and Rachel Perry, directors Patricia McGregor, and Ashley Tata, and filmmakers Bill Morrison and Peter English, and his works have been conducted by Michael Tilson Thomas, John Adams and Gustavo Dudamel. Recent commissions include orchestral works for the San Francisco Symphony, Los Angeles Philharmonic, chamber works for Eighth Blackbird and Ensemble dal Niente, and vocal works for Conspirare and Roomful of Teeth. Upcoming works include a new work for the Royal Ballet and Pam Tanowitz, and a new opera with Daniel Fish at Komische Oper Berlin to be premiered in February 2024.

About The Crossing
The Crossing is a Grammy-winning professional chamber choir conducted by Donald Nally and dedicated to new music. It is committed to working with creative teams to make and record new, substantial works for choir that explore and expand ways of writing for choir, singing in choir, and listening to music for choir. Many of its nearly 160 commissioned premieres address social, environmental, and political issues.

The Crossing collaborates with some of the world’s most accomplished ensembles and artists, including the New York Philharmonic, Los Angeles Philharmonic, American Composers Orchestra, Lyric Fest, Piffaro, Beth Morrison Projects, Allora & Calzadilla, Bang on a Can, Klockriketeatern, and the International Contemporary Ensemble. Similarly, The Crossing often collaborates with some of the world’s most prestigious venues and presenters, such as the Park Avenue Armory, Annenberg Center for the Performing Arts at the University of Pennsylvania, National Sawdust, David Geffen Hall at Lincoln Center, Disney Hall in Los Angeles, the Cleveland Museum of Art, the Menil Collection in Houston, the Isabella Stewart Gardner Museum in Boston, Haarlem Choral Biennale in The Netherlands, The Finnish National Opera in Helsinki, The Kennedy Center in Washington, Philadelphia Museum of Art, Metropolitan Museum of Art, Zankel Hall at Carnegie Hall, Symphony Space in New York, Winter Garden with WNYC, and Duke, Northwestern, Colgate, and Notre Dame Universities. The Crossing holds an annual residency at the Warren Miller Performing Arts Center in Big Sky, Montana.

With a commitment to recording its commissions, The Crossing has released 30 albums, receiving three Grammy Awards for Best Choral Performance (2018, 2019, 2023), and eight Grammy nominations. The Crossing, with Donald Nally, was the American Composers Forum’s 2017 Champion of New Music. They were the recipients of the 2015 Margaret Hillis Award for Choral Excellence, three ASCAP Awards for Adventurous Programming, and the Dale Warland Singers Commission Award from Chorus America.

Recently, The Crossing has expanded its choral presentation to film, working with Four/Ten Media, in-house sound designer Paul Vazquez of Digital Mission Audio Services, visual artists Brett Snodgrass, Eric Southern, and Steven Bradshaw, and composers David Lang, Paul Fowler, and Michael Gordon on live and animated versions of new and existing works. Lang’s protect yourself from infection and in nature were specifically designed to be performed within the restrictions imposed by the COVID-19 pandemic, during which The Crossing premiered a number of newly-commissioned works for outdoors by Matana Roberts, Wang Lu, and Ayanna Woods.

The Crossing is represented by Alliance Artist Management. All of its concerts are broadcast on WRTI, Philadelphia’s Classical and Jazz public radio station. Learn more at www.crossingchoir.org.

# # #