Composer Ted Hearne sets Chelsea Manning’s leaks to music – SFGate

By Ryan Kost, San Francisco Chronicle

Ted Hearne composed The Source, a combination of opera and music theater that draws its materials from Chelsea Manning, who leaked government data.

Ted Hearne composed The Source, a combination of opera and music theater that draws its materials from Chelsea Manning, who leaked government data.

Chelsea Mannings struggles with gender identity and her role in a war she wanted no part of are explored in The Source, a combination of opera and musical theater by Ted Hearne.

Chelsea Mannings struggles with gender identity and her role in a war she wanted no part of are explored in The Source, a combination of opera and musical theater by Ted Hearne.

Composer Ted Hearne sets Chelsea Mannings leaks to music

Ever since WikiLeaks profile began to blow up internationally, composer Ted Hearne had been considering how he might create some art with it. He was interested in the way the organization had situated itself around the very basic concept of freedom of information and the potential parallels around the digitization of music and peer-to-peer sharing.

Then, news about the arrest of Chelsea Manning, one of the biggest leakers of government data in U.S. history, broke, his frame shifted, and near the end of 2011, Hearne and librettist Mark Doten took a trip to Maryland to attend Mannings pretrial hearing.

That was sort of the moment we realized the piece was about her, Hearne says over the phone from Los Angeles. The way in which she held herself was totally different than the way shed been portrayed in the media up until that point.

What the two came up with was a piece that samples from the Department of Defense cables Manning was ultimately convicted of leaking as well as the chat logs, published on Wired.com, between her and the man that would go on to turn her in.

The piece explores not just the leaks, then, but the struggle Manning was going through with her own identity both as it related to her gender shes a transgender woman and her role in a war that she seemed to want no part of, all of which came up in those chats.

This material which asks the audience to consider their own complicity in what was leaked and the ensuing fallout is presented by four singers (their voices heavily modified, at times, by auto-tune) as projections of some of the leaked footage runs in the background.

As the San Francisco Opera prepares to present the piece beginning Friday, Feb. 24, the work seems as timely as ever. In one of his final acts as president, Barack Obama commuted Mannings sentence, one decried by many as overly long. (I think its incredible that Obama commuted her sentence. Its so amazing, Hearne says. An act of mercy, a real act of mercy.) And now leaks, even if of a somewhat different nature, are taking their toll on the Trump administrations early efforts. This month, they lead to the resignation of Trumps national security adviser.

That Hearne would find space for music in all of the political fallout, hearings and court proceedings that swirled around the Manning leaks may initially feel surprising, but, for him, it was an easy fit.

Hearnes political awakening came about a decade ago, at the age of 22. George W. Bush was waging war and consolidating power, dismantling the rule of law all over the place. At the same time, Hearne was coming into his own as a composer. The two are linked for me.

Indeed, very early on, Hearne won critical acclaim for his oratorio Katrina Ballads, which set primary sources, including television interviews of storm victims, to music. The Source, then, comes from this same place. I think if the questions are honest, then I think it makes a lot of sense to deal with politicized topics, he says.

The Source itself deals mostly with questions more so than answers; the gray areas seem to interest Hearne more than the black or the white. He sees ambiguity in the value of leaks. Thats why I write the piece because I had a lot of questions. And I still have a lot of questions, he says. Its both clear that we over-classify information and clear that WikiLeaks is a political organization with its own goals.

Theres also, Hearne says, an interesting distinction the public likes to make between the sorts of leaks Edward Snowden made leaks that show our privacy is being violated, and by the government no less and was largely celebrated for, and the sorts of leaks Manning was responsible for the kind we might try to ignore because they show us parts of ourselves that are hard to confront and was largely ridiculed for.

Hearne tries to break down dichotomies in the compositions themselves, too, eschewing any genre even if the piece is being presented by the citys Opera. Its more like a video installation, he says at one point. And that is by design. Ive started to think about the distinctions that separate our conceptions of musical genre and the binaries that are tyrannical when we think about style.

You can unspool that even further, of course, and bring it back to Manning, who was breaking her own binaries even as she broke the law. And like that, the music becomes a metaphor, Hearne says, for both gender and right and wrong.

Ryan Kost is a San Francisco Chronicle staff writer. Email: rkost@sfchronicle.com Twitter: @RyanKost

The Source: Friday, Feb. 24, through March 3. $35. Taube Atrium Theater, 401 Van Ness Ave., S.F.

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Composer Ted Hearne sets Chelsea Manning's leaks to music - SFGate