I had the pleasure of hearing Ted Hearne’s Katrina Ballads live two and a half times last week: one and a half times in New Haven and again last night in New York. It’s an album-length oratorio, of sorts, which mixes instru­men­tal numbers with vocal settings of primary-source texts taken from the week follow­ing Hurri­cane Katrina.

Music that tries to make a polit­i­cal point rarely convinces me— which is probably my personal failing, since the two seem to have gone together since the dawn of time, or at least the dawn of politics. What makes Katrina Ballads surpass the category of polit­i­cal music is that its politics are almost beside the point; it feels more like a work about under­stand­ing than one about propa­ganda. If Dennis Hastert happens to come off as a cold-hearted lunatic, or George W. Bush as a stut­ter­ing block­head, that’s because they actually did that week. Katrina Ballads has a message, certainly, but it’s given to us with admirable perspec­tive and remark­able self­less­ness; I never once felt I was being preached to, or emotion­ally manip­u­lated. (Inci­den­tally, I wonder if the choice of the word “Ballads” has anything to do with Rzewski’s North American Ballads; the last piece of that set, Winns­boro Cotton Mill Blues, is the only other polit­i­cally-moti­vated work I can think of that is as success­ful and affecting.)

Perhaps another reason Katrina Ballads feels so differ­ent from other polit­i­cal music is that the music itself is always the first priority. I’ve always known Ted is a good composer, but what I hadn’t known is that he has the ability, chameleon-like, to blend his style into prac­ti­cally any musical genre that suits his purpose, and he makes them all work together as a consis­tent whole. He sets Barbara Bush’s infamous “This is working very well for them” quote (from an NPR interview—it’s still shocking to hear it) to easy-breezy but harmon­i­cally subver­sive ragtime, Kanye West’s impas­sioned tirade (from a live NBC telethon) to slowly-building gospel/R&B (though it’s not made explicit until the climac­tic line “George Bush doesn’t care about black people”), and Anderson Cooper’s blus­ter­ing anger in high operatic style. Though most of this music is quite acces­si­ble, it never sounds cliché or facile. The instru­men­tal writing is beau­ti­fully handled, skill­fully employ­ing more “new music‑y” tricks (multi­phon­ics, looping pedals, piano-drumming) to serve the greater dramatic purpose.

Of course, the piece wouldn’t be such a hit if the perform­ers weren’t so intense and dedi­cated. Ted’s hand-picked band (includ­ing many Manhat­tan School new-music stal­warts) clearly love the music, and love playing together. The five singers are pitch-perfect, navi­gat­ing Ted’s diffi­cult passages and styl­is­tic shifts with aplomb. Mezzo Abby Fischer was eerily, smarmily composed as Barbara Bush; soprano Allison Semmes was in turn preter­nat­u­rally unflap­pable as Sen. Mary Landrieu, then vulner­a­ble and affect­ing as flood victim Ashley Nelson. Tenor (maybe coun­tertenor? that stuff was pretty high) Isaiah Robinson really stole the show in the Kanye West movement; the climax of the song was an almost joyful release of angry passion. Ted himself took a break from conduct­ing to deliver the virtu­osic “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job”, a Nixon-esque disin­te­gra­tion of the president’s comment to former FEMA head Michael Brown. And baritone Anthony Turner, singing the text of another hurri­cane victim, conveyed utter deso­la­tion and despair in “My wife, I can’t find her body”.

I’m pretty much in awe of Ted right now. He’s expended a tremen­dous amount of time, effort, and money to bring all these people together and perform (and in a couple weeks, record) this huge, diffi­cult piece, which he not only wrote, but also conducts and sings. I think Katrina Ballads has a great future, and I can’t think of anybody better to advocate it than Ted. I hope it makes him famous.