Ted Hearne’s oratorio, “The Source,“ released as album

Composer Ted Hearne, a faculty member of the USC Thornton Composition department, has released a new album of his oratorio, “The Source.” Built around short samples of spoken language, snippets of popular music, and disjointed instrumental riffs, the 2014 work examines the experience of US Army Private Chelsea Manning, who infamously leaked classified military documents to WikiLeaks. Librettist Mark Doten culled Manning’s transcripts and juxtaposed them with US Defense Department documents.

Reviewing “The Source” for The Nation, David Hadju said that “It is a refutation of literal meaning, an assault on sense. It evokes our time, the age of atomized digitized information, more potently than any piece of music I’ve heard.”