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For The Love of Charles Mingus

from Hazy Heart Pump by Ted Hearne

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FOR THE LOVE OF CHARLES MINGUS
notes by Anne Leilehua Lanzilotti

"Last and least is me. Mingus. I wrote the music for dancing and listening. It is true music with much and many of my meanings."
Charles Mingus, The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady (1963)

Inspired by Mingus’s album The Black Saint and the Sinner Lady, Ted’s For the Love of Charles Mingus “imagines some echo of that artifact living and breathing under layers of distortion and interference.” Written for six violins, the work begins with a fast downward motion in all the voices, as though we are falling into a bed of sound. Beneath it, we uncover a hushed groove.

The subtitle of the second track on Black Saint is “Hearts’ Beat and Shades in Physical Embraces.” Ted writes in the score for the players to make a “hazy heart pump sound”—a low, barely pitched glissandi played with a “light and dusty” bow. This underlying rhythm references the compositional technique Mingus uses in the opening of his album. In a recent interview, Ted said:

"I love that opening where Mingus is really playing with the perceived downbeat. What first sounds like a simple pattern in 4 is soon recontextualized in a totally other way. So I was trying to capture that essence of rhythmic multiplicity and simultaneity, but also to fill in that frame with other sounds, sounds you wouldn’t hear in Mingus."

These “other sounds” are breathy, earthy—the sounds of touching, rubbing, stolen breaths. Ted asks for “throaty” sounds and requires the violinists to play all the way up the neck of the instrument, behind the bridge, and on various parts of the body of the instrument. The violin writing is sensuous, messy, sticky.

For this album, Miki-Sophia Cloud recorded all the violin parts. This means that these six voices are all projections of one person. When we dance with others are we projecting our own heartsound onto them? When we interact with a person are we ever hearing their voice fully? Is the way we think of them just a reflection of what we want to hear from them? Ted writes in his program note for the work that the sounds of the piece are overheard:

Like the sound of voices singing from inside a church when you’re passing on the street, or a song you’re barely picking up on a distant radio signal, you are drawn to imagine this music in a more complete form than you can actually hear. But you know it’s there.

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from Hazy Heart Pump, released October 25, 2019
Miki-Sophia Cloud, violin

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Ted Hearne Los Angeles, California

Ted Hearne is a composer, singer and bandleader.

The New York Times has praised. 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." ... more

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