The Crossing Presents World Premiere Of Ted Hearne's FARMING Outdoors at Kings Oaks Farm

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.

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