Ted Hearne was born and raised in Chicago, Illinois, where he was a member of the Chicago Children's Choir and graduate of Whitney M. Young Magnet High School. He moved to New York in 2000 and has attended the Manhattan School of Music and Yale School of Music. Hearne's oratorio “Katrina Ballads”, an hour-long work about the media’s response to Hurricane Katrina received widespread acclaim after it was premiered at Charleston's Spoleto Festival in 2007.^[2][3][4] His oratorio The Source, about Chelsea Manning, sets text from leaked military documents and was premiered at the Brooklyn Academy of Music.^[5] His third oratorio Place, written in collaboration with Saul Williams and the director Patricia McGregor, was premiered digitally in 2020 as Place: Quarantine Edition.^[6] The album version of Place was also released in 2020 and was nominated for two Grammy Awards.^[7]

Hearne has been commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic, San Francisco Symphony, A Far Cry, pianist Timo Andres, singer-songwriter Gabriel Kahane and other musicians. Hearne has become known for writing in a wide range of contemporary-music styles, and has collaborated with a diverse group of musicians, most notably Erykah Badu, with whom he created an evening-length piece for Badu to perform with the Brooklyn Philharmonic,^[8] J.G. Thirlwell, with whom he created chamber-music arrangements of Thirlwell's electronic project Manorexia,^[9] and electronic/noise musician Philip White, whom with he performs as R We Who R We.^[10] Hearne has also worked with jazz musician Rene Marie, poet Dorothea Lasky, the JACK Quartet, harpist/composer Zeena Parkins^[11] and conductor Alan Pierson,^[12] and his music has been performed at the Brooklyn Academy of Music (BAM), (Le) Poisson Rouge, Amsterdam’s Muziekgebouw, and Carnegie Hall.^[13]

Hearne is the recipient of the 2009 Gaudeamus Prize in Music Composition,^[14] and the 2014 New Voices Residency from publisher Boosey and Hawkes and the San Francisco Symphony.^[15] In 2018 he was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize in music.^[16] He is currently on the Composition faculty at the USC Thornton School of Music.

Hearne's music is known for juxtaposing diverse styles,^[17] and for its often overtly political content.^[18] The New York Times has noted Hearne for his “topical, politically sharp-edged works,” ^[15] and has called his compositional style “nuanced, elliptical and elusive.” ^[19]

Hearne has performed as a vocalist in several of his own projects, including Katrina Ballads and R WE WHO R WE, and has also performed in works by other contemporary composers. He played the role of Justin Timberlake in Jacob Cooper's opera Timberbrit,^[20] and performed at the Ecstatic Music Festival as part of Timo Andres’s Work Songs.^[21] Time Out Chicago has called Hearne a "vocal hellion."^[10] He is known for his extreme range and for mixing vocal techniques from different styles, including abrupt register changes, rapid speaking, screaming, rapping, falsetto and crooning.

Hearne is an active conductor of contemporary music. He has worked as a conductor with many ensembles in New York, including the Red Light Ensemble, Bang on a Can, Wet Ink Ensemble, Ne(x)tworks and the International Contemporary Ensemble.^[11][22][23]

• 2009 Gaudeamus Prize^[24]
• 2009 and 2013 Charles Ives Prize^[25]
• 2009 and 2012 Morton Gould Young Composer Award^[26][27]
• 2013 Music Alive Residency Award^[28]
• 2014 New Voices Residency for Composers^[29]

• 2010 – Katrina Ballads (New Amsterdam)
• 2010 – J. G. Thirwell: Manorexia: 'The Mesopelagic Wars' (Tzadik)^[30]
• 2013 – R WE WHO R WE (New Focus) with Philip White^[31]
• 2014 – The Law of Mosaics (Crier) with Andrew Norman and Far Cry^[32]
• 2015 – The Source (New Amsterdam)^[33]
• 2016 – Outlanders (New Amsterdam)^[34]
• 2017 – Sound from the Bench (Cantaloupe Music)^[35]
• 2019 – Hazy Heart Pump (New Focus)^[36]
• 2020 – Place (New Amsterdam)^[37]

• official website.