Experimental Music Video
Released: 2019
Runtime: 5 mins
director/editor/archivist
Seth Gadsden
music & lyrics
Ted Hearne
Mark Doten
Complex Keys is an experimental music video featuring a song from Ted Hearne's album "The Source." The protagonist is Chelsea Manning, the US Army Private who infamously leaked hundreds of thousands of classified military documents to WikiLeaks and their media partners in 2010.
“Complex Keys prompts dinner table conversation. It offers a fresh model of how opera and musical theater can tackle contemporary issues: not with documentary realism - film and television have that covered - but with ambiguity, obliquity, and even sheer confusion.”
— Zachary Woolfe, The New York Times
This composition of found footage detached from a human perspective explores and approximates the contrasting landscapes of Manning’s birth state of Oklahoma and the Greater Middle East where she was stationed with the U.S. military. Tornadoes, drones, vast dheserts, explosions, suburban grids and minaret-dotted landscapes offer an increasingly agitated and disturbed look into conflict. The intermixing landscapes distorted on screen evoke the anxieties induced by the open, unfiltered access and exchange of disturbing, disconnected and often personal media available online.
The music is composed from a litany of primary sources including Twitter feeds, cable news interviews, chat transcripts and declassified military reports. The text of this data-obsessed new work culled and arranged by librettist Mark Doten, sets Manning's words and sections of the classified material known as the Iraq War Logs and the Afghan War Diary. The Source premiered at the 2014 BAM Next Wave Festival, performed at LA Opera and San Francisco Opera, and was released as an album on New Amsterdam Records in October 2015.
