Hearne, a graduate student at the Yale School of Music, assembled a dozen musicians and four singers at Trinity Lutheran Church on Orange Street Wednesday night for his Katrina Ballads, which set to music some of the most infamous words uttered in the days immediately after Katrina struck on August 29, 2005.

Hearne wrote the music, conducted it, and sang a solo of a three-minute song using just the one sentence President George Bush uttered to his FEMA (Federal Emergency Management Agency) director at the time, Michael Brown; “Brownie, you’re doing a heck of a job.” Click here to listen.

Other immortal statements included then-Speaker of the House Dennis Hastert’s question, “How do you go about rebuilding this city? It doesn’t make sense to me. It looks like a lot of that place could be bulldozed.” Also, the short speech by Kanye West at a Katrina relief telethon that ended with the famous phrase, “George Bush doesn’t care about black people.”

Baritone Anthony Turner (pictured on the left, with Abby Fscher, tenor Isaiah Robinson and sopranoMellissa Hughes) sang the shocked and shocking words of a resident of Biloxi, Mississippi that began, “My wife, I can’t find her body, she gone…I held her hand tight as I could and she told me, ‘You can’t hold me.’”

Shocking in another way was Barbara Bush’s comment that the thousands who sought shelter at the Houston Astrodome were “underprivileged anyway, so this is working very well for them.” Click here to listen to mezzo-soprano Abby Fischer belt out the words set to Texas-swingy music.

In the program’s introduction, Hearne wrote, in part, “It is my hope that setting primary-source texts from the devastating week in 2005 when Katrina hit will help us keep this time active in our memory, challenging us to cut through the spin that followed, and bringing us closer to an understanding of the true aftermath. New Orleans has long been a musical epicenter and a real crossroads of culture. The musical influences present in Katrina Ballads are plentiful and diverse. In that sense, this work is a tribute to the life of music, and its ability to shape and inspire us.”

The audience, which included many connected with the School of Music, gave the performers a standing ovation. The applause trailed off and then burst out in another long round of enthusiastic clapping and hollering. John Sipher said, “It was really powerful. I got chills through my body countless times. It’s really mature work.”

Katrina Ballads was presented by Yes is a World, an organization that works “to promote peace and social change through musical diversity and the collaboration of young artists,” and the New Music Collective, a South Carolina-based organization “devoted to the composition, production, and promotion of new music,” quoting from the program notes. The former takes its name from the e.e. cummings’ poem that appeared on the back cover:
love is a place
& in this place of
love move
(with brightness of peace)
all places

yes is a world
& in this world of
yes live
(skillfully curled)
all worlds

Hearne said Katrina Ballads has been performed at the Spolleto Festival in Charleston, S.C., in Chicago, and in New York City in addition to the two performances in New Haven. The musicians and singers will be recording the performance next week in New York

Selections from Katrina Ballads will be performed free tonight at Yale’s Sprague Hall at 8 p.m. as part of the New Music, New Haven concert series.