October 26, 2014 by the Chelsea Manning Support Network
Chelsea Manning and Wikileaks were the subject of “The Source”, an opera composed by Ted Hearne that ran in October at the Brooklyn Academy of Music in New York. The opera featured auto-tuned portions of the leaked Iraq and Afghanistan war logs, Manning’s chat logs with hacker Adrian Lomo, along with reaction footage of individuals as they watch the leaked ‘Collateral Muder’ video.
Audio samples from ‘The Source':
From the New York Times Music section on ‘The Source':
Its patchwork libretto is drawn from the documents disclosed by Ms. Manning as well as instant messages and bits of interviews. Fragmented, layered and obsessively repeated, these texts are sung by four performers whose voices are heavily processed in real time, giving them an eerily anonymous, half-mechanical sound.
Seven instrumentalists play a score with the propulsion of rock and the sensitivity of chamber music. Sung excerpts from the leaked war logs take on the unnervingly lulling rhythms of the Evangelist’s recitatives in Bach’s Passions, while passages from Ms. Manning’s Internet chats elicit warmer, more human vocalism.
Surrounding the audience are projected faces: eyes scrolling, lips pursing, tears occasionally falling, reflections of screens and video faintly visible in eyeglasses. We are looking at people looking at something — but what? It is only at the end, as we see some of the much debated, so-called “Collateral Murder” footage of a 2007 American attack that killed civilians in Baghdad, that we understand the projected faces were filmed watching that footage.