New York, NY (Top40 Charts) On Friday, October 30, 2020, Sound American releases Something to Hunt, the first ever portrait album of the music of Pulitzer Prize-nominated composer Ash Fure. Works on the album include Fure's
Shiver Lung for ensemble and electronics, Something to Hunt for septet, and Soma for sextet performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble; A Library on Lightning for trio performed by trumpeter Nate Wooley, bassoonist Rebekah Heller, and double bassist
Brandon Lopez; and Bound to the Bow for orchestra and electronics performed live by the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra at the 2016 New York Philharmonic Biennial. The release includes a limited edition hardcover book featuring first-hand accounts of Fure's expansive, interdisciplinary practice by Zachary Woolfe, Classical
Music Editor of The New York Times; composer and lyricist César Alvarez; Dahlia Borsche, Head of
Music at the DAAD Artist-in-Berlin program; Taïca Replansky of Berlin's CTM Festival; and veteran classical music journalist Steve Smith; plus an interview between Nate Wooley, Editor-in-Chief of Sound American Publications, and Ash Fure.
Nate Wooley writes, "It feels false to refer to this release simply as the music of Ash Fure, because the world Fure creates is experientially so much more than what can be contained in a sound file, a text, a remembrance. Her work is tactile and sensuous - performances as haptic memory object - and encompasses ideas that transcend combinations of frequencies or a mapping of sound. Her compositions are as close to a microcosm of life as any I've ever experienced... This release is also a primer for those who, as of yet, have not been able to experience a performance of Fure's music live...There will be time and space for other voices to take up the necessary study of her timbral, formal, and harmonic choices, but a premiere presentation should give priority to the work's most powerful elements. And, in Fure's case, this is her music's innate humanity."
Zachary Woolfe adds in his note that Fure's "music depends on that presence as a group, on a hair-trigger physical unity, on a togetherness that is the thing most directly threatened by the coronavirus." Dahlia Borsche and Taïca Replansky agree, asserting that her "work relies on collectivity, community, and on non-verbal forms of communication. She seeks to create moments of unity within multiplicity."
Shiver Lung for ensemble and electronics (2016) consists of material drawn from Fure's large-scale immersive installation opera, The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects. Both pieces wrestle with the rising tide of ecocide through a choir of speaker cones pumping sub-audible sound into the space. Though vibrating too low for humans to hear, the cones act as kinetic drum kits for players who slide hands and objects across their shaking surfaces, coaxing them into audibility through touch. Of The Force of Things, composer César Alvarez divulges, "This is unrecognizable theater. The sounds are shimmering and raking over me. I'm flooded with questions and unfamiliar sensations...This is stunning and difficult...The piece asks us to listen with our whole (shared) body. Ash wants us to hear sounds that we think we can't hear. In working to open myself to the sound, I expand... To experience The Force of Things is to actually be filled with Ash's urgent questions about humanity and our future together. It is demanding, and awe-inspiring, and afterward I feel like my capacity to imagine expands outward, some immeasurable amount, in every direction."
Shiver Lung was premiered by the International Contemporary Ensemble at the Darmstadt in New York Festival in May 2016.
Something to Hunt for septet (2014) invokes the singularity of purpose a tiger exhibits when stalking its prey. Like much of Fure's work, it revolves around questions of compulsion and drive, asking "What motivates a sound, what pulls it forward? Can we conjure, outside tonality, that inexplicable sense of craving that seems to tug 'ti' towards 'do'?" Something to Hunt was commissioned on Fure's receipt of a 2012 Darmstadt Stipendienpreis. Dal Niente performed the premiere at the 2014 Darmstadt Summer Courses for New Music, where Something to Hunt was awarded the coveted Kranichsteiner Musikpreis in Composition.
Soma for sextet (2012) is the second in a series of intimately personal works surrounding Fure's grandmother, who had advanced Parkinson's Disease. Fure says, "Instruments act out the disconnect her sickness causes between psychological intent and physical execution. Aberrations in placement, pressure, angle, force, and speed distort instrumental technique and interrupt the correlation between effort and audibility. With the syntax of movement scrambled, even the simplest of sounds turn fragile and chaotic. In Soma, instrumental bodies act as landscapes across which the limbs and fingers of performers must crawl." Soma was commissioned by the Alice and Harry Eiler Foundation on receipt of the Staubach Honorarium. It was premiered by Curious Chamber
Players at the 2012 Darmstadt Summer Course for New Music, where it received a Stipendienpreis.
A Library on Lightning for Bb Trumpet, Bassoon, and
Double Bass (2018) was conceived as a preparatory sketch for the soloist's material in Filament for trio, orchestra, and moving voices, which opened The New York Philharmonic's 2018 season. The piece leans on the image of lightning flowers - the branching scars left on the skin of a body struck by lightning. Steve Smith explains, "Pity the writer tasked with attempting to describe Filament, practically every aspect of which defies convention: the deployment of forces, the involvement of guest artists, even the essential nature of the orchestra's participation. It's not just that Fure asks the players to embrace unorthodox techniques and chaotic sounds... It's also that she actually destabilizes and dislocates the orchestra as we know it, using it as just one element in a complicated web of sensations.
Sounds and bodies move in space. Tones produced naturally tangle with others artificially altered. Encountering so dense a web of unfamiliar sensations, a listener might feel a vulnerability born of uncertainty - a quality amplified by the physical presence of musicians in spaces they don't normally occupy." A Library on Lightning was premiered by Klangforum Wien on April 28th, 2018 at the Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik in Witten, Germany. It was subsequently performed by Klangforum in Vienna and by Nate Wooley, Rebekah Heller, and
Brandon Lopez at Issue Project Room in Brooklyn.
Recorded in a live performance by the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra led by
Christopher Rountree at the 2016 New York Philharmonic Biennial at
David Geffen Hall, Bound to the Bow for orchestra and electronics (2016) takes a twist on Samuel Taylor Colerdige's poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. In Fure's mind, the Albatross is not slain and slung around the neck of a sailor but bound stead to the bow of the boat. That sense of captured kinetic force generated productive contrasts: heavy lightness, grounded flight, wet, weighted wings.
Ash Fure's practice sits at the nexus of experimental music and experiential art. Ash's full-bodied listening environments offer space for social reckoning through the political, poetic, and erotic multiplicities in sound. A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music, Ash also received a Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize in
Music Composition, a DAAD Artists-in-Berlin Prize, a Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a Fulbright Fellowship to France, a Kranichsteiner Musikpreis, and a Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship from Columbia University. Notable recent projects include Hive Rise: for Subs and Megas (2020), a migratory performance installation premiered at Berghain/CTM; Filament: for Trio, Orchestra, and Moving Voices (2018) commissioned by the New York Philharmonic; and The Force of Things (2017), an immersive installation opera that wrestles with the rising tide of eco-dread around us. Ash holds a PhD in
Music Composition from Harvard University and is an Associate Professor of
Music at Dartmouth College.Learn more at www.ashleyfure.com.
The International Contemporary Ensemble (ICEensemble) is an artist collective that is transforming the way music is created and experienced. As performer, curator, and educator, the International Contemporary Ensemble explores how new music intersects with communities across the world. The Ensemble's 36 members are featured as soloists, chamber musicians, commissioners, and collaborators with the foremost musical artists of our time. Works by emerging composers have anchored the Ensemble's programming since its founding in 2001, and the group's recordings and digital platforms highlight the many voices that weave music's present.
The Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra presents approximately eight major concerts each year and frequently collaborates with renowned guest artists and conductors. The orchestra performs a diversity of literature comprising major works of the symphonic repertoire, concerti and new music. The orchestra also performs with choir and other ensembles, and is the resident orchestra for the annual ballet production.
Brandon Lopez is a New York-based composer and bassist working at the fringes of jazz, free improvisation, noise and new music. His music has been praised as "brutal" (Chicago Reader) and "relentless" (The New York Times). From the New York Philharmonic's
David Geffen Hall to the DIY basements of Brooklyn, Lopez has worked beside many luminaries of jazz, classical, poetry, and experimental music, including Fred Moten, John Zorn, Okkyung Lee, Ingrid Laubrock, Tony Malaby, Tyshawn Sorey, Bill Nace, Chris Potter, Edwin Torres, Tom Rainey, Cecilia Lopez, Sun Ra Arkestra, Susan Alcorn, Mette Rasmussen, and many others.
Nate Wooley was born in Clatskanie, Oregon and began playing trumpet professionally with his father, a big band saxophonist, at the age of 13. Considered one of the leading lights of the American movement to redefine the physical boundaries of the horn, Wooley has been gathering international acclaim for his idiosyncratic trumpet language. He has collaborated with Eliane Radigue, Annea Lockwood, Ken Vandermark, Anthony Braxton and is the editor of Sound American publications. He was the recipient of 2016's Grants to Artists Award from the Foundation for Contemporary Arts.
Something to Hunt Track List
1.
Shiver Lung for ensemble and electronics (2016) [11:58]
International Contemporary Ensemble (Lucy Dhegrae and Alice Teyssier, voice; Ryan Muncy, saxophone; Rebekah Heller, bassoon; Ross Karre, percussion; Levy Lorenzo, percussion; Mariel Roberts, cello)
2. Something to Hunt for septet (2014) [11:07]
International Contemporary Ensemble (Campbell MacDonald, clarinet;
Stuart Breczinski, oboe; Ryan Muncy, saxophone; Joshua Modney, violin; Wendy Richman, viola; Mariel Roberts, cello; Greg Chudzik, bass; Ross Karre, conductor)
3. Soma for sextet (2012) [10:12]
International Contemporary Ensemble (Carlos Aguilar, piccolo; Campbell MacDonald, bass clarinet; Nathan Davis and Ross Karre, percussion; Cory Smythe, piano; Mariel Roberts, cello;
David Fulmer, conductor)
4. Library on Lightning for trio (2018) [14:34]
Nate Wooley, trumpet
Rebekah Heller, bassoon
Brandon Lopez, double bass
5. Bound to the Bow for orchestra and electronics (2016) [17:35]
Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra
Christopher Rountree, conductor
Total: 65:26
Soma, Something to Hunt, and A Library on Lightning recorded on March 1, 2019 at Oktaven Audio by Ryan Streber
Shiver Lung recorded on March 2, 2019 at The Bunker Studio by Caley Monahan-Ward
Bound to the Bow recorded live at the 2016 New York Phil Biennial in
David Geffen Hall on June 5, 2016
All compositions mixed and mastered by Ryan Streber and Ash Fure
Produced for Sound American Publications by Nate Wooley
Design by
Daniel Flodin and Jesper Canel
