Composer Ashley Fure “spent years struggling against her education and searching for the right technological tools before she learned to harness the beauty she heard around her,” writes Justin Davidson in Friday’s (8/3) New York Magazine. “Take, for instance, the eerie profundo moan produced by an instrument of Fure’s invention in The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects, which will have its New York premiere August 6 at the Mostly Mozart Festival.” Fure comments, “ ‘From an early age, I wanted to make immersive, expansive multisensory … things…. I wanted something that had the same potency [as opera] but was more abstract.’ … She spends hours in a studio, obsessively recording a fan’s mutable whir, or slapping a baseball into a mitt…. Working with the editing program Pro Tools, she distills harmonies from the static…. The endpoint of this tortured method is often a more or less written-out musical score: notes on paper, the very cage of convention that Fure hoped to bust out of.” At Mostly Mozart, The Force of Things features the International Contemporary Ensemble and sounds from 24 subwoofer speakers. In September, the New York Philharmonic will give the world premiere of Fure’s Filament.
Posted August 7, 2018
In photo: Composer Ashley Fure, whose “The Force of Things” and “Filament” debut this month and next in New York City. Photo by Krista Schlueter
