Ash Fure’s “Portrait Album”

Composer Ash Fure (photograph by Clare Gatto, courtesy of Morahan Arts and Media)

At the end of this past October, Sound American released Something to Hunt, which it described as “the first ever portrait album of the music of Pulitzer Prize-nominated composer Ash Fure.” The offering consisted of a limited edition hardcover book coupled with either a compact disc or instructions for downloading the album, whose title was also Something to Hunt. The “limits” of the book have now been exhausted; but Amazon.com has created a Web page for MP3 download.

“Something to Hunt” is the second of five compositions on the album. Like two of the other selections, “Shiver Lung” and “Some,” it is performed by members of the International Contemporary Ensemble. These three tracks are followed by “A Library on Lightning,” a trio performed by Nate Wooly on trumpet, Rebekah Heller on bassoon, and Brandon Lopez on bass. The album concludes with “Bound to the Bow,” scored for orchestra and electronics with Christopher Rountree conducting the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra. This track was recorded at a live performance at the 2016 New York Philharmonic Biennial at David Geffen Hall in Lincoln Center.

Over the course of these five compositions, the attentive listener will most likely be drawn to the prodigious variety of sonorities that Fure summons, frequently through highly imaginative accounts of the interplay between electronic sounds and those of conventional instruments, often subjected to extended performance techniques. Mind you, there have been any number of composers that have pursued that same interplay; and, more often than not, the results sound more like self-indulgent laboratory experiments, rather than compelling performance. Fortunately, Fure’s work does not fall into that category.

My guess is that her “secret sauce” involves an understanding of the nature of narrative that complements the portfolio of skills acquired through her composition studies. Indeed, “Bound to the Bow” was inspired by “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,” the longest poem in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s Lyrical Ballads collection. I would not be surprised if Fure was aware of the narrative techniques through which Coleridge led the reader through an intense account of a plethora of dark moods; and that poem may have inspired her to pursue a similar effect through her own inventions, “Bound to the Bow” being only one example of how she had mastered that technique.

Indeed, the only downside to the album is the fact that it is an album. The impact of each of the five works being presented is so great that the “mental reverberations” induced by listening to any one of them is likely to interfere with listening to another one in close succession. Thus, the MP3 download allows one to get beyond the usual beginning-to-end approach taken towards an album. Instead, one can establish “context-free isolation” for each track, coming to know the interplay between music and narrative without any “mental reverberations” from other listening experiences.

Personally, however, I suspect that, for any of these compositions, the best listening experience would be one of performance, rather than a recording. These are works in which the activities of the instrumentalists are likely to be as informative as the resulting auditory phenomena. Indeed, even the impact of the electronics is likely to benefit from physical presence. As a case in point, consider what Fure wrote on her “Shiver Lung” Web page:

A ring of subwoofers encircle the audience, projecting soundwaves too low to hear until performers slide the flesh of their hands across each palpitating surface, pulling the soundwaves into the realm of the audible. 

Clearly, her understanding of acoustics is as perceptive as her appreciation of narrative; and her imagination decidedly reaches beyond the limits of even the best recording technology. However, as long is we are in pandemic conditions, we have to make the best of what we can get.