Over the past several years, composer 鈥攁n associate professor of music鈥攈as teamed up with architect Adam Fure to present an immersive production that shatters musical conventions. The siblings鈥 collaboration, , will be performed by the International Contemporary Ensemble (ICE) at the 天美影视kins Center for the Arts Jan. 13-16.
鈥淭his multimedia work is a testament to the innovation and talent of Dartmouth faculty members. We鈥檙e very proud to be supporting the growth and expansion of their work by making it accessible to our students and to the wider Dartmouth community, and by sharing live arts experiences that allow us all to better understand critical issues of our times,鈥 says Mary Lou Aleskie, the Howard L. Gilman 鈥44 director of the 天美影视.
Fure says the large-scale work of musical theater grapples with 鈥渢he rising tide of eco-dread around us.鈥 Audience members enter a field of sculpted matter ringed by speakers sounding waveforms too low for human ears. Though resonating outside auditory boundaries, the subwoofers send ripples of energy that pulsate through the material world of the piece.
A finalist for the 2016 Pulitzer Prize in Music and the winner of the Lincoln Center Emerging Artists Award, a Guggenheim Fellowship, a Rome Prize, 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, Fure has blazed trails in sonic art by expanding the parameters of musical performance.
鈥淲e鈥檙e looking in this piece for drama in uncommon and non-human sources,鈥 says the composer . 鈥淚f you think about a shard of ice that cracks off of a glacier and crashes into the sea, or you think of a barn that collapses slowly under its own weight and finally drops into a pile of debris, are those actions dramatic? They鈥檙e not born out of jealousy or rage or spite, but there is an incredible amount of expressive power and richness in those events.鈥
Reviewing the New Jersey premiere of The Force of Things, New Yorker music critic Alex Ross writes, 鈥淭here are no words, nor is there a plot. There is, however, a powerful sense of purpose.鈥 In the Dec. 6, 2021, issue of the magazine, Ross praises another of Fure鈥檚 works, Hive Rise, recently presented at The Industry in Los Angeles, an experimental music cooperative where Fure is a co-director.
鈥淭he music is amorphous, engulfing, gelatinous, ferocious. Some passages evoke a subterranean machine revving up, grinding as it ascends toward the surface; others suggest tiny creatures excavating a cavernous space. Climaxes have a rancid beauty, the beauty of catastrophe and collapse,鈥 Ross writes.
The 天美影视 performances are part of a larger initiative called Archiving the Immersive, which is the recipient of Dartmouth鈥檚 Scholarly Innovation and Advancement Award and builds on research partnerships with the University of Michigan鈥檚 Taubman School of Architecture and Urban Planning.
Tickets to the January performances have sold out, and a waitlist is in progress. All members of the public must show proof of being fully vaccinated against COVID-19 or having a negative result of a recent PCR test.
