What’s That Sound? In Ashley Fure’s Compositions, It Could Be Almost Anything.

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Imagine that youre a young composer and one day you realize that you dont much care for notes.

Actually, youre also kind of disappointed in instruments, pitch, melody, and rhythm.

Language fails when you get to complex timbres.

You look at unstable complex waveforms and we call it a screech.

Several dozen feet of aircraft cable are winched taut over a Styrofoam block.

Plucked at one end, the tense braided steel sings like a giants double bass.

The world is full of vibrations too high, low, and quiet to hear.

Fure makes a few of them audible.

A butterfly in Brazil can cause a song to be heard in Manhattan.

Fure is no renegade.

In 2015, she joined the faculty at Dartmouth.

From an early age, I wanted to make immersive, expansive multisensory …things.

I didnt have a word for them.

I didnt want to work with text, and I wasnt after characters, plot, or costumes.

I wanted something that had the same potency but was more abstract.

I was hungry for a more interesting ritual.

He understood these strange visions I had, Fure says.

I dont know if its just because were siblings or because we were both feeling constricted by our disciplines.

The sets, crinkly, translucent curtains suspended from the ceiling, enfold the audience, rustling and whispering.

There is no luxury of distance.

This looks like an alien material, Alvarez says approvingly.

Im attuned to the immersive effects of these ancient spaces.

Its not the first time epiphany has gotten in the way of efficient creation.

But I did, of course.

Fure had been through this cycle of desire, crisis, and breakthrough before.

She hoped to build on a long tradition of extended performance techniques that went back several generations.

To widen the range of weirdness proved hard.

It would always turn into a blunt scratch, she says.

That got debilitatingly frustrating.

I almost just checked out.

But then I got into the electronic-music studio.

Now I could make those noises myself.

Afterward she listens, over and over, to that catalogue of hums and pocks.

Im selecting the ephemeral moments that had the most potent energy, the most harmonic or melodic interest.

The sound may have a 47-note chord, but I dont wantallof those frequencies.

Shes on to Berlin and the next project.Filamentopens notelessly, of course.

A corps of singers distributed across the balconies whispers into handheld megaphones, sweeping the audience like acoustical spotlights.