Enveloping dread, ambient unease, a kind of sensuous foreboding: the music of the thirty-five-year-old American composer Ashley Fure addresses feelings that are all too familiar in early-twenty-first-century life. Fure’s experimental music-theatre piece “The Force of Things,” which was recently staged at Peak Performances, in Montclair, New Jersey, is in part a study in infrasound, or sounds below the range of human hearing. For most of the work’s duration, twenty-four subwoofers, placed with their cones pointed upward, emit electronic tones that vibrate at a frequency of 10.67 hertz, or around ten oscillations per second. They are arrayed around the auditorium, with the audience seated in the middle. Human ears can’t detect sounds much below twenty hertz, but you register their presence all the same. Urban legend holds that infrasound can cause people to vomit, become disoriented, or lose control of their bowels. Although scientific studies have failed to observe such effects, they have noted increased blood pressure, rapid eye movement, and other temporary physiological changes. The body is listening even when the ears tune out.
That tectonic rumble underpins an imposing musical construction, which maintains ritualistic intensity over a fifty-minute span. Fure calls it an “opera for objects,” yet it is hardly an opera in the conventional sense. There are no words, nor is there a plot. There is, however, a powerful sense of purpose. In a program note, Fure says that she wishes to evoke “the mounting hum of ecological anxiety around us”—changes that are too slow and too vast to be immediately grasped. Like the political theorist Jane Bennett, from whom the work’s title is derived, Fure seeks to foster empathy for the nonhuman world that we have remade in our image.
“The Force of Things” is set in a dim, cavernous environment designed by the architect Adam Fure, the composer’s brother, and lit by Nicholas Houfek. Ragged sculptural forms, made of silicone, paper, and plastic, dangle from the ceiling, resembling stalactites. Seven members of the International Contemporary Ensemble—the vocalists Lucy Dhegrae and Alice Teyssier; the saxophonist Ryan Muncy; the bassoonist Rebekah Heller; and the percussionists Levy Lorenzo, Dustin Donahue, and Ross Karre—circulate through the space, wearing poncho-like garments. Much of the work is eerily spare and quiet, with instruments gravitating toward fragile sustained tones, shivery glissandos, and fractured timbres. The vocalists whisper and breathe into megaphones. When the piece builds to a roar, as it does several times, the impact is all the greater. Fure’s formidable orchestral score “Bound to the Bow,” which was heard at last year’s New York Philharmonic Biennial, follows a similar structure: first stillness, then catastrophe.
At performances of “The Force of Things,” listeners are encouraged to move around and explore what is essentially a live-action installation. The experience is like a reconnaissance mission into an auditory wilderness: the challenge is to figure out where sounds are coming from and how they are being made. Early on, I heard a brisk fluttering from the sculptures above me. My first thought was that a fan was blowing on them. I then realized that pieces of string extended upward from several of the subwoofers, and that vibrations were causing the strings to strike the material. A little later, I heard a soft, rapid tapping behind me: this emanated from a sheet of paper that Karre—who doubled as the work’s producer—was holding a few inches away from a subwoofer. All manner of unearthly noises ensue when the performers apply their fingers and palms to the speaker cones. At the climax of the first part, the percussionists brush metal chimes against the subwoofers, triggering an apocalyptic jangle.
Tense silence descends again, and the musicians disperse to the far end of the auditorium, barely visible in the murk. New sounds arise—deep, droning tones. You discern that the performers are applying bows to aircraft cables that crisscross the space, supported by hemispheres of Styrofoam that function like the bridge on a stringed instrument. The players advance toward the middle of the room, their tones rising in pitch as they go. It’s like being inside a gigantic surrealist cello. All this activity hits a frenzied climax, with the winds and the voices sustaining high pitches and the infrasound growing in volume. (So you surmise from the rumbling of your seat.) Then the barrage suddenly cuts off, and plastic sheets swoosh down from the ceiling. In a becalmed coda, the musicians manipulate vibrating strings with their hands: you can see the resulting waveforms, textbook diagrams come to life. The patterns also look like double helixes—sound and matter becoming organic.
Peak Performances, possibly the most adventurous presenter in the New York area, has devoted its entire season to “women innovators in the performing arts.” Gender does not play an explicit role in “The Force of Things,” although Fure’s emphasis on the idea of empathy implies an opposition to the masculine megalomania of certain modernist predecessors. Last year, when ICE performed a preliminary version of “The Force of Things” at the Summer Courses for New Music, in Darmstadt, Germany, Fure confronted her colleagues with grim statistics about that illustrious institution: from 1946 to 2014, ninety-three per cent of pieces programmed at Darmstadt were by male composers. The staggering originality of Fure’s latest work—and of music by Chaya Czernowin, Liza Lim, Clara Iannotta, Kate Soper, Linda Catlin Smith, and dozens of others—makes one think that mostly female seasons might have to become the norm.
For new-music fanatics in the New York region, the first weekend of October was problematically rich. While “The Force of Things” was running in Montclair, the Park Avenue Armory revived Pierre Boulez’s computer-enhanced showpiece “Répons,” and BAM offered Matthew Aucoin’s “Crossing,” a keenly imagined chamber opera about Walt Whitman. I also made it down to the Barnes Foundation, in Philadelphia, where the newly created Barnes Ensemble introduced Iannotta’s “dead wasps in the jam-jar (ii),” in which string players double as percussionists, eliciting sonic dreamscapes from thimbles, paper clips, electric-guitar strings, birdcalls, and wineglasses. Happily, attendance was strong at all these events, showing that risk-averse programming is not the only path forward in precarious times.
The Armory’s version of “Répons,” which had its première in 1981 and underwent several revisions, was an audiovisual wonder. The Ensemble Intercontemporain, under the direction of the composer-conductor Matthias Pintscher, played the piece twice each night: listeners were seated on four sides, and after intermission they traded places with those directly opposite. On the periphery were six soloists—a harpist, a cimbalomist, two pianists, and two percussionists—who make a dramatic entrance in the work’s second section. Pierre Audi, the Armory’s artistic director, and the lighting designer Urs Schönebaum provided a coolly gorgeous setting. The chance to hear “Répons” twice, and from different perspectives, put a new light on a hyper-dense score. When Boulez conducted it at Carnegie Hall, in 2003, some detail was lost in the resonant auditorium. The Armory is even more reverberant, but the audience was close enough that the sound had tactile impact. A colleague rightly identified a certain funkiness in the bleating brass and the pizzicato bass.
The Armory’s programming has become essential to New York life, although it too often indulges in bigness for bigness’s sake—the wow factor of filling the arena with water or bringing in a flock of sheep. What I liked about “Répons” was its visceral intimacy: Audi gestured toward the grandeur of the space, especially when Boulez’s satellite instrumental stations kicked in, but the musical foreground dominated the picture. Intimacy also distinguished Michel van der Aa’s high-tech opera “Blank Out,” which the Armory presented in late September. Tightly staged by the composer, it might as well have been in a small black-box theatre. Van der Aa is a master of many media: the production incorporated video projections of his own devising, and involved only one live performer, the luminous soprano Miah Persson. At the same time, its deft, fluid vocal writing conveyed a piercing story, of a mother who dies rescuing her boy from drowning. (The baritone Roderick Williams, on video, portrayed the boy as a grown man.) Rarely have modern techniques and ancient musical virtues coexisted more naturally. Van der Aa, like Fure, uses technology to get at something elemental: for him, the long reach of memory; for her, the irreversibility of change. ♦
