Ashley Fure facts for kids

Ashley Fure (born in 1982) is an American composer. She creates unique and exciting music. She has won important awards like the Rome Prize and a Guggenheim Fellowship in 2017. Her piece Bound to the Bow (from 2016) was even a finalist for the 2017 Pulitzer Prize in Music, which is a very big honor!

Early Life and Education

Ashley Fure grew up in Marquette, Michigan. She studied music at the Oberlin Conservatory of Music for her first degree. Later, she earned her PhD from Harvard University. She also did more research at Columbia University. Since 2015, she has been a music professor at Dartmouth College.

Her Music and Career

Ashley Fure's music often tells a story or explores interesting ideas.

Bound to the Bow

Her orchestral piece Bound to the Bow was inspired by a famous old poem. The poem is called The Rime of the Ancient Mariner by Samuel Taylor Coleridge.

The Force of Things: An Opera in Objects

One of her most interesting works is an opera called The Force of Things: An Opera in Objects. It first showed in Darmstadt, Germany, in 2016. It was also performed in New Jersey and New York.

This opera is about the environment and how we interact with it. Ashley Fure worked with her brother, Adam Fure, who is an architect, to create it. They designed the show to be an immersive experience. This means the audience feels like they are right inside the performance. They sit under a canopy of special materials and hanging objects.

The music for The Force of Things is very special. It mixes sounds played by instruments with electronic sounds that are projected around the room. They even use huge speakers that create very low sounds. These sounds are so low you can't really hear them with your ears. But you can feel them! They make objects in the room vibrate and create a unique feeling for the audience.

One newspaper said that Ashley Fure's work makes it feel like the whole room is alive. It suggests that even everyday objects can make their own music and messages.

Filament

In 2018, a famous conductor named Jaap van Zweden chose Ashley Fure's orchestra piece Filament. He chose it to start his time as the director of the New York Philharmonic orchestra. This was a big moment for her music!