Skip to main content
The 2017 Pulitzer Prize Finalist in Music

Finalist: Bound to the Bow, by Ashley Fure

Premiered on June 5, 2016 at David Geffen Hall, Lincoln Center, New York City, a mesmerizing orchestral piece, at once rigorous and evocative, by a sure-handed composer who takes her inspiration from Coleridge’s "The Rime of the Ancient Mariner."

Nominated Work

Bound to the Bow

By

Ashley Fure

Contemporary composer Ashley Fure, an Interlochen Arts Academy alumna, visited Interlochen in March to work with students on her composition ("Bound to the Bow") commissioned for the Academy Orchestra’s appearance at the NY Philharmonic Biennial on June 5.

An image in my ear kicked off this piece, drawn from Coleridge's famous Rime, with a twist: here the Albatross, that great winged thing, wasn't slain and slung around the neck of a sailor but bound instead to the bow of the boat. A few choice contrasts emerged from there: heavy lightness, grounded flight, wet, weighted wings. "Bound to the Bow" is charged with such caged kinetic energy.  Frantic wisps of sound tangle into dense, noisy webs. Bows swish across strings like birds in boxes: flapping without flight, clawing towards tone, trying to rise.

Called "boldy individual" by the New York Times and the "most arresting of the world premieres" at the NyPhil Biennial by Alex Ross in the New Yorker, "Bound to the Bow" was commissioned for the 2016 New York Phil Biennial and premiered by the Interlochen Arts Academy Orchestra at David Geffen Hall on June 5, 2016.

--from the composer's website

 
 

Biography

Ashley Fure is an American composer of acoustic and electroacoustic concert music as well as multimedia installation art. Called “raw, elemental,” and “richly satisfying” by the New York Times, her work explores the kinetic source of sound, bringing focus to the muscular act of music making and the chaotic behaviors of raw acoustic matter. She holds a PhD in Music Composition from Harvard University and further degrees from IRCAM (Cursus 1 and 2), Oberlin Conservatory, and the Interlochen Arts Academy. Fure was a Mellon Post-doctoral Fellow at Columbia University in 2014 and joined the Dartmouth College Department of Music as an Assistant Professor of Sonic Arts in September 2015.

Fure received a 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Grant for Artists, a 2015 Siemens Foundation Commission Grant, a 2014 Kranichsteiner Composition Prize from Darmstadt, a 2014 Busoni Prize from the Akademie der Künste in Berlin, a 2013 Fulbright Fellowship to France, a 2013 Impuls International Composition Prize, a 2012 Darmstadt Stipendienpreis, a 2012 Staubach Honorarium, a 2011 Jezek Prize, and a 2011 10-month residency at Akademie Schloss Solitude.

Notable recent projects include The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects, an immersive intermedia opera commissioned by ICE for the 2016 Darmstadt Internationalen Ferienkursen für Neue Musik, Bound to the Bow, for Orchestra and Electronics, commissioned by the 2016 New York Philharmonic Biennial, and a new work for the Diotima String Quartet commissioned by IRCAM for Manifeste 2017. Fure’s music has been performed by Klangforum Wien, Mosaik, ICE, Talea, the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Dal Niente, Curious Chamber Players, eighth blackbird, and Calithumpian Consort, among others. Her kinetic installation Tripwire, created with visual artist Jean-Michel Albert, premiered at the 2012 Agora Festival in Paris and has since toured to BOZAR (Belgium), the International Digital Arts Biennale/Elektra (Montreal), Seconde Nature (Aix-en-Provence), Stereolux (Nantes), Nemo (Paris), l’Ososphère (Strasbourg), and Panorama (Tourcoing).

Winners

Prize Winner in Music in 2017:

Du Yun

Premiered on January 6, 2016, at the Prototype Festival, 3LD Arts and Technology Center, New York City, a bold operatic work that integrates vocal and instrumental elements and a wide range of styles into a harrowing allegory for human trafficking in the modern world. Libretto by Royce Vavrek. Music

Finalists

Nominated as finalists in Music in 2017:

Kate Soper

Premiered on December 9, 2016, at The Curtis R. Priem Experimental Media and Performing Arts Center at Rensselaer Polytechnic Institute, Troy, NY, a breakthrough work that plumbs the composer’s fertile musical imagination to explore the relationships between idea and expression, meaning and language.

The Jury

Carol J. Oja(Chair)

William Powell Mason Professor of Music

John V. Brown, Jr.

Director of the Jazz Program and Associate Professor of the Practice of Music

Jennifer Higdon*

composer

Alex Ross

Music Critic

Evan Ziporyn

Director, Center for Art, Science & Technology and Kenan Sabin Distinguished Professor of Music

Winners in Music

2016

Henry Threadgill

Recording released on May 26, 2015 by Zooid, a highly original work in which notated music and improvisation mesh in a sonic tapestry that seems the very expression of modern American life (Pi Recordings).
2015

Julia Wolfe

A powerful oratorio for chorus and sextet evoking Pennsylvania coal-mining life around the turn of the 20th Century.
2014

John Luther Adams

A haunting orchestral work that suggests a relentless tidal surge, evoking thoughts of melting polar ice and rising sea levels.
2013

Caroline Shaw

A highly polished and inventive a cappella work uniquely embracing speech, whispers, sighs, murmurs, wordless melodies and novel vocal effects (New Amsterdam Records).
See All Music

2017 Prize Winners

Feature Writing

C. J. Chivers

For showing, through an artful accumulation of fact and detail, that a Marine’s postwar descent into violence reflected neither the actions of a simple criminal nor a stereotypical case of PTSD.
Commentary

Peggy Noonan

For rising to the moment with beautifully rendered columns that connected readers to the shared virtues of Americans during one of the nation’s most divisive political campaigns.
Criticism

Hilton Als

For bold and original reviews that strove to put stage dramas within a real-world cultural context, particularly the shifting landscape of gender, sexuality and race.
Editorial Writing

Art Cullen

For editorials fueled by tenacious reporting, impressive expertise and engaging writing that successfully challenged powerful corporate agricultural interests in Iowa.
See All 2017 Winners