Ashley Fure’s Bound to the Bow made her a Pulitzer-Prize finalist and is a mesmerising piece, at once rigorous and evocative, inspired by Coleridge’s The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. measurement as contrition is, in the composer’s words, “an inaccessible, distant, privately meditative hovering over the measurement of spaces and the weighing of volumes… The orchestra is there, in large part, as potential, an outer bound”. In Praise of Darkness was written for the Dark Music Days festival in ReykjavĂk, and HaraldsdĂłttir explores the dark using unusual tunings, loops and natural cycles. Berlin-based Canadian composer Marc Sabat typically draws inspiration from investigations of the sounding and perception of Just Intonation, and his new ±«Óătv Commission explores “gradually shifting harmonic constellations with melodic counterpoints”.
