Ashley Fure
composer

Born in 1982, American Ashley Fure is a composer of acoustic and electroacoustic music for the concert hall, and a creator of multimedia installations. Deemed "raw, primal" and "highly enjoyable" by the New York Times, her work explores the kinesic source of sound, revealing the muscular act of music production and the chaotic behaviors of raw acoustic matter. She holds a PhD in music composition from Harvard University, and has completed additional degrees at Ircam (Cursus 1 and 2), Oberlin Conservatory and Interlochen Academy of the Arts. Fure was awarded the Mellon Postdoctoral Fellowship at Columbia University in 2014 and has since joined Dartmouth College's Music Department as Assistant Professor in Sound Arts in September 2015. Ashley Fure is the recipient of the 2016 Foundation for Contemporary Arts Artist Fellowship, the 2015 Siemens Foundation Fellowship, the 2014 Kranichsteiner Composition Prize in Darmstadt, the 2014 Busoni Prize of the Berlin Academy of the Arts, the 2013 Franco-American Fullbright Fellowship, the 2013 Impuls International Composition Prize, the 2012 Darmstadt Fellowship, the 2012 Staubach Honorarium, the 2011 Jezek Prize. She was in residence for 10 months at the Schloss Solitude Academy in 2011. Recent projects include "The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects", an immersive intermedia opera, commissioned by ICE for the Darmstadt Festival in 2016, "Bound to the Bow", for orchestra and electronics, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Biennial in 2016, and "Feed Forward", for large ensemble, commissioned by Klangforum Wien for the 2015 Impuls Festival. Fure's music was the subject of a Portrait Concert at the Miller Theater in 2016, and is regularly performed by the likes of Klangforum Wien, Ensembles Mosaik, ICE, Talea, San Francisco Contemporary Music Players, Dal Niente, Curious Chamber Players, eighth blackbird, and the Calithumpian Consort. His kinetic installation Tripwire , created in collaboration with visual artist Jean-Michel Albert, was unveiled at the 2012 Agora Festival in Paris and has since toured to BOZAR (Belgium), the Biennale Internationale des Arts Numériques/Elektra (Montreal), as well as in France, at Seconde Nature (Aix-en-Provence), Stereolux (Nantes), Némo (Paris), l'Ososphère (Strasbourg), and Panorama (Tourcoing).

Mauro Lanza
musician, composer

Mauro Lanza studied piano at the Venice Conservatory, then took courses in composition and musicology at Ca' Foscari University in Venice. He trained with Brian Ferneyhough, Salvatore Sciarrino and Gérard Grisey. In 1998/99, he attended the Ircam composition and computer music program. In 2006, he was a resident at the Civitella Ranieri Foundation, then at the Académie de France in Rome in 2007/08 and at the Akademie Schloss Solitude from 2009 to 2011. A guest professor at McGill University in Montreal in 2004/05, he also taught at the Cuneo Conservatory between 2004 and 2010 as part of the Music and New Technologies curriculum. He is also involved in research at Ircam in the fields of physical model synthesis and computer-assisted composition, and between 2010 and 2013 was associate professor of composition in the composition and computer music curriculum. After visiting professorships at Esmuc (Barcelona) and the Hochschule für Musik in Detmold, he currently teaches composition at the Universität der Künste (Berlin). Highly playful and often mischievous, both demanding and distanced, Mauro Lanza's writing combines traditional and electroacoustic instrumentarium, as well as a whole range of toy instruments and astonishing machines, such as the rain machine around which the musical discourse of "Le nubi non scoppiano" develops.Le nubi non scoppiano per il pesos" (2011), or like the augmented household appliances and computer-controlled electromechanical objects of the pieces in the cycle "Systema naturae" (2013-2016), born of the collaboration with Andrea Valle. In addition to his strictly musical work, Mauro Lanza shows a strong penchant for multidisciplinarity. In 2004, he composed the music for "Songe de Médée", commissioned by the Paris Opera and Ircam for a choreography by Angelin Preljocaj. His collaborative work with video artist Paolo Pachini was the subject of a creative residency at the Studio du Fresnoy, giving rise to "Descrizione del Diluvio" in 2008. In 2009, for the Musée du Louvre, he composed a vast electronic score for Benjamin Christensen's film Häxan (1922). In 2011, he worked with visual artist Jean-Michel Othoniel on an installation at the Centre Pompidou. In 2014, he was awarded the Franco Abbiati prize by Italy's national critics of Italy. His works have been published by Casa Ricordi since 2003.