Megaphones Up, the Philharmonic Opens With Two Young Voices

NEW YORK — The New York Philharmonic’s declaration of its new-music bona fides this season is so emphatic, it’s being delivered with megaphones.

In Ashley Fure’s “Filament,” which has its premiere Thursday in the Philharmonic’s season-opening gala — the first under its new music director, Jaap van Zweden — singers are spread throughout David Geffen Hall, armed with bespoke megaphones that create body-shaking sounds.

It speaks volumes that the Philharmonic has handed such a prominent platform to Fure, a 36-year-old composer making a brazen debut with the orchestra (and bringing in guest artists more often associated with the avant-garde than with Lincoln Center). It says even more that another premiere comes just a week later, with Conrad Tao’s “Everything Must Go.”

Tao, 24, has long been admired by van Zweden, who commissioned works from him as music director of the Dallas Symphony Orchestra and Hong Kong Philharmonic. (“It’s actually how I kind of learned to write for orchestra,” Tao said in an interview of those earlier pieces, which he worked on when he was as young as 17.) Van Zweden hasn’t worked with Fure before, but he has warmed to the idiosyncratic demands of her music.

“I am really, really impressed by her,” he said after a rehearsal Monday, adding that she “knows exactly what she wants, and that’s a very big joy for us to work with.”

Here are previews of “Filament” and “Everything Must Go.”

Fure thinks concerts are a little weird. If the music we hear is just sound waves traveling through the air, she said in an interview, then “we’re coming together to let air bump up against us. It’s a strange collective act.”

This perspective — looking at music as something physical — is at the heart of much of Fure’s work, which deals in sound environments more than melodic lines. “Filament” is no exception.

Van Zweden leads the orchestra in its typical configuration. But there are also three amplified soloists on elevated platforms: a trumpet (Nate Wooley) at the back of the stage, a bass (Brandon Lopez) to one side of the front and a bassoon (Rebekah Heller) in the audience. Then there are so-called “moving voices,” members of the Constellation Chor holding megaphones, scattered throughout the concert hall.

The soloists at times play with a credit card, a metal sheet or, in Heller’s case, the slap of a tongue against the bassoon’s bocal. Musicians in the orchestra sometimes use pencils and wooden skewers (“meat sticks,” van Zweden called them in rehearsal).

The sensory effects, particularly those created by the megaphones, are profound, not unlike the tingling feelings people get while watching online ASMR videos, which depict a phenomenon called autonomous sensory meridian response. This, Fure said, is what she’s interested in: “a body listening.”

“Romantic music can let us get swept away in a melody, and there’s something incredible about that,” she added. “In my work, however, I’m trying to do something different, which is pull us into the present — to feel our bodies, but also feel the strangeness and the beauty of this act of sitting in this room together.”

Pulling this off has required more resources than the Philharmonic’s usual program opener. In addition to the guest artists, “Filament” has a team of light and costume designers, and each of the megaphones was custom-made by Matter Design.

“We had a lot of license to stretch this and ask for things,” Fure said. “But I feel like everybody’s stretching together and trying. It’s been a deeply collaborative process.”

“Everything Must Go” is a curtain raiser for Bruckner’s Eighth Symphony — in fact, the symphony will follow the new piece without pause. That transition, or lack thereof, was decided before Tao got the commission. Indeed, he says he didn’t really know Bruckner’s music before the Philharmonic tapped him.

“I learned to really appreciate Bruckner,” Tao said, adding that living with the 19th-century Austrian composer’s notoriously divisive music changed the way he listens to it.

Bruckner’s massive orchestras have sheer sonic force. Tao nearly matches that with his largest-scale orchestral work yet. “It could be bigger: I didn’t include any Wagner tubas,” he said with a laugh. “But the three harps push it over the edge.”

“Everything Must Go” isn’t melodically entwined with the Bruckner; it could stand on its own. Tao said that the similarities between the two are less overt references and “more of a vibe.”

The clearer homage is to French overtures, with dotted-note rhythms at the start. But the sound of those opening measures begins to change, continuing to transform throughout the rest of the piece. As Tao describes it in his program note, “The sound mass leaves behind tendrils and residue as it gains and loses appendages, writhes and delights in its own possibilities.”

Tao will return to Bruckner on Sept. 28 as part of Nightcap, a new Philharmonic series of late-night concerts hosted by violist Nadia Sirota at the Kaplan Penthouse. The only direction he received was for his program to be related to the orchestra’s, so he decided to take inspiration from the religious, ritualistic aspects of Bruckner’s music, with guests including the choreographer and tap dancer Caleb Teicher.

What arose from that? With a straight face, Tao said: “a Bruckner motet for piano and tap dance.”