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Protest Music

Nathan is a specialist in the realization, coaching, and vocal performance of Frederic Rzewski's minimalist-cum-maximalist classic scores Coming Together and Attica.


For this project, he created a system of conducting which combines physical direction and vocal performance. In the orchestration and coaching of the instrumental ensemble, Nathan cultivates not only classical precision, but also integrates systems of improvisation in order to spice the instrumental performance with a certain tension which is fundamentally manifest in the spirit of the text:

“ I think the combination of age, and a greater coming together, is responsible for the speed of the passing time. It's six months now and I can tell you, truthfully, few periods in my life have passed so quickly. I am in excellent physical and emotional health. There are doubtless subtle surprises ahead, but I feel secure and ready. As lovers will contrast their emotions in times of crisis, so am I dealing with my environment. In the indifferent brutality, incessant noise, the experimental chemistry of food, the ravings of lost hysterical men, I can act with clarity and meaning. I am deliberate— sometimes even calculating— but seldom employing histrionics except as a test of the reactions of others. I read much, exercise, talk to guards and inmates, feeling for the inevitable direction of my life. “

He first performed these works with his ensemble Collision Palace at Amsterdam's Paradiso for the "Night of the Unexpected" in 2002, and at the Royal Conservatory of The Hague’s Radical Minimalism Festival in 2003. 

In 2012 in New York City, he joined forces with protest voices and creative musicians of the Occupy Wall Street movement Jen Chapin, Joey Molinaro, and the String Power orchestra, in a program conducted by Nathan which featured Coming Together and Attica, as well as works by Slayer and Charles Mingus.

Most recently, in collaboration with the Dakar, Senegal voices of the Black Lives Matter movement in 2016, he realized and directed a new rendering of Coming Together for English & Wolof language voices, and an ensemble of traditional Sabar drummers.

Live, Nathan Fuhr with Collision Palace.

Steve Reich in The Hague Festival, 2002

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