Becoming a composer

For some musicians, composing is an instinct that manifests early. For others, it only gradually becomes an imperative. For Thomas Adès, it was a decision: one he made as a young pianist reluctant to be constrained by stereotypes. His compositions from the beginning of his career the 1990s are built on two pillars: a subject matter, which he frequently takes from a poetic idea, and a generative unifying musical element that can be manipulated in diverse ways. In the opening of “New Hampshire,” the first of the Five Eliot Landscapes (1990), one such generative element is a descending string of notes separated by an interval that increases incrementally by a half-step between each note (Example 1). Such a sequence is also present at the beginning of “…but all shall be well” (1993), in the fugue from Under Hamelin Hill (1992), and in “Auf dem Wasser zu singen,” which is the third movement of the string quartet Arcadiana (1992), among others. The sequence is surprisingly flexible; it can integrate within tonal, modal, or atonal harmony and can facilitate inconspicuous transitions between them.¹

Adès continued using similar arithmetic formulae through the early 2000s. Consider the sequence of three three-tone chords in his Piano Quintet (2000) and The Tempest (2004): read horizontally, the bass notes ascend in major thirds, the mid-range notes ascend in minor thirds, while the upper notes ascend in whole tones. The result is two perfect major chords, tonic and dominant in function, which lead to a third, dissonant chord (Example 2). The third chord is a consequence of the initial process even as it moves away from the initial tonality.

Similar intentions remain present in more recent work and drive Adès’s experimentation with new material. “Increasingly,” he wrote, “my thinking is centrifugal—when you think from a point and everything is spun outwards—rather than centripetal.”²

Across his scores, similarities in style and color come in part from common material to which Adès repeatedly returns to generate new arrangements. “Think of the thousands of combinations which we’ve formed, like pawns on a chessboard,” exclaims Leticia in Act III of The Exterminating Angel (2016). Via Adès’s music, this phrase from Luis Buñuel’s screenplay becomes a manifesto.

For Adès, musical ideas develop like plants, growing from the same generative nucleus.³ For example, In Seven Days (2008), an evocation of the genesis of the world, for piano, orchestra, and video, contains a theme, a sequence of six chords, taken from The Tempest. On this theme, musical material is generated through a series of variations. The plantlike development becomes apparent in the third movement, which through no coincidence is entitled “Land – Grass – Trees.” The variations rely on a dodecaphonic series (a language Adès rarely uses) whose twelfth tone becomes the first note of the serial expression that follows. Thus, the starting point acts as a center from which the discourse spirals outward: the variations are like branches of a tree growing out from the trunk.

Adès approaches composition much as a gardener approaches her seedlings, encouraging the growth and propagation of organisms that preexisted her care. He asserts that he “found” rather than invented the formula for Example 1.⁴ And he believes that each piece prepossesses a sort of DNA which no one owns, but which would have remained ineffectual had he not invested in it.⁵ An inherent dynamism in the material determines in what direction he takes it.

The works after The Tempest are not built on arithmetic sequences, but they reveal an ever-growing dedication to organic coherence. This coherence often rests on contrapuntal techniques, in particular fugue and canon. In his canonic writing, which has been present from his first opuses (the Sonata da Caccia from 1993), Adès contrives to superimpose several tempos. This technique also appears in America – A Prophecy (1999) and in Polaris (2010), whose three parts each consist of a canon.

Even without the opportunity to examine a score, listeners may detect recurring counterpoint and architectural techniques: the form progresses in consecutive sequences, amplified by a crescendo built up by an increasing number of instruments, a widening range, and a densifying texture. Once the peak is reached, layers slip away into almost nothing, and the next episode grows from near silence. Often, a section pivot will occur after a long ascent or descent that has led to a register so extreme that it would be impossible to continue.

Adès is devoted to the Western tradition but does not necessarily maintain tonal language. “I don’t believe at all in the official distinction between tonal and atonal music,” he said. “I think the only way to understand these things is that they are the result of magnetic forces within the notes, which create a magnetic tension, an attraction or repulsion.”⁶ Overall, Adès’s harmony doesn’t fall under the scope of functional tonality. The most tonal sequences resemble quotations, as if foreign material had been inserted into the score. It is quickly frittered away with dissonances, and the temporary tonal stability is distorted in a manner reminiscent of surrealism.

In Adès’s work, listeners will find that everything is constantly slipping away, whether it be a reassuring sense of tonality or consistent rhythm. Rhythmic regularity, maybe even the blurred memory of a dance, at times almost emerges but then vanishes. The line shifts, peppered with challenging meter changes. Nevertheless, the irregular lengths of the motifs are sometimes anchored in arithmetic logic. For example, in the finale of the Violin Concerto (2005), the principal elements of the main theme are, respectively, thirteen, twelve, and eleven eighth notes long. In other cases, rubato creates the sense of imbalance. Some scores are notated as to create the illusion that the performers are improvising, as in Life Story (1993), a piece for soprano and three chamber players sung in the “later style of Billie Holiday.”⁷ In a similar vein, Totentanz (2013) makes use of “collective ad libitum” as invented by Witold Lutosławski, to whom the piece is dedicated.

Gardens of memory

Many listeners find Adès more approachable than some of his peers, due to both his language and the elements he draws from shared culture. He uses formal structures from traditional Western music and familiar quotations, references, and allusions that forge a bond with the public. The first movement of Chamber Symphony, the composition …but all shall be well, and the Piano Quintet all contain references to sonata form. The last includes a reprise of the exposition, modeled after Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 15, op. 28, “Pastorale.” Passacaglias can be found, for example, in Arcadiana (in “O Lethe”), Asyla (in the middle of the second movement), The Tempest (Act III, scene 4), the Violin Concerto (“Paths”), and The Exterminating Angel (Act I, scene 3 and Act III, scene 6). Canon and fugue are used in the central movement of Under Hamelin Hill, in “Creatures of the Sea and Sky” from In Seven Days, and in the “Fugue of Panic” in Act II of The Exterminating Angel.

Listeners are most likely to recognize borrowed elements. Actual quotations are exceptional and brief, and are akin to stolen fragments: In fact, Adès uses the term “robbery” to describe his quotation of Carlos Gardel’s tango Cuesta Abajo in Powder Her Face (1995).⁸ Only one score, Darknesse Visible (1992), is entirely based upon a preexisting piece: John Dowland’s “In Darkness Let Me Dwell.” The appropriated matter is unrecognizable, absorbed into a quivering texture of tremolos. The more obvious or substantial the citation, the more Adès deconstructs and reconfigures it. The same applies to stylistic references. In Brahms (2001), which Adès calls an “anti-homage,” he creates a parody of his German forebearer. His bassoons mock Brahms’s milquetoast use of this instrument. He parodies the percussion from the Scherzo from Brahms’s Symphony No. 4 by replacing the triangles with an anvil and baking dishes. And he saturates his composition with descending thirds, a cliché marker of Brahms’s music, now lodged in a largely non-tonal setting.

It is often difficult to recognize references, particularly when they are so changed and removed from their original contexts. For instance, two chords from The Magic Flute are embedded into “Das klinget so herrlich, das klinget so schön” (the second movement of Arcadiana), a movement whose title hints at the presence of extrinsic matter. The diminished seventh chords in Piano Quintet are veiled allusions to Liszt.⁹ And the Tristan chord is almost unrecognizable in Powder Her Face, even though it is repeated multiple times during the famous fellatio scene (Act I, scene 4).

In contrast, the stylistic references are easier to perceive. Adès draws from the Spanish Renaissance (in America – A Prophecy), Elizabethan music, François Couperin (inSonata da caccia), Franz Schubert (in “Auf dem Wasser zu singen,” the third movement ofArcadiana), the waltz (in Living Toys,Powder Her Face, andThe Exterminating Angel), jazz (inChamber Symphony,Powder Her Face,Life Story,Living Toys, and parts of Ariel’s role inThe Tempest), tango (inArcadianaandPowder Her Face), and techno (in the third movement ofAsyla), to name only some of the more obvious occurrences. Most often, the pastiche dissolves within seconds, instantly undercut by dissonances, rhythmic irregularities, and unexpected notes. Listeners thus drift between the familiar and the unfamiliar. The evocative power of Adès’s music is the result of this conversation between seemingly unrelated dialects.

Poetry and drama

Adès confesses to his keenness, as a young composer, to write music about extra-musical subjects.¹⁰ Though this interest has not disappeared, it has evolved: since the early 2000s, the extra-musical element mentioned in each title tends to refer to the central compositional mechanism, as, for example, in the Violin Concerto: Concentric Paths, or in Polaris (the North star being a metaphor for the magnetic power of a note). Many scores, even the instrumental ones, are inspired from non-musical fields, whether literary, pictorial (a Daniel Maclise painting in The Origin of the Harp (1994), and Jean-Antoine Watteau and Nicholas Poussin in Arcadiana¹¹), mystical (Tevot [2007]¹² and In Seven Days), historical (the Spanish colonization of South America in America – A Prophecy), or cinematographic (Stanley Kubrick’s2001: A Space OdysseyinLiving Toys [1993]¹³). Most of Adès’s instrumental pieces can be considered program music. The composer-storyteller plays with different levels of narration, running the gamut from the obvious tale to the undertone.

These citations and stylistic allusions imply an exercise in intertextuality. In Powder Her Face for a scene set in 1934, Adès pastiches a song in Cole Porter’s style, and to forebode the Duchess’s passing he quotes from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and the “Lullaby” from Modest Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death. The presence of Dies Irae in Totentanz requires no explanation, and the chorus of trumpets brings to mind Symphony No. 2, “Resurrection,” by Gustav Mahler. The Exterminating Angel draws upon the bells and Mexican musical influence in Buñuel’s film, to which Adès adds the waltz, a nod to Salzburg, the city where the opera was first performed. Totentanz was conceived in relation to two other pieces programmed at its premiere: Sinfonia da Requiem by Benjamin Britten and the Cello Concerto by Lutosławski. The basic listening experience can be enriched by knowledge of these symbolic and dramaturgical corollaries. And certain references may not be immediately intuitive. For example, though the chorale in Totentanz could be read as a sign of deference, Adès was in fact quite critical of the Resurrection Symphony.¹⁴ However obvious they might appear, some borrowed elements are not what they seem.

Other factors in the music, beyond citation and imitation, also contribute to narrative. The instruments imitate the human voice, its laughter, wails, growls, or cries. This is especially the case in scores from the 1990s, where anthropomorphisms are frequent, as in the written directions to perform “as if telling a story” or as if “crying” or “laughing.” These spectacular gestures rely upon the musicians’ virtuosity and contrasts in intensity, register, and color. Adès has a particular penchant for juxtaposing or superimposing swarm-like and somber low frequencies and ethereal, tinkling, or squealing sounds in the highest ranges, all generated by the human voice, as in Ariel and Leticia’s extravagant roles in The Tempest and The Exterminating Angel, respectively.

The caustic humor in many sequences is wielded with brazen schoolboy pluck. Consider the creativity with which the sound effect paraphernalia (a fishing rod reel, tin cans of all sizes, a hubcap, a bucket, and a garbage bin into which dishes will be shattered) are deployed in Powder Her Face. The theatricality, though dazzling, is but a gloss upon a more sinister context, as the Duchess’s sexual obsession lambasts the petty, puritan excesses of English society. In The Exterminating Angel the familiar turns droll, and then tailspins into the disquieting and tragic.

Despite the flamboyance and humor of many pieces, death’s shadow is often looming. In The Fayrfax Carol (1997), the joy of the nativity theme is undercut by an infant Jesus who senses his fate. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra for the advent of the twenty-first century, America – A Prophecy explores the massacre of the Mayan people by Spanish conquistadors. Tragedy is in fact pervasive in Adès’s oeuvre. In Life Story, two lovers perish when their hotel catches fire from a lit cigarette. At the end of The Tempest, Prospero appears painfully bleak, more so than Shakespeare’s original character. Even in the exuberant Living Toys, the child envisions his own death. Brahms is narrated from the perspective of the German composer’s ghost. Furthermore, several instrumental scores also culminate on sepulchral tones, though shrouded in delicate veil (Arcadiana) or stormy gesticulations (the “Cancan macabre” from Lieux retrouvés, 2016).

In Adès’s work, the spirit of Thanatos inspires melancholy lyrical outbursts wreathed in harmonies that conjure the imminence of death or the impending demise of a corrupt society. Perhaps the only escape is to dream of an ideal world, or take on the imagination of a child-phoenix who rises each day to fly toward the unknown.

^{1. See Hélène CAO, Thomas Adès, le voyageur: Devenir compositeur. Être musicien (Paris: Éditions mf, 2007), 38–40.↩}

^{2. Tom SERVICE, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises. Conversation with Tom Service (London: Faber and Faber, 2012), 172.↩}

^{3. SERVICE, Thomas Adès, 151.↩}

^{4. See CAO, Thomas Adès, 38.↩}

^{5. See SERVICE, Thomas Adès, 150.↩}

^{6. SERVICE, Thomas Adès, 3.↩}

^{7. Score preface (London: Faber Music).↩}

^{8. SERVICE, Thomas Adès, 152–153. See also Kyle SHAW, “Promiscuity, Fetishes, and Irrational Functionality in Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face” (PhD diss., University of Illinois Music and Performing Arts Library, 2018), 34.↩}

^{9. Interview of Thomas Adès by Tom SERVICE, BBC Music Magazine, July 2001, 28–29.↩}

^{10. SERVICE, Thomas Adès, 3–4.↩}

^{11. See CAO, Thomas Adès, 13.↩}

^{12. This title, which refers to Noah’s ark, is inspired by a idea of a ship carrying a transient humanity toward an uncertain destiny.↩}

^{13. CAO, Thomas Adès, 107.↩}

^{14. Alex ROSS, “Roll Over Beethoven: Thomas Adès,” The New Yorker, 2 November 1998. See also SERVICE, Thomas Adès, 22–23 and 172.↩}