The Glossary

This chapter considers Adès’s compositional priorities by exploring his works which respond to complete, pre-existing musical pieces. I refer to these efforts collectively as Adès’s glossary. These glosses refract an existing piece through the lens of his own aesthetic, and also constitute a kind of commentary on practices through which composers have historically recruited music of the past into their work. Moreover, Adès’s engagements with composers ranging from Dowland to Nancarrow can be grouped according to a few overarching goals. Some of his glosses seek to comment or clarify on the harmonic or structural features of a piece; others focus on questions of performativity. In the case of his reconfiguration of his own music, Adès engages in a process of intensification of the source material, resulting in self-borrowings which distill the sometimes uncanny—or even disturbing—qualities present in the originals.

Introduction

The chapter introduces the general perspective from which I consider the music of Thomas Adès from the beginning of his career up until The Exterminating Angel. Broadly speaking, I frame a consideration of his work as a dialectic, but also synthesis, of a variety of different themes in music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In particular, I orient the reader by briefly considering Adorno’s notion of a Musique Informelle, alongside a theory of cultural production for the twenty-first century known as “metamodernism.” While neither one of these frames of reference totally captures the dynamics of the music that I seek to explore in the chapters that follow, they provide a useful point of departure for considering why Adès’s music has attracted the attention that it has.

The Great Beyond

In the decade ending in 2016, Adès has gravitated toward larger-scale works including Tevot (2007), Totentanz (2013), and The Exterminating Angel (2016). The increasingly cosmic ambition of these works reflects a more “philosophical” footing for Adès’s largest works. Despite the heterogeneity of these pieces, each of these works carefully balances its subjective and objective dimensions. Each of them features a different primary means of musical signification: Tevot operates largely through the use and development of autonomous musical material, Totentanz relies heavily on stylistic allusion and the pre-existing musical technique of limited aleatory, and The Exterminating Angel is a combination of both strategies. Taken as a whole, what emerges from these pieces when viewed in this light is the way in which Adès increasingly uses musical styles and materials to engender subjective experiences which point to truths outside of the objectively observable—his own kind of great beyond.

The Dilemmas of Musical Surrealism

Discussions of the music of Thomas Adès have seized on the idea of “surrealism” as an explanatory means to characterize music from across his career. This essay traces the development and emergence of the aesthetic of surrealism in the reception of Adès’s music and considers surrealism’s rapport with neighboring conceptual terrains, especially the uncanny. I argue that the idea of surrealism engages a larger process through which commentators have developed a vocabulary for considering various dimensions of otherness in Adès’s music while avoiding a rhetoric that uses alterity and identity politics as its primary argumentative fulcra.

The Twelve Tones

Serialism retains its cachet as one of the most severe, learned styles to have been developed in the last one hundred years. Adès seldom uses serialism on its own, but rather in concert with other compositional techniques. For example, he opens The Four Quarters (2010) with a striking juxtaposition of serialism and isorhythm. In a somewhat different vein, Adès relies on what he calls a “magnetic” approach to serialism in Polaris (2010), which artfully masks intricate row relations behind a gradually additive structure. Taken as a whole, Adès’s serial works demonstrate his comfort with not only the history and techniques of serialism, but also the potential for certain strict compositional styles to achieve particular affective ends in diverse contexts.

The Song Inside Your Mind

Adès’s second opera, The Tempest (2003), has been celebrated for many reasons. In the public imagination it has solidified comparisons between Adès and Benjamin Britten (the composer of one of the other most well-known Shakespeare operas of the last hundred years, A Midsummer Night’s Dream, 1960). The Tempest also established Adès as a leading presence in contemporary opera. My goal in this essay is to explore how two interrelated concerns—the expressive possibilities of moving from one medium to another and the interpenetration of different subjectivities with one another—show one way of thinking about The Tempest which is emblematic of several recurrent aspects Adès’s sensibility. The Tempest, as the largest work he completed in the decade after his initial flush of success in the 1990s, demonstrates the longevity of his quest for what he calls “new objects” which transcend their medium and engender singular subjective experiences.