Thomas Adès: Full of Noises: Conversations with Tom Service - Hardcover

Adès, Thomas; Service, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0374276323 ISBN 13: 9780374276324

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2012

Synopsis

Composer, conductor, and pianist, Thomas Adès is one of the most diversely talented musical figures of his generation. His music is performed by great opera companies, symphony orchestras, chamber groups, and music festivals throughout the world. But Adès has resisted public discussion of the creative process behind his musical compositions. Until now, the interior experience that has fired the spectrum of his work―from his first opera, Powder Her Face, to his masterpiece The Tempest and his acclaimed orchestral works Asyla and Tevot―has largely remained unexplained. Here, in spirited, intimate, and, at times, contentious conversations with the distinguished music critic Tom Service, Adès opens up about his work. "For Adès, whose literary and artistic sensibilities are nearly as refined and virtuosic as his musical instincts," writes Service, "inhabiting the different territory of words rather than notes offers a chance to search out new creative correspondences, to open doors―a phrase he often uses―into new ways of thinking in and about music."

The phrase "full of noises," from Caliban's speech in The Tempest, refers both to the sounds "swirling around" Adès's head that are transmuted into music and to the vast array of his musical influences―from Sephardic folk music, to 1980s electronica, to Adès's passion for Beethoven and Janácek and his equally visceral dislike of Wagner. It also suggests "the creative friction" essential to any authentic dialogue. As readers of these "wilfully brilliant" conversations will quickly discover, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises brings us into the "revelatory kaleidoscope" of Adès's world.

About this title

About the Author

Thomas Adès is widely considered the foremost composer of his generation. His first opera, Powder Her Face, has been produced throughout the world; his 1997 orchestral piece Asyla won a Grawemeyer Award; and his 2004 opera The Tempest was staged at the Royal Opera House to huge critical acclaim. The Tempest premiered at the Metropolitan Opera in October 2012, with Adès at the podium. Adès was artistic director of the Aldeburgh Festival for a decade, has conducted orchestras from the New York Philharmonic to the London Symphony Orchestra, and has had festivals worldwide devoted to his music.

Tom Service writes about music for The Guardian, where he was chief classical music critic, and broadcasts for BBC Radio 3. He has presented Radio 3's flagship magazine program, Music Matters, since 2003. Service was the inaugural recipient of the ICMP/CIEM Classical Music Critic of the Year Award and a guest artistic director of the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. He is the author of Music as Alchemy: Journeys with Great Conductors and Their Ochestras.

Excerpt. © Reprinted by permission. All rights reserved.

Thomas Ades: Full of Noises
1 a studio covered in scraps - stability/instability - magnetism - subjects and titles - forms and feelings - Chopin and the bottomless pool - opera and drama - absurdity - Wagner's fungus, janáek's truth, Mahler's banality  
 
What are you writing just now?  
I'm writing something that will probably be absorbed into my new opera. I often find that smaller pieces emerge before an opera. If an idea emerges that might not go into the smaller pieces, I immediately write it on a scrap of paper and stick it to the wall. When you're writing an opera, there's so much material you might need. So anything that seems pregnant, you don't want to throw away. A scrap can stay there for years before I use it. By the end of the opera, the wall in my studio is covered with yellowing scraps. The thing that's sitting on my desk at the moment is a piano miniature. It may become part of a larger book of miniatures, but I won't probably produce that for some time. It might be like a scrapbook, of actual thoughts that occur to one. They are a form of study - but they're sketches rather than studies exactly.  
 
Sketches or studies in what?  
I'm finding more and more that the most interesting issue is stability. That's what animates everything in music- stability and instability. I've been asking myself: is there such a thing as absolute stability in music, or in anything? I came to the conclusion that the answer is no: where there is life, there is no stability. However, a lot of musical material - maybe all - tends to desire stability or resolution of some kind, unless it's held in a kind of equilibrium, which is still a volatile situation. That's the way I understand everything in history, in musical history. The music we listen to is the residue of an endless search for stability. I think you can make a sort of illusion of stability in a piece; you can fix it in a certain way. In a musical work, you permanently fix something that in life would be appreciable only for a moment. The piece can stand in that relation to one's everyday experience of stability, as an ideally achieved form.  
 
There's a contradiction there: if everything in life is unstable, that attempt at stability in a musical work is a sort of anti-life - a death.  
Well, it could equally be a sort of captured, eternal volatility. You could argue that a given interval is stable, like a perfect fifth or something. But it's not, to me. The piece can be trying to resolve a tension between two ideas, to resolve them ideally into one thing. But in my case, I can hear a single note and feel all the directions it wants to move in. It might be something in the room that makes it want to move, something in the nature of the way it is played, or a quality inside me at that moment; but essentially, the note is alive and therefore unstable. If I put a note under the microscope I feel I can see millions, trillions of things. In Polaris, my recent orchestral piece, a 'voyage for orchestra', I was looking and looking at a particular C sharp, and as I put it under the microscope I saw or heard a writhing that turned into the piece.  
 
You talk about 'magnetism' in your programme note for Polaris: is that a term for the pull between what's stable and what's unstable in your music?  
That's really what one is dealing with all the time, magnetism: understanding the magnetic pull of the notes put in a given disposition, their shifting relative weights. I have a problem - well, it's not a problem for me, but it can make life confusing talking to anyone else - which is that I don't believe at all in the official distinction between tonal and atonal music. 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. The two notes in an interval, or any number of chords, have a magnetic relationship of attraction or repulsion which creates movement in one direction or another. A composer, whether of a symphony or a pop song, is arranging these magnetic objects in a certain disposition. That means that sometimes, in order to understand the weight of one note and the next note to it, you might have to transfer meaning from one to another. In Polaris, I had to transfer meaning from the C sharp to the A in order to do that. And it was difficult in some ways, because to really discover what the n otes want to do, you might have to go against what they at first appear to want to do, and then they start to resist and you have to use other magnets to see what they are really feeling.  
 
Is that a pre-compositional idea in Polaris, that decision to look at that C sharp, to work out what that move from C sharp to A meant?  
There's no such thing as 'pre-composition': as soon as you start you're really composing. I wouldn't distinguish between a 'pre-compositional' and a 'during-composition' stage. What if you have to go back to the 'pre-compositional stage', which would almost certainly happen? You're dealing with something that is chronically volatile. It's like lava, except my material doesn't actually exist in physical reality. They are evanescent sounds. These notes are not objects that are in front of you - although in another sense it helps to treat them like that; maybe they are, in fact, a sort of invisible object. But that very invisibility is frustrating, because one's brain can't necessarily define them clearly at first.  
 
That idea of 'where the notes want to go', their magnetic weights relative to one another - I can hear a lot of your music in those terms when you put it like that.  
Any music. It's the way I hear.  
 
That's different from other living composers.  
Good!  
 
Is Polaris doing something very different from what your music has always done?  
I think working with magnets is what I was always doing. I perhaps felt in the past that it wouldn't be interesting enough on its own to make a piece out of, that it would bemore interesting to have a descriptive subject for the piece. When I was younger, it was helpful, in some ways, to have a subject; it was a short cut to the point where things are sitting in a permanent equilibrium, a resolution, even if it's an uncomfortable one.  
 
Is it when you sense a permanent equilibrium that you feel a piece is finished?  
It can be. A piece can have more than one ending. My first opera, Powder Her Face, has three or four endings; different surfaces, different keys in it that end at different points. And that comes from the nature of the subject; there are different layers. And my orchestral piece Asyla has a couple of endings, some in a row and then some on top of each other - I can't remember how many. When they are all in place I can sense the equilibrium. It is quite exciting to find all those resolutions happening at once.  
 
How do you choose the subject of a piece, and once chosen, does it risk limiting the piece? How and why do you choose a descriptive title, like Asyla, or an abstract, generic title, as in your Piano Quintet?  
Well, all pieces have subjects, whether stated in the title or not. That was another problem for me: I don't see the distinction between abstract music and programme music. I literally have no idea what that means, because to me all music is metaphorical, always. That textbook distinction is meaningless to me. Also, to me abstract titles are difficult to use without sounding pretentious or in bad taste. I find 'symphony' impossible to use now: it sounds so affected. Ithink, though, one would still be able to use the word 'symphony' in the sense that Purcell does, meaning instrumental music at the beginning of a masque or something; that makes perfect sense to me.  
 
So you feel the subject, the title, used to be a way in to the music for you, which now you need less?  
I can now access more immediately the metaphorical implications of a note or two notes, without the need for an image or a picture, whereas in the past, the metaphorical freight was expressed in a title or an idea. It doesn't bother me much either way; it's a natural, musical process.  
 
There is a distinction you're talking about, though: when you are 'just' combining notes, with no further subject, is the freight of metaphors different, less heavy?  
It's completely indistinguishable, whether one names the subject behind a musical idea or chooses not to. I might not be able to name it. I might try very hard and not come up with a name. In my piano piece Traced Overhead I had about a hundred and fifty titles for it before I came to that one. I almost called it 'Sonata da Sopra'. I can't explain why that wasn't logical enough. It's not ultimately up to me, whether I reject one avenue and choose another one. It is very like walking blind: you run into an obstacle and you go the other way. Or perhaps you try to do something with the obstacle. Whatever it is that leads you to reject one path - even if it's something larger, a whole section that you do or don't write, or a detail that you choose over another - all of those choices are made at a level that's almost completelyinstinctive and emotional. But I find that there is almost always an analytical reason behind those decisions, which suddenly becomes clear at the last minute, when I've finished the composition, and I see: oh, this melody was the inversion of that one, or there was some other technical connection, all along.  
 
So is all this a conscious or subconscious thing?  
As I said, it's the same thing either way: when I say analytical, it's because you sense this form internally and have to find a way to realise it. And that is an analytical process - whether conscious or not makes no difference. Usually it's not explicitly conscious at the start. It may be like seeing the face in the fire, which isn't actually there, but once you've written it down, it becomes real. Just as if an artist draws a face they see in the fire, then once it is drawn that face becomes a real face. Writing music is like trying to draw the face in the fire.  
 
That's fine in principle, but there are moments in your music where there are conscious uses of forms: chaconnes, say. Surely these are decisions that aren't so instinctive: I mean, if you're writing a chaconne, you must have made a decision to write a chaconne?  
No! That's not true. This is a very common mistake. That's not how one makes a decision. That is what is wrong with academic analysis. The impulse comes first, the method second. The desire to travel faster preceded the invention of the car. It was desire that generated the design. A chaconne is simply one kind of harmonic motion. In mymusic it's very often spiral rather than circular - in other words, it's transposed down with each appearance, or whatever it is. But it's really an organic form, a kind of growth, and the label 'chaconne' comes after. The same goes for 'sonata form' or 'fugue'. It's not to say 'I'm going to do that because composer X did it' - I wouldn't think like that, really. I mean, some do, of course, but I think the duty should be first to the desire of the material, second to the formal plan, otherwise it remains like a photograph, faded. But there may already be something in the nature of the material that tends towards a particular form - in which case it's not really referential in that sense. I mean, again, everything is metaphorical in music.  
 
Maybe a chaconne, or any formal structure, is something that helps you feel less blind when you're composing, and you perhaps see the obstacles more clearly, before you run into them?  
Well, in some ways, perhaps. But you could say that any serial piece is a chaconne of a kind, in the sense that you're going through rotations of the twelve notes of the row in order. You could describe the whole serial process as a chaconne if you felt like it, but it's really just to do with the way that notes recur. And if they happen to recur in a certain recognisable way - suddenly the piece is a chaconne. What I'm saying is: the distance between something that's a repetitive structure in that explicit sense, and the way a continually unfolding structure - like the first movement of Asyla, say - actually works, is quite small. I might have set out to write that as a chaconne, but the material didn't allow it. I began that piece, Asyla, by writing the melody, in fact,where the horns enter. And then in the course of completing that melody, I found that I had to start to compose the harmonisation at the same time in order to understand how the melody was moving. And then the accompaniment, the harmonisation, began to take on a life of its own, and at that point I couldn't make it into a chaconne. It had already run somewhere else, and I had to let it do what it wanted. There is quite a long development of the melody, and you could almost see it as a chaconne, yet it's not. It doesn't sound like one - but it's much more closely related to one than you might think, and it does have a spiral form. And then I had to compose an introduction to the first movement later, and then the middle section is based on Couperin. And then it's simply a recapitulation. So it's never very far from classical form, really.  
 
You make it sound as if all that just happened without any intervention from you, as if there were scarcely any decisions to be made about what to do with the material. But you must surely have been shaping it, grappling with it, all the time. I mean: take that melody in the first movement of Asyla, for example: where does it lie in relation to the question of stability and instability?  
I'm afraid in that case it can be a sort of Chinese box effect. That is: I answer one instability with another, and it can resemble a hall of mirrors. There are models for this. Take Chopin - one knows that there must be a point of possible resolution somewhere in his music, partly because it's the nineteenth century; but mostly, there is nothing stable. As soon he puts a note on the page it starts to slide around. And there is no real resolution. It's like a pool you can't seethe bottom of. You're aware of the movement of the water, and there may be currents of different temperatures that affect one another, and indeed there must be a bottom to it, but you can't necessarily see it. In fact, if Chopin gives you a resolution, it's a concession on his part, a concession to us. The music doesn't really demand it. Or you could have a Beethovenian model, which is in the other direction most of the time, yet it's actually quite similar. What I mean is it's more volcanic: in Beethoven, the bottom can simply move under your feet. That's what catalyses his music. That's a different world, but as models of ways to think about the question of stability, they're quite good twin ideas.  
 
Are you aware of the bottom of the pool when writing your own music?  
As much as any swimmer is. But some...

About this edition

• Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0374276323
• ISBN 13: 9780374276324
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208