Thomas Adès

Becoming a composer

Some musicians discover their calling as composers early in life; for others, the impulse develops more gradually before becoming an urgent necessity. In the case of Thomas Adès, composition was a deliberate choice, made by a young pianist unwilling to be confined within the rigid framework of convention.

From the outset, two guiding principles shaped his work in the 1990s: the presence of a “subject” (most often grounded in a poetic idea), and the use of a unifying, impersonal musical material capable of undergoing diverse transformations.

The opening of “New Hampshire,” the first part of Five Eliot Landscapes (1990), offers a clear example of the principal generative formula Adès used during his early period, and its significance is heightened by the fact that this song cycle bears his first opus number. The formula consists of a succession of descending notes whose intervals progressively widen by the addition of a semitone (Example 1).

The same idea can be heard again at the beginning of the fugue section labeled “…but all shall be well,” in Under Hamelin Hill (1992), and again in “Auf dem Wasser zu singen,” which is the third movement of the string quartet Arcadiana (1992), among other examples. This pitch complex turns out to be astonishingly malleable, as it fits into tonal, modal, or atonal harmony, with the possibility of slipping almost unnoticeably from one to another.¹

Example 1

Other materials derived from similarly quasi-automatic procedures remain active in Adès’s compositions of the early 2000s. A notable example is the succession of three triadic chords that appears in both the Piano Quintet (2000) and The Tempest (2004). Read horizontally, the notes in the bass part form a series of ascending major thirds, the middle voice a series of minor thirds, while the upper voice proceeds by major seconds. The result is two major triads, functioning as tonic and dominant, leading to a third chord that is dissonant (Example 2). This third chord moves away from tonality while still being the consequence of the initial process.

Example 2

Comparable procedures continue to inform Adès’s more recent works, although over time they have come to govern parameters beyond pitch alone. “Increasingly, my thought is centrifugal, more than centripetal,” Adès observed.²

The stylistic and coloristic affinities among certain works arise in part from their shared musical material, whose potential Adès continues to explore for its capacity to generate still more configurations. “Think of the thousands of combinations we formed, like pawns on a chessboard,” exclaims Leticia in Act III of The Exterminating Angel (2016), when she realizes that her fellow guests have inadvertently returned to the exact positions they occupied many days earlier. In the context of Adès’s music, this line from Luis Buñuel’s screenplay functions almost as a manifesto. The recurring use of a single generative kernel across multiple works produces a kind of organic growth, continually feeding and reshaping the musical discourse.³

Another vivid illustration is In Seven Days (2008), for piano, orchestra, and video. Its depiction of the creation of the world unfolds as a set of variations — a natural means of proliferating musical material — and more specifically as double variations, one of whose themes (a sequence of six chords) derives from The Tempest. The third movement, “Land – Grass – Trees,” brings the biological metaphor into sharp focus. The variations are built from a twelve-tone row (rare in Adès’s output) in which the twelfth pitch becomes the first note of the next now. The music thus spirals around its point of origin. Like the branches of a tree, the variations grow outward from the trunk.

Adès is a gardener, encouraging the growth of organisms that preexisted his intervention; he has remarked, for example, that he “found,” rather than invented, the formula shown in Example 1.⁴ In his view, each work possesses its own DNA, something he does not so much own as activate. Left untouched, it would remain dormant.⁵ Once set in motion, however, the material develops a life of its own, its internal energy guiding the composition along its necessary course. The motifs and melodies to which the listener might readily attach are merely the visible growth above ground; beneath them lies a far more intricate system of roots and impulses, quietly propelling the music forward.

After The Tempest, Adès began to step away from the arithmetic, rule-based systems that had shaped many of his earlier works — systems that, once established, could generate music almost automatically. This shift, however, did not result in looser structures; on the contrary, his later pieces reveal an even more deliberate pursuit of organic unity. Their coherence often rests on contrapuntal techniques, especially fugue and canon.

Canonic writing had been part of Adès’s toolkit from the start: Sonata da Caccia from 1993 already signals this preoccupation in its title. He returns repeatedly to superimposing multiple tempos at once, as in America – A Prophecy (1999) and Polaris (2010), whose three sections are each built as a canon.⁶

Although the finer details of Adès’s contrapuntal procedures emerge fully only through analysis, listeners can readily apprehend the surface of this shifting substance, as well as its principal architectural lines. The form typically unfolds in successive waves, with climaxes often created by a crescendo combined with added instruments, an expanded register, and a thickened texture. Once the apex is reached, the music sheds multiple layers — sometimes almost all of its material — before a new episode begins from almost nothing. Another recurrent gesture occurs when a section boundary is marked by a long ascent (or descent) into an extreme register, beyond which continuation becomes impossible.

Faithful to the dialectical impulse of the Western tradition and its demand for directionality, Adès likewise embraces the concept of polarity, though not necessarily regarding tonal and atonal language. “I don’t believe at all in the official distinction between tonal and atonal music,” he says. “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.”⁷ He constructs Polaris around precisely these principles. At the work’s conclusion, the full chromatic set appears, and the polarity shifts from C-sharp to A.

In general, Adès’s harmonic language is not functionally tonal. When distinctly tonal passages do emerge, they often sound like quotations, as though an alien element has been inserted into the texture. The sense of stability they momentarily suggest is frequently subjected to surreal distortion and quickly eroded by dissonance.

With Adès, certainties continually recede: whether reassuring tonal reference points or a stable pulse. A meter may seem momentarily perceptible, even hinting at a dance, yet its contours soon blur, sometimes tipping into rhythmic disorientation. The musical line sways amid changing meters that place considerable demands on performers. And yet the irregular lengths of his motifs often follow a precise arithmetic logic: in the finale of the Violin Concerto (2005), for example, the three phrases of the main theme last thirteen, twelve, and eleven eighth notes, respectively.

At other moments, the line seems to float freely in rubato, but in fact its smallest inflections are governed by meticulous notation. The score thus creates the illusion of improvisation, as in Life Story (1993), which is sung in the late vocal style of Billie Holiday.⁸ If Totentanz (2013) occasionally adopts Witold Lutosławski’s device of “collective ad libitum,” it does so in acknowledgment of its dedication to the Polish composer and its premiere at a concert held in his honor.

Gardens of memory

For many listeners, Adès seems more accessible than other contemporary composers. This accessibility stems in part from his musical language, but also from its integration of elements drawn from a shared cultural heritage: formal archetypes from the Western tradition, along with quotations, references, and allusions that establish a rapport with the audience.

Traditional forms may govern only a handful of works—or brief internal passages within them—yet they nonetheless offer points of orientation. A bi-thematic sonata form shapes the first movement of the Chamber Symphony (1990), as well as …but all shall be well (1993) and the Piano Quintet (2000), which even includes a repeated exposition. (In the later case, the model is Beethoven’s Piano Sonata No. 15, op. 28, “Pastoral.”) The passacaglia, which is more frequent, appears in Arcadiana (“O Lethe”), Asyla (midway through the second movement, 1997), The Tempest (Act III, Scene 4), the Violin Concerto (“Paths”), and The Exterminating Angel (Act I, Scene 3, and Act III, Scene 6). The use of canon and fugue (already noted) likeways plays a structural role 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.

What listeners are most likely to recognize, however, are borrowings — whether direct quotation or more diffuse stylistic references. Genuine quotations tend to be brief and episodic, like fragments of appropriated objects (Adès himself has spoken of “robbery” in describing his use of the tango Cuesta Abajo by Carlos Gardel in Powder Her Face, 1995⁹). Only one work is entirely based on preexisting music: Darknesse Visible (1992), based on In Darknesse let mee dwell by John Dowland. Even here, the borrowed material is scarcely recognizable, absorbed into a texture set quivering with tremolos in order, as Adès has explained, to “illuminate the melody from within.” The more obvious and extended the quotation, the more it becomes subject to processes of deconstruction and recomposition.

The same principle applies to stylistic reference. One might consider Brahms (2001), which is an “anti-homage” that gently mocks Johnannes Brahms by preserving his vocabulary while stripping it of its nostalgic expressivity. In this orchestral lied, three contrabassoons parody Brahms’s timid use of the instrument, and the triangle associated with the scherzo of his Fourth Symphony is amplified by the addition of an anvil and frying pan. The musical discourse is saturated with descending thirds, a Brahmsian cliché, yet heard here within an essentially nontonal context.

Once detached from its original context, a brief borrowing may lose its status as quotation and function instead as a simple morpheme, difficult to connect to the style it ostensibly signifies. One thinks, for example, of the two chords from The Magic Flute inserted into the second movement of Arcadiana, “Das klinget so herrlich, das klinget so schön.” In this case, the presence of a foreign material is suggested by the movement’s title. No such indication accompanies the diminished seventh chords in the Piano Quintet, where nothing reveals that Adès had Liszt in mind.¹⁰ Nor does the subject of Powder Her Face readily suggest the presence of the Tristan chord, though it appears several times in the notorious fellatio scene (Act I, Scene 4). Transposed into a new context, the borrowed element effectively efface its own identity.

Stylistic references, however, are more easily perceived. Adès draws from wide-ranging sources: the Spanish Renaissance (America – A Prophecy), Elizabethan music, François Couperin (Sonata da caccia), Franz Schubert (“Auf dem Wasser zu singen,” Arcadiana), the waltz (Living Toys, Powder Her Face, The Exterminating Angel), jazz (Chamber Symphony, Powder Her Face, Life Story, Living Toys, and certain scenes for Ariel in The Tempest), tango (Arcadiana, Powder Her Face), and techno (the third movement of Asyla) — to mention only the most striking cases.

Yet such pastiche dissipates after only a few seconds, or is immediately undermined by dissonance, rhythmic irregularity, and unexpected sonorities that create distance and reassert the composer’s own voice. The listener, alert to these references and perhaps projecting their own cultural associations into the cracks of the score, experiences a listening divided between the known and the unknown, the recognizable and the unrecognizable. From this tension between supposedly very different musical languages, between individual invention and borrowed material, arise much of the evocative power and ambiguity characteristic of Adès’s music.

Poetry and drama

Adès has acknowledged that in his youth he often depended on an external subject as the catalyst for composition.¹¹ Although this need has not entirely disappeared, it has evolved. Since the 2000s, the extramusical references signaled by his pieces’ titles tend rather to highlight the central compositional idea itself, as in the Violin Concerto, subtitled “Concentric Paths,” or in Polaris, where the polestar functions as a metaphor for the magnetic pull of a single note.

Even so, the majority of his works, including instrumental ones, draw inspiration from literary, pictorial, mythological, historical, or cinematic sources: a painting by Daniel Maclise for The Origin of the Harp (1994); Watteau and Poussin in Arcadiana;¹² myth in Tevot (2007)¹³ and In Seven Days; the conquest of South America by the Spaniards in America – A Prophecy; and Kubrick’s 2001: A Space Odyssey in Living Toys (1993).¹⁴ Most of his instrumental compositions thus fall, in varying degrees, within the tradition of program music. Adès navigates a spectrum of narrative strategies, from explicit storytelling to suggestive frameworks that invite interpretation.

By their very nature, quotations and stylistic references generate intertextuality. Their presence is often motivated less by historical inquiry — thought they may indeed prompt historical reflection — than by the subject matter and dramatic context in which they appear. In Powder Her Face, Adès pastiches a song in the style of Cole Porter for a scene set in 1934, while quotations from Schubert’s Death and the Maiden and Modest Mussorgsky’s “Berceuse” from Songs and Dances of Death foreshadow the Duchess’s impending demise. The presence of the Dies Irae in Totentanz requires little comment, whereas the trumpet chorale preceding Death’s final entrance invites comparison with Gustav Mahler’s Symphony No. 2 “Resurrection.” Such dramatic and symbolic resonances presuppose a certain factual knowledge and cannot be grasped through listening alone. Some allusions may even prove misleading: the chorale in Totentanz might suggest homage, although Adès has expressed a notably severe judgment of the “Resurrection” Symphony.¹⁵ Even when recognizable, borrowings sometimes arrive in altered guise.

Beyond quotations and imitations, other devices also help create a sense of narrative. Adès often has instruments imitate the human voice — laughter, screams, growls, or sobs — especially in works from the 1990s, where his score markings (“narratively,” “weeping,” “laughing”) invite listeners to hear human expression in the sounds. He also uses striking musical gestures that create a kind of sonic theater. These moments rely on extreme virtuosity from performers and on sharp contrasts of intensity, register, and color. Adès is particularly drawn to juxtaposing subterranean rumblings in the lowest register with ethereal, tinkling, or screeching sounds in the uppermost range, often produced by the human voice. Examples include the stratospheric roles of Ariel in The Tempest and Leticia in The Exterminating Angel.

What may first strike the listener is the acerbic humor that animates many passages, fueled by mischievous—at times outrageous—ideas. One recalls the veritable “hardware store” required for Powder Her Face (fishing-rod whirls, tin boxes and cans, a hubcap, saucepan, bucket of water, a garbage can into which dishes are smashed), all employed with equal measures of dramatic purpose and sonic imagination. Yet this dazzling comedy often serves as a veneer for darker undercurrents. The subversive dimension is not always located where one might expect. The irony with which the Duchess’s sexual obsessions are portrayed exposes, with heightened sharpness, the narrowness and puritanism of English society. The premise of The Exterminating Angel crystallizes Adès’s fascination with the corrosion of appearances: a seemingly ordinary situation slips first into the comic, then into the uncanny and unsettling, and finally into tragedy.

The shadow of death hovers over many of Adès’s works, even where one might expect a more festive or luminous tableau. In The Fayrfax Carol (1997), composed for Christmas, the infant Jesus foresees his future suffering. America – A Prophecy, commissioned by the New York Philharmonic for the year 2000, confronts the massacre of the Maya by the Spanish conquistadors. Other works likewise culminate in tragedy: Life Story, in which two lovers perish in a hotel-room fire ignited by a cigarette; Powder Her Face, notwithstanding its closing tango between the Electrician and the Maid; and The Tempest, whose Prospero appears more painfully resigned, and darker, than Shakespeare’s original. Even the child in Living Toys for all the work’s exuberance, imagines his own death. Several instrumental pieces also conclude with a funereal image — whether veiled in a fragile breath, as in Arcadiana, or lashing out with capricious fury, as in the “Cancan macabre” of Lieux retrouvés (2016).

In Adès’s work, the shadow of Thanatos often gives rise to lyrical effusions tinged with melancholy and clothed in consonant harmony. Such passages may evoke the imminence of death — the final lullaby in Totentanz, or the duets of Beatriz and Eduardo in The Exterminating Angel — or they portray a corrupted, decaying society destined to vanish, as in the waltzes of the same opera. As a counterweight, there remains the dream of an ideal, oneiric realm: the vision of the phoenix-child who, at each awakening, is reborn and resumes its flight toward the unknown.

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^{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. Hélène CAO, program note on Polaris for the Orchestre de Paris. ↩}

^{7. SERVICE, Thomas Adès, 3.nbsp;↩}

^{8. Score preface (London: Faber Music). ↩}

^{9. 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. ↩}

^{10. Interview of Thomas Adès by Tom SERVICE, BBC Music Magazine, July 2001, 28–29. ↩}

^{11. SERVICE, Thomas Adès, 3–4. ↩}

^{12. See CAO, Thomas Adès, 13. ↩}

^{13. This title, which refers to Noah’s ark, is inspired by an idea of a ship carrying a transient humanity toward an uncertain destiny. ↩}

^{14. CAO, Thomas Adès, 107. ↩}

^{15. Alex ROSS, “Roll Over Beethoven: Thomas Adès,” The New Yorker, 2 November 1998. See also SERVICE, Thomas Adès, 22–23 and 172. ↩}