Tempestuous times: the recent music of Thomas Ads

Musical Times, Autumn 2004 by Fox, Christopher

THE DEARTH OF SERIOUS WRITING about the music of our younger composers is a depressing feature of contemporary musical culture in Britain. Devoting analytical effort and critical time to composers still making their reputations is perhaps too risky an undertaking for academics anxious about their research ranking, and postmodernism's validation of so many other forms of music-making has, of course, diverted many critics into trawling shallower waters. Nevertheless it is particularly remarkable that the music of Thomas Adès has been subjected to so little critical scrutiny. There are a 2001 New Grove article by Arnold Whittall, a symposium paper on 'James Dillon, Thomas Adès, and the pleasures of allusion' also by Whittall,' useful CD booklet notes by Andrew Porter and Paul Griffiths to accompany EMI's series of Adès recordings, and a number of penetrating programme book essays and newspaper articles by Tom Service. But there is nothing more of note.

Why should this be so? Adès is, after all, the most celebrated British composer of his generation, a prodigiously gifted musician whose credentials as composer, pianist, conductor and artistic planner make him the most eligible successor yet to be thrust into the position of pre-eminence in the country's musical life which Benjamin Britten once occupied. This may be part of the problem. The phenomenon of Adès's celebrity has achieved a self-perpetuating critical mass in which the detail of this piece or that performance can seem almost incidental. This article is an attempt to disentangle Thomas Adès, composer, from the Adès phenomenon and to consider some of the detail of his recent work, concentrating particularly on the paradoxical and deceptive dichotomy between its cellular simplicity and its elaborational complexity. Arnold Whittall's concise but illuminating Grove entry on Adès takes his story up to 1997, to the Concerto concise^ the work in -which Adès made his 1998 BBC Proms debut, and the CBSO commission Asyla, Adès's grandest achievement at that point. I want to pick up from there and focus on four recent Adès scores: America: a prophecy (1999), the Piano Quintet (2000), Brahms (2001) and The tempest (2004), the opera whose triumphant reception at its Covent Garden premiere earlier this year gave further musical validation to its composer's celebrity.

America: a prophecy was Adès's response to the sort of opportunity that is granted to stellar young composers, to write a short piece for a large occasion, but it is far from being the straightforwardly celebratory offering that was probably expected. Commissioned by the New York Philharmonic Orchestra as part of their 'Messages for the millennium' programme and premiered by the orchestra under Kurt Masur on 11 November 1999, the work is scored for large orchestra, with a mezzo-soprano soloist and optional chorus who sing Spanish and English texts, the latter translations of Mayan scriptures predicting disaster - the 'prophecy' of the work's subtitle.

The people move as in dreams

They are weak from fuck and drink

The prophets and the priests are blind

In his bed the governor weeps

It is the end of all our ways

O my nation

Prepare

They will come from the east

Their god stands on the pole

They will burn all the land

[...]

Your cities will fall

In the wake of the terrorist attacks on New York and Washington on 11 September 2001, these texts have come to seem horribly prescient, but at the end of the 2oth century Adès's intention was not to foretell, rather to remind the inhabitants of the USA that they were not the first Americans, nor are they the only ones. This America is located to the south of the United States and is a memorial to the destruction of the Mayan civilisation by the invading Spanish. The subversiveness of the project, creating an 'America' for New York out of the lost America of pre-Columbian culture, is however also reminiscent of the Surrealist Map of the World, published in the Belgian magazine Parietein 1929, in which North America barely registered, its place taken by a distended Mexico. For the Surrealists, as for Adès, the extraordinary cultures of the Maya, Aztec and Inca, and the more recent hybridisation of indigenous and imported Hispanic customs in Latin America were far more inspiring than the modernity of the USA. In an interview with Tom Service before the UK premiere of America Adès was reported as saying, 'I don't think that the notion of America as the future of modernity is available seriously as a creative idea any more.' Instead, his America 'started when I saw an enormous view from a pyramid in Belize. There were trees in every direction. But there were these little dents, which were also green, which were the ancient Mayan pyramids.'2

Invoking the Surrealist Map of the World may seem to be a connection too far, but surrealism is something of an Adès family business. Professor Dawn Adès, the composer's mother, is a leading expert on the visual art of Dada and the Surrealists, and her son's scores regularly transpose elements of the surreal into music. In his Grove entry on Adès Arnold Whittall argues that his music 'avoids the consistent textural fragmentation and formal disjunction of an Expressionist aesthetic' and instead 'blends vividness of detail with a clear sense of compelling overall design'. The same could be said of Surrealist painters like Magritte and, especially, DaIi, the compelling strangeness of whose work depends for its success on the evenness of painted texture, the preservation of the integrity of the picture plane and the marriage of clear pictorial design with bizarre detail. In Adès's music the seductive brilliance of his instrumental writing is often allied with extramusical subject matter which also has surrealist resonances. Whittall cites Living toys (1993) and Asyla in particular: