The following contains excerpts from the book, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises (Tom Service).
As Adès, up to this point has been notoriously secretive about how he approaches his writing, this interview and conversation with him (in book form) provides much insight into his methodologies and philosophies of his work. “There are new and important insights into his creative processes, glimpses of how this astonishingly musical personality hears and relates to the world, as composer, conductor and pianist; how he conjures his islands of musical invention from the sound swirling around his head, and how he imagines and re-imagines the music of the past, from Couperin to Ligeti, Beethoven to Kurtag…Ads most wanted to talk about: the fine balance between stability and instability in his work, his ceaseless attempt to release what he calls the ‘magnetism’ between every note he writes, his desire to make his musical visions as extreme, direct, clear and moving as possible, and to return to and refine that he hears as the ‘irrationally functional harmony’ of Berlioz, Janacek and others.”
Thomas Adès is considered to be one of the top contemporary composers of our generation. His works have been performed around the world, and his reputation is widely accepted as a vanguard for successful modern creativity.
In our music school in Midland, Texas we teach students the value of studying great composers from the past, as well as current-day modern ones.
Following are the main points in the book:
- “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…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…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…There is a mysterious thing that happens when you set actions to music: a third shape that emerges when something non-visual like a musical score is acted out by people moving on a stage…Music should have no excuse, other than itself. Music is its own excuse…Good symphonies are often in some ways an unfolding sequence of miniatures. They have to go through miniature forms as they go along…That could be what gives the music its power, those cuts and hard juxtapositions. That’s organic too. There’s no contradiction…every idea is presented with its maximum force. That seems to me more completely evolved, more arrived…grand failures are preferable to sneaky successes, aren’t they?
At our music school in Midland, Texas we teach our composition students how to create tension and release in their writing in ways that carry meaning.
- The moment I put a note down on paper it starts to slide around on the page. And the writhing that I could see when I look at a note under the microscope, you would see with any living thing…When I was a teenager I used to listen voraciously. I used to record whole days of Radio 3 onto cassette – the more obscure the better. And I had a season ticket to the Proms and went to almost every concert. It was the best education for a composer. It might even be thinking about a piece: ‘That was a total failure, so what did the composer do wrong?’…You can only police yourself to a limited extent, in terms of taste. I try to be truthful. Maybe my music is to some people too emotional; to others, it’s not emotional enough – you see, I can’t think about it. Either direction is a result of not convincingly balancing the truth and the artifice – too dry or too mawkish – it’s a question of artistic skill. That’s where taste does come into play…Of course, I would love to do something with such a perceptual solidity, or the diamond-like precision of Haydn or Nancarrow, because I am so aware of the chaos around us that I am attracted to those solid constructions. It was achieved by them, so one hopes that this can happen again.”
- “Paradoxically, to achieve the ‘subjective’ emotional and expressive effect you wanted the music to have, you had to think, you had to compose, as objectively as possible. But I don’t really believe we have in the blue corner, subjective, and the red corner, objective. There’s a certain kind of ‘subjectivity; that is completely unhelpful – because it means not being at one with the material. You have to try to be at one with it. So whether that’s being objective or subjective is irrelevant. It’s really one and the same, if it’s working.”
We teach our students, at our music school in Midland, Texas, how to balance music’s need for solid technique and structure with passion and emotion. The two together, in combination, make up the value of the artform.
- “What started me composing was worrying why we build these things, why composers or writers make a piece of music or a novel. ‘Why’ and ‘how’ are the same thing, here. At one point I thought it is purely the creation of an alternative reality that one can escape into. But now I think what happens is that you try to create a simulacrum of the real world, a reflection. The piece is a way of trying to make the real world real again, in a sense…I’m more interested in an art where you can see the different elements in a clear glass jar, or a Petri dish. In that case, the magic is even more powerful, more mysterious, because you can clearly see the elements that create this indefinable magic as separate entities…I was fascinated by the gratuitousness of music. That was something I felt quite early: that art is gratuitous, we don’t need to have it, practically, on one level. But then you think: ‘What do we need to have? Is there really anything there?’ So then, I think, well, art probably is the only thing we actually need to have, the only necessary thing, because it is the only route to the truth. Yet it is also gratuitous…the whole area of music is illogical, or perhaps I should say supra-logical.
At our music school in Midland, Texas we teach students that music is more than sound, it is relationships. Music gathers people in community and has value in our interactions.
- “For a composer, Stravinsky is like a terminus that you have to go through to get anywhere on the train. There’s no way to avoid him; and I’m fortunate in that I love everything he did and find so much to learn from. I think you will get further if you’re learning from examples that you can’t replicate that easily, that run counter to your own nature…But no composer has worked through as many shifts of style as Stravinsky…Stravinsky’s principle that ‘A good composer doesn’t borrow, he steals’…All non-composers hear style, surface, far too much. To me it is a mirage; I see through it, not necessarily in any more intelligent way, but just because I have eyes that are looking for the ‘how’ rather than the ‘what’, because I have to understand. It doesn’t seem real to me, the style of a piece…but the point is the pieces have a location…And often the symphonic dialogue is a struggle between that topos, or genre, and some logic in the material…But if the composer has properly heard beneath these surfaces, you are not really conscious of them: you just see the beauty of the form beneath, the truth of the emotion. If a piece is all style, it isn’t real. This is not to say, ‘Write in any style you like, whatever it is.’ I’m not really saying that at all. There’s banality lurking in both directions…(Stravinsky) walked such a beautiful middle way, between borrowed surfaces and live material. Sometimes he trespasses outrageously, in both directions. He’s the great example of someone for whom the style of each piece is a transparent thing that reveals the energy beneath. He could be incredibly severe, unyieldingly naked, or should I say flayed, in his later works. And he could be extravagantly cheesy, particularly in the Twenties and Thirties, wildly, provocatively tasteless…So it is important to belong to your time, in order to be ahead of it. This is frustrating, because it might take you, I don’t know, three months to write ten or fifteen seconds of music. So that also means that your timescale is completely at odds with everyday life. However, I think, increasingly, one has to understand that if you look back through time, artists have to be somehow of their time, or ahead of it, but not completely opposed to it. I don’t think that’s possible. I think that’s a very difficult and almost certainly unhelpful position for an artist to take. As much as writing only for one’s time. That’s also unhelpful. I think this is about relevance: I wouldn’t chase after it, as it is always moving; but it’s probably not wise deliberately to avoid it. However, if you chase it to the exclusion of your own wishes, you won’t get far…I think one has to run the risk of being thought improper by all sides.”
At our music school in Midland, Texas we encourage the student to become aware of their unique artistic voice and to strive to be authentic to that inner sense of truthfulness.
- “Performers should never think about even one hundredth of a second in the past. They should only ever think about the next thing. Great performers never look backwards. And you should do that in composing as well…To write music and to have it played are two different things, and some composers never recover from the shock…A recording is simply a document of that process in some other form. What I’m talking about is a thing that happens in the moment. It doesn’t really matter if there is anyone in the hall…But I am a sound artist. I think that’s exactly what I am. I’m just doing it in a very much more elaborate way than someone who puts a microphone next to a tap…But it’s part of the strength of notated music that it travels through time…The question of tempo, for example, metronome marks – that’s certainly not absolute. What they imply should be respected, but not, I think, to the exclusion of the reality of the place and time that you’re in, and the instruments and the players that you’re working with…They are very dangerous things, metronome marks, but you can’t really not have them. I am thinking of writing them in inverted commas. I’ve already used inverted commas for dynamics, often…Tempo too is relative. This is why metronomes are very dangerous, because tempo is not a question of beats per minute. The minute is a variable thing – in music, in lived experience. Minutes stretch and contract, depending on where you are or what’s going on around you. A minute is not the same as another minute: in music it’s not the same…You can give as many clues, as many leads as possible, but nothing will work unless it is felt by the players…But the performer shouldn’t do these things just because they are printed…So you must look for the reason why that ritardando has to happen, and then it will happen…the alchemy of live performance is more elusive…You have to be prepared to make changes in practice that would have seemed impossibly huge when you were writing the piece…but to really get the most vitamins and nutrients out of the music, you have to be prepared to say: Oh, this place should actually be half the speed…the way to extract full energy from the idea is not necessarily the way that you initially thought of.”
- “The pieces with the fewest notes in are probably the ones that took the longest…I go through and make a long sketch of something, a long first draft, because one of the things with a long piece is that you’re trying to find the inner music in it…Schenkerian reduction…He is a scientist who fails to understand that the life force was there before it entered a certain form. The form is a result of the inner music. So to hear the inner music I often go right through, very quickly, and listen from beginning to end, and I will start to notice that there’s a connection between things.” (A piece he likes a lot is ‘Messages of the Late Miss R. V. Troussova’ by Kurtag.) (‘Irrationally functional harmony’ can be found in Berlioz’ ‘Le Spectre de la rose’ and Gerald Barry’s ‘The Triumph of Beauty and Deceit’. Also, Sibelius Symphonies, particularly Sibelius’ ‘Tapiola.) “Artists are always attracted to do what they can’t do easily. A challenge is always more interesting, because then you know you are making something, and not just doing whatever is automatically…I felt there was actually a real counterpoint that would now be available, but a counterpoint that was not classical or baroque counterpoint, but something else – vertical harmony, but horizontally energized.”
- “A thing becomes possible which makes another thing possible which wouldn’t have been possible without it. That’s life. I mean, you can just barge through a door; but I can imagine barging through a door and not knowing what to say, and whatever’s behind it just looking at you in puzzlement. You have to enter and understand. That’s what is happening to me all the time, continually being released from one space into another, finding what’s behind the door, and emerging, again, into another elsewhere.”
We encourage students at our music school in Midland, Texas to continually strive for new horizons, new vistas of excellence, and to continually challenge themselves to learn and grow.