Thomas Adès in five essays /
Massey, Drew(Drew Michael),author.
"The British composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Adès (b. 1971) has achieved a level of recognition and celebrity within the concert world shared by very few living musicians today, and his compositions enjoy a degree of wide-spread acclaim that places him among the most widely-heard composers working now. His critical and popular successes, at least inside the insulated world of classical music, place him within the absolute mainstream of concert life today. Is he merely pecking over the carcass of a tradition, soon to be subsumed by or abandoned in favor of some other cultural practice? Or does his work suggest possibilities for a concert world waiting to be born? This book, which is the first full-length study of Adès's work as a whole in English, seeks to answer - or at least articulate the terms of response to - these questions and others. Considering the diversity of Adès's output, this book is structured as a series of essays. These essays are organized thematically. The first two essays considers Adès's arrangements and serialist compositions, respectively. The third looks at how his opera The Tempest illuminates much of his music's beguiling contradictions. The fourth considers how Adès has been understood as a "surrealist" composer, and the final chapter considers the cosmic sweep of some of his most recent works"--
Includes bibliographical references (pages 171-191) and index.
Introduction: The Informal Adès -- The Glossary -- The Twelve Tones -- The Song Inside Your Mind : The "New Object" of The Tempest -- The Dilemmas of Musical Surrealism -- The Great Beyond.
"The British composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Adès (b. 1971) has achieved a level of recognition and celebrity within the concert world shared by very few living musicians today, and his compositions enjoy a degree of wide-spread acclaim that places him among the most widely-heard composers working now. His critical and popular successes, at least inside the insulated world of classical music, place him within the absolute mainstream of concert life today. Is he merely pecking over the carcass of a tradition, soon to be subsumed by or abandoned in favor of some other cultural practice? Or does his work suggest possibilities for a concert world waiting to be born? This book, which is the first full-length study of Adès's work as a whole in English, seeks to answer - or at least articulate the terms of response to - these questions and others. Considering the diversity of Adès's output, this book is structured as a series of essays. These essays are organized thematically. The first two essays considers Adès's arrangements and serialist compositions, respectively. The third looks at how his opera The Tempest illuminates much of his music's beguiling contradictions. The fourth considers how Adès has been understood as a "surrealist" composer, and the final chapter considers the cosmic sweep of some of his most recent works"--
Adès, Thomas