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A guide to Thomas Ads's music

Ads makes you hear things with which you thought you were familiar as if they were completely
new
Tom Service
Monday 1 October 2012 16.19BST

I believe new music should take you to new places, via soundscapes and landscapes of
feeling you hadn't thought could exist. For me, that's something Thomas Ads does in
different ways in pretty well every piece. No composer of his generation (he is now 41)
has written music that makes me want to return to it again and again to explore the
fundamental questions about the job music does and the mechanics therein.
That's because Ads performs one of the greatest sleights of hand a composer is capable
of. His music for instance, the first piece I heard of his, Darknesse Visible for solo piano
makes you hear things you thought you were familiar with as if they were completely
new. Darknesse Visible transforms the piano into an instrument that's alchemically
capable of sustaining a continuous line of melody; the technique of ceaseless tremolo
that Ads demands of the player (often, as on this recording, himself) conjures a ghostly
shimmer from the instrument. You feel you're experiencing the piano as apparition as
much as reality a heightened sonic surrealism that Ads's music often achieves with
different media and in different contexts.
This piece is simultaneously an "explosion", as Ads says, of a John Dowland lute song,
and an expressive distancing from it, as if you're seeing and hearing Dowland's tune with
a shuttering or a doubleness in the image. It's not just about the instruments Ads uses
and how he uses them, either although that kind of imagination is as vivid when he's
writing for the largest orchestra. Listen to the opening of his 1997 orchestral piece Asyla,
with its cowbells and quarter-tone-flat upright piano, to hear what I mean.
Ads also makes you hear and assess the fundamentals of music all over again: the bare
intervals that remain the building blocks of the vast majority of contemporary classical
music; the humble third or fourth or fifth, or the supposedly simple major and minor
chords, or the forms that are still the touchstones for teachers, historians and musicmakers the world over, those hoary old classics like "binary form" or "sonata form". Have
a listen to how Ads takes a pattern of familiar intervals in the slow second movement of
Asyla (a typically punning Adsian title, meaning places of refuge as well as enclaves of
madness), starting with that breathtaking melody for the epicurean timbre of the bass
oboe, and makes them sound rich and strange. To hear the way he makes chords
resonate in new ways, try his 2007 orchestral piece Tevot (written, like Asyla, for Simon
Rattle, but this time for the Berlin Philharmonic instead of the City of Birmingham
Symphony Orchestra). Above all, listen to its ending, which finds an A-major chord that
shimmers like no other I've heard. For the way he does the same to entire forms, listen to
the Piano Quintet, a fully fledged sonata form movement that makes its recapitulation a
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musical black hole of time and tonality, sucking up the material you've been listening to
for the last quarter of an hour into a couple of frantic but inevitable-sounding minutes.
But all this is really a tangent to what I think Ads's real achievement has become in
recent years and what it could mean for the music he will write in the future (not least
the new opera he is working on, his third, to be based on Luis Buuel's film The
Exterminating Angel). To hear it, the best place to start is the opera he wrote for Covent
Garden in 2004 and is conducting at the Metropolitan Opera in New York this autumn:
The Tempest, which uses a brilliantly effective rhyming distillation of Shakespeare's play
in the libretto by Meredith Oakes. Ads casts his singers adrift on an island of music of
his own conjuring, as any composer writing music for The Tempest must. But more than
that, in writing this piece, Ads has found a way of hearing, a way of navigating the
relationships between one note and another, that marks The Tempest as the place where
a truly Adsian world is magicked into being.
In the course of a series of interviews that form the basis of a new book, Full of Noises,
Ads has explained to me how the opera's harmony works, and how each character is
associated with a distinct but interrelated series of intervals and harmonic moves. In
those sets of chords and shifts from one kind of harmony to another, Ads was
describing a totally distinctive (in my experience, at least) way of inhabiting the tonal
universe. On one hand, there's something objective and even systematic about Ads's
harmonies: there are some quasi-serial aspects to the way his chords work that could
generate a virtually infinite ocean of musical possibilities. But it's the instinctive manner
in which he handles his material in the score that gives the piece its visceral, expressive
power. (Some moments to listen to in the opera: the prelude; Prospero and Miranda's
first duet; Ariel's ethereally, stratospherically high-register music; Ferdinand and
Miranda's love duet; Caliban's aria This Island's Full of Noises. There are plenty more!) I
say "tonal universe" because when you're listening to the piece, you'll hear how it
sounds as so often with Ads both familiar and strange, as if the world of
conventional tonal progressions and processes were shifted by a knight's move. (Ads,
incidentally, identifies historical precursors for his musical thinking, what he calls the
"irrationally functional harmony" that goes at least as far back as Berlioz, he says, but
was not properly followed up by today's composers.)
Above all, the sounds in The Tempest are, I find, some of the most unforgettable and
most moving of any recent music (video). The same is true for the other big pieces Ads
has composed in the last few years: Tevot, the Violin Concerto, and his latest orchestral
piece, Polaris. Ads talks about hearing the "magnetism" in each note of Polaris, every
one of which becomes, under his composer's microscope, a seething mass of musical
possibilities. For Ads, this way of hearing is an absolute, a golden thread he follows in
each piece he writes. The results, though, are the opposite of predictable or pre-planned.
To hear what I'm talking about, listen to Violin Concerto: Concentric Paths, which he
composed in 2005. In just 20 minutes, this three-movement piece does something
magical. The way it swirls ethereally in the first movement, exerts a tragic and vice-like
grip in the chaconne-like second part and finally propels you into the uninhibited flight
of the finale is like being spun into an infinite space.
Yet you never lose your footing, never lose a sense of where you are, even as you
glimpse an unbounded region out there behind the notes. Technically, that's because of
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Ads's seemingly infinitely subtle and infinitely expandable tonal universe. As with all
really good music, however, it's a piece whose detail is endlessly absorbing but whose
emotional impact is immediate and impossible to resist. In my opinion, at least. See
what you think as you delve into the Asyla and Arcadiana of Ads's music.

Five key links

Powder Her Face (Ads's first opera)
Asyla
Piano Quintet
The Tempest
Violin Concerto: Concentric Paths
More blogposts

Topics
Thomas Ads
Classical music
Opera

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