Thomas Adès Studies

Thomas Adès Studies PDF

Author: Edward Venn

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2021-11-25

Total Pages: 337

ISBN-13: 1108787266

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Thomas Adès is a dominant force in contemporary music, whose work attracts significant attention and acclaim, and has been performed by many renowned ensembles. This volume – the first to present a range of scholarly essays on every aspect of Adès's music – offers authoritative accounts of Adès's major compositions from a variety of analytical, critical, cultural and historical perspectives. The opening chapters focus on Adès's earlier music, offering close readings of key works. Further essays focus on his engagement with forms and instrumental genres. The final chapters turn to Adès's texted music and highlight how themes introduced in earlier chapters cut across Adès's entire output. Richly illustrated with musical examples and supported by further online material, this book provides a multi-faceted portrait of Adès's work that opens up new ways of thinking about, and engaging with, his music.

Thomas Adès: Asyla

Thomas Adès: Asyla PDF

Author: Edward Venn

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2017-05-12

Total Pages: 214

ISBN-13: 1351580361

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Thomas Adès (b. 1971) is an established international figure, both as composer and performer, with popular and critical acclaim and admiration from around the world. Edward Venn examines in depth one of Adès’s most significant works so far, his orchestral Asyla (1997). Its blend of virtuosic orchestral writing, allusions to various idioms, including rave music, and a musical rhetoric encompassing both high modernism and lush romanticism is always compelling and utterly representative of Adès’s distinctive compositional voice. The reception of Asyla since its premiere in 1997 by Sir Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) has been staggering. Instantly hailed as a classic, Asyla won the 1997 Royal Philharmonic Society Award for Large-Scale Composition. An internationally acclaimed recording made of the work was nominated for the 1999 Mercury Music Prize, and in 2000, Adès became the youngest composer (and only the third British composer) to win the Grawemeyer prize, for Asyla. Asyla is fast becoming a repertory item, rapidly gaining over one hundred performances: a rare distinction for a contemporary work.

Thomas Adès: Full of Noises

Thomas Adès: Full of Noises PDF

Author: Thomas Adès

Publisher: Macmillan + ORM

Published: 2012-10-16

Total Pages: 206

ISBN-13: 0374709912

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Composer, conductor, and pianist, Thomas Adès is one of the most diversely talented musical figures of his generation. His music is performed by great opera companies, symphony orchestras, chamber groups, and music festivals throughout the world. But Adès has resisted public discussion of the creative process behind his musical compositions. Until now, the interior experience that has fired the spectrum of his work—from his first opera, Powder Her Face, to his masterpiece The Tempest and his acclaimed orchestral works Asyla and Tevot—has largely remained unexplained. Here, in spirited, intimate, and, at times, contentious conversations with the distinguished music critic Tom Service, Adès opens up about his work. "For Adès, whose literary and artistic sensibilities are nearly as refined and virtuosic as his musical instincts," writes Service, "inhabiting the different territory of words rather than notes offers a chance to search out new creative correspondences, to open doors—a phrase he often uses—into new ways of thinking in and about music." The phrase "full of noises," from Caliban's speech in The Tempest, refers both to the sounds "swirling around" Adès's head that are transmuted into music and to the vast array of his musical influences—from Sephardic folk music, to 1980s electronica, to Adès's passion for Beethoven and Janácek and his equally visceral dislike of Wagner. It also suggests "the creative friction" essential to any authentic dialogue. As readers of these "wilfully brilliant" conversations will quickly discover, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises brings us into the "revelatory kaleidoscope" of Adès's world.

Pierre Boulez Studies

Pierre Boulez Studies PDF

Author: Edward Campbell

Publisher: Cambridge University Press

Published: 2016-10-13

Total Pages: 413

ISBN-13: 1107062659

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This collection explores the works, influence, reception and legacy of one of the most important composers in contemporary musical life.

Music and Narrative Since 1900

Music and Narrative Since 1900 PDF

Author: Michael L. Klein

Publisher: Indiana University Press

Published: 2013

Total Pages: 445

ISBN-13: 0253006449

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This comprehensive volume offers a wide-ranging perspective on the stories that art music has told since the start of the 20th century. Contributors challenge the broadly held opinion that the loss of tonality in some music after 1900 also meant the loss of narrative in that music. To the contrary, the editors and essayists in this book demonstrate how experiments in approaching narrative in other media, such as fiction and cinema, suggested fresh possibilities for musical narrative, which composers were quick to exploit. The new conceptions of time, narrative voice, plot, and character that accompanied these experiments also had a significant impact on contemporary music. The repertoire explored in the collection ranges across a wide variety of genres and includes composers from Charles Ives and the Pet Shop Boys to Thomas Adès and Dmitri Shostakovich.

Thomas Adès in Five Essays

Thomas Adès in Five Essays PDF

Author: Drew Massey

Publisher: Oxford University Press

Published: 2020-10-01

Total Pages: 240

ISBN-13: 019937497X

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The British composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Adès has achieved a level of recognition and celebrity within the world of classical music today that is almost unmatched. Once seen as the heir to Benjamin Britten, both in his importance to British music and his reputation as the enfant terrible of the concert world, Adès is a fascinating figure of contemporary composition. Reaching for the music behind the celebrity, author Drew Massey deftly tackles the challenges of writing about a living figure with such far-reaching impact by focusing on representative moments in his compositional career and critical reception. In this series of five interlocking essays, Massey provides an illuminating look at the formal characteristics of Adès's music, considers his work from the perspective of a contemporary listener, and places it within the larger context of developments in twentieth-century British music. He not only traces the diverse historical forms and traditions that Adès taps into but also reflects on where he is steering the future of composition and performance. An analysis of the key transitions in the artist's critical reception completes this book as the most comprehensive study of this pivotal figure of contemporary classical music in the English language to this day.

Thomas Adès: Full of Noises

Thomas Adès: Full of Noises PDF

Author: Thomas Adès

Publisher: Macmillan

Published: 2012-10-16

Total Pages: 204

ISBN-13: 0374276323

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A collection of conversations with English composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Adès.

The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music

The Routledge Research Companion to Modernism in Music PDF

Author: Björn Heile

Publisher: Routledge

Published: 2018-10-29

Total Pages: 518

ISBN-13: 131704245X

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Modernism in music still arouses passions and is riven by controversies. Taking root in the early decades of the twentieth century, it achieved ideological dominance for almost three decades following the Second World War, before becoming the object of widespread critique in the last two decades of the century, both from critics and composers of a postmodern persuasion and from prominent scholars associated with the ‘new musicology’. Yet these critiques have failed to dampen its ongoing resilience. The picture of modernism has considerably broadened and diversified, and has remained a pivotal focus of debate well into the twenty-first century. This Research Companion does not seek to limit what musical modernism might be. At the same time, it resists any dilution of the term that would see its indiscriminate application to practically any and all music of a certain period. In addition to addressing issues already well established in modernist studies such as aesthetics, history, institutions, place, diaspora, cosmopolitanism, production and performance, communication technologies and the interface with postmodernism, this volume also explores topics that are less established; among them: modernism and affect, modernism and comedy, modernism versus the ‘contemporary’, and the crucial distinction between modernism in popular culture and a ‘popular modernism’, a modernism of the people. In doing so, this text seeks to define modernism in music by probing its margins as much as by restating its supposed essence.

The Rest Is Noise

The Rest Is Noise PDF

Author: Alex Ross

Publisher: Farrar, Straus and Giroux

Published: 2007-10-16

Total Pages: 640

ISBN-13: 1429932880

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Winner of the 2007 National Book Critics Circle Award for Criticism A New York Times Book Review Top Ten Book of the Year Time magazine Top Ten Nonfiction Book of 2007 Newsweek Favorite Books of 2007 A Washington Post Book World Best Book of 2007 In this sweeping and dramatic narrative, Alex Ross, music critic for The New Yorker, weaves together the histories of the twentieth century and its music, from Vienna before the First World War to Paris in the twenties; from Hitler's Germany and Stalin's Russia to downtown New York in the sixties and seventies up to the present. Taking readers into the labyrinth of modern style, Ross draws revelatory connections between the century's most influential composers and the wider culture. The Rest Is Noise is an astonishing history of the twentieth century as told through its music.

The Piano

The Piano PDF

Author: Susan Tomes

Publisher: Yale University Press

Published: 2021

Total Pages: 399

ISBN-13: 0300253923

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A fascinating history of the piano explored through 100 pieces chosen by one of the UK's most renowned concert pianists "Tomes . . . casts her net widely, taking in chamber music and concertos, knotty avant-garde masterworks and (most welcome) jazz."--Richard Fairman, Financial Times, "Best Books of 2021: Classical Music" "[One of] the most beautiful books I got my hands on this year. . . . About the shaping of this maddening, glorious, unconquerable instrument."--Jenny Colgan, Spectator, "Books of the Year" An astonishingly versatile instrument, the piano allows just two hands to play music of great complexity and subtlety. For more than two hundred years, it has brought solo and collaborative music into homes and concert halls and has inspired composers in every musical genre--from classical to jazz and light music. Charting the development of the piano from the late eighteenth century to the present day, pianist and writer Susan Tomes takes the reader with her on a personal journey through 100 pieces including solo works, chamber music, concertos, and jazz. Her choices include composers such as Bach, Mozart, Beethoven, Robert Schumann, Tchaikovsky, Debussy, Gershwin, and Philip Glass. Looking at this history from a modern performer's perspective, she acknowledges neglected women composers and players including Fanny Mendelssohn, Maria Szymanowska, Clara Schumann, and Amy Beach.