Thomas Adès
Asyla
In the fifteen-odd years since Thomas Adès first appeared on the modern music scene in Britain, he has developed from a wunderkind to a contemporary musical force to be reckoned with. Works such as Living Toys (1993), Concerto Conciso (1997), or his chamber opera Powder Her Face (1994) have been performed by symphonies and opera companies around the world. Adès has garnered numerous awards and is the youngest composer to receive the prestigious Grawemeyer Prize for composition (in 2000, at age 29).
Adès was born in London in 1971 to an artistic family; his father is a translator of modern and ancient languages, and his mother is an art historian. Adès attended the Guildhall School of Music in London and also studied music at King’s College in Cambridge. He showed early talent as a percussionist and pianist, and won the second prize for piano at the BBC Young Musician of the Year contest in 1989. But this win only propelled him to take a different course entirely, as he said in a 1998 interview: “Did I want to … play the same things again? I went home and said ‘I’m going to become a composer today, and do it properly.'”
Adès’s music has been variously described as “complex and direct” (The New Yorker); “multifaceted and colourful” (Die Welt); “unfold[ing] with a vitality and assurance that proclaim a born master” (Atlantic Monthly). Adès himself is more down-to-earth about his work; he described his reaction while rehearsing his Chamber Symphony (1990), as follows:
“I remember starting the first rehearsal and thinking, I’m making this noise! It was so–you know–modern. It really did sound like horrible modern music: clicks here and pops there, scratching, screeching, one high note, one low note. The thing was now out of my hands; it was an organism crawling around on the instruments. I’ve never forgotten that moment.”
One of Adès’s stalwart supporters has been conductor Sir Simon Rattle, who with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra commissioned Adès’s first large-scale symphonic work, Asyla. Rattle and his orchestra premiered the piece in October of 1997, and later recorded the work along with several of Adès’s other compo sitions on the EMI Classics label. The work met with critical success, and won the 1997 Royal Philharmonic Society prize.
‘Asyla’ is the plural form of the word ‘asylum,’ and refers to both ‘sanctuary’ and ‘madhouse.’ The work requires a large orchestra, including six percussionists and two pianists, one playing both concert grand and upright pianos and the other an upright tuned a quarter-tone flat as well as a celesta. Critic Alex Ross of The New Yorker describes it as “a piece in four movements which passes through violently contrasted symphonic episodes while pursuing a single potent figure.”
The first movement (titled simply I) opens with cowbells and other percussion, over which sounds a horn melody, soon taken up and altered by the strings. The music becomes more agitated, contrasting sustained chords in both the highest and lowest registers with restless figures for strings, brass, flutes, or percussion. It ends with sharp slaps that are echoed by the loud brass chords that announce the opening of movement II. But these shouts are immediately for gotten as soft bells and piano support a melancholy, descending melody for the bass oboe. This theme evolves somewhat ominously until the strings take over, and cellos play what one critic describes as a “sprawling, Wagnerian theme.” The movement ends with an abrupt figure that reaches the orchestra’s highest and lowest registers at once.
The third movement is the only one to sport a name, Ecstasio. It is meant to depict a night out in a London club, with its ubiquitous drug scene (the title refers in part to the drug ecstasy) and the repetitive patterns of technomusic. In fact, Adès began hyperventilating when copying out by hand the numerous repetitious segments in the parts of his score, and he briefly checked himself into the hospital, thinking he was having a heart attack. The music is lively, insistent, and at times somewhat frightening with its pounding percussion, as if the club-goer were suffering from a bad drug-induced haze.
Movement IV contrasts a low tuba melody with brief, fast figures in the higher registers. The movement builds to a huge tutti chord, followed by a trembling, lyrical motif for the strings. The darting figures from movement I briefly return, now transformed into the restless music heard at the beginning of the first movement. Having come full circle, the piece ends quietly but nervously.