Day Twenty-One: Thomas Adès
Thomas Adès’ Asyla, Op.17, is an orchestral work that was composed in 1997. It was premiered by Sir Simon Rattle and the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in October of that year, Rattle then taking the work to Berlin for his inauguration concert as music director of the Berlin Philharmonic in 2002. The title of the composition is the Latin plural form of asylum, which here means both sanctuary and madhouse. For today’s recommended listening, I have chosen the third movement of this work, Ecstasio.
The composer comments on the compositional process behind this movement:
“So I bought some techno music and listened to it, just quietly, to get the structure rather than blast my head off. I realised that, in techno, you have to repeat things 32 or 64 times. So I tried to orchestrate it one night in my living room, repeating all these figures over and over, on this massive score paper, 30 staves to a page. At 3am, I went to bed and, as I sat there, realised my heart had stopped beating. I thought, 'Christ, I'm having a heart attack'. I rang the hospital and then they sent an ambulance. My heart gradually started again, but very shallowly. The ambulance took me to the Royal Free, where I waited for two hours among other Saturday night casualties. And finally a doctor saw me and said, 'You hyperventilated'. I thought, 'Thank God. It's not my heart, it's just my brain...”
— Thomas Adès, The Independent, 27 May 1999
Ecstasio, the third movement, is a dance, with a similar function to a Scherzo in a Romantic symphony. It is inspired by the insistent rhythms of club music and has a very primeval feel, gradually building from short and melancholy chord progressions, to a thrashing tutti climax from which the music then recedes. One of the most striking elements of the piece is the way in which the composer uses the orchestra. The Classical and Romantic periods have cast a long shadow of tradition that we continue to adhere to even to this present day, even though, idealistically, music and composers have evolved so much but the orchestra more or less remains untouched in its pre First World War state. Asyla is therefore an exploration of the pull between the safety of tradition, and daunting freedom.
The percussion in Asyla is written mainly for metallic instruments. Even the timpani are struck on their metal shells at times. These instruments played this way generate a shimmering surface. Amid the percussion, there is an upright piano tuned a quarter of a tone lower than the rest of the orchestra which provides an uneasy glow to every texture in which it plays. When listening to the work, it is like looking through a kaleidoscope and seeing the familiar with new eyes, a remarkable achievement for contemporary music in my view.
Thomas Adès was born in London in 1971. He studied at the Guildhall School of Music, London, and then King’s College, Cambridge, with the composers Alexander Goehr and Robin Holloway, graduating in 1992 with a double starred first. He quickly established his name with works including his Chamber Symphony (1991), Living Toys (1994) and, in particular, his opera Powder Her Face, based on the scandalous life of Margaret, Duchess of Argyll, (1995). In 1994 he was appointed Composer-in-Residence to the Hallé Orchestra.
In 2004, Adès’s opera The Tempest (based on Shakespeare) was premiered at the Royal Opera House, London and both courted controversy and marked him out as a fully mature composer. Works he has produced since then include his violin concerto, Concentric Paths (2005), the orchestral work Tivot (2007) and Totentanz (2013).
