Thomas Ades: Full of Noises
Conversations with Tom Service
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- 18,99 €
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- 18,99 €
Beschreibung des Verlags
Thomas Adès is fêted from Los Angeles to London, from New York to Berlin, as the musician who has done more than any other living composer to connect contemporary music with wider audiences. His operas, orchestral pieces and chamber works have already stood the test of repeated performances, productions and continued critical acclaim.
But this celebrated composer, conductor and pianist is notoriously secretive about his creative process, about what lies behind his compositional impulse. The poetry, technique and biography that fuel his most successful and shattering works, such as his operas Powder Her Face and TheTempest, or his orchestral works Asyla and Tevot, have remained hidden and unexplained. Until now.
In conversation with Tom Service - the writer with whom he has had the closest relationship in his career - Adès opens up for the first time about how he creates his music, where it comes from, and what it means. In these provocative and challenging interviews, Adès connects his music with influences from a huge historical and cultural spectrum - from Sephardic Jewish folk music to 80s electronica, from the films of Luis Buñuel and pre-Columbian art to the soundtracks of Al-Qaeda training videos - and offers a unique insight into the crucible of his composition.
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For the past 12 years, music critic Service and Ad s have been talking about the ways that Ad s the brilliant composer, conductor, and pianist conjures his musical inventions from the sounds swirling in his head, how he reimagines the music of the past, from Beethoven to Ligerti, and the ways that his music explores the intersections of music and literature. Throughout 2011, the two met at Ad s's London home and recorded the interviews gathered in this new collection, which ranges over many of the same subjects and offers us a glimpse of Ad s's creative mind at work. Reflecting on the central theme of stability and equilibrium in music, Ad s observes that "the music we listen to is the residue of an endless search for stability... that's the way I understand everything in musical history." Exploring the reasons he starts composing a certain piece of music, Ad s reveals that he's always been preoccupied by the "why" and "how" of composition. Early on, he thought that writing a new opera was "purely the creation of an alternative reality" into which one can escape. Now, however, he's come to the conclusion that "you try to create a simulacrum of the real world, a reflection. The piece is a way of trying to make the real world real again, in a sense." Energetic, honest, and warm, these conversations between friends reveal the intricacies of the creative process and a deep and abiding love of music.