Thomas Ades: Full of Noises: Conversations with Tom Service - Hardcover

Ades, Thomas; Service, Tom

Hardcover

ISBN 10: 0571278973 ISBN 13: 9780571278978

Publisher: Faber & Faber, 2012

Synopsis

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 The Tempest, 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.

About this title

Review:

'A series of conversations between Tom Service and Thomas Ades that are as magnetic as they are argumentative ... There is a winning petulance to the encounter, which Service as editor has done well to leave unexpurgated ... Childish, philosophical, witty, exasperating, noisy, calm, Service shows us the full gamut of opinion, passion and precision driving one of our most engaging talents. It is a great battle of wills and provokes an unapologetically complex book.' --Classical Music Magazine

'Thomas Adès is one of this country s most brilliant and inventive composers, and in Full of Noises he shares his thoughts with a leading music journalist. Driving the book is the passionate intensity with which Adès thinks about his art, which leads to some entertainingly acerbic views on his fellow composers. But as well as this knockabout stuff, there are fascinating explorations of the mysterious, organic process of composition and his admiration for Beethoven.' --Adam Lively, Sunday Times Books of the Year

Far from looking to establish his position at the forefront of any kind of fashionable aesthetic doctrine, Ades speaks only for himself and here offers rare insights into his compositional method...it all makes for engaging exchanges in a book that is rich in musical metaphors, as two articulate minds discuss, reveal and at times compete over what, for now, interests them most. --BBC Music Magazine, January 2013

This is not about competing composers; rather it is about what the enthusiastic, probing and tenacious Tom Service, such a popular host these days on BBC Radio 3, has elicited from Ades, a notably enigmatic and reclusive man. Service has in fact secured some very interesting responses, some illuminating, some wacky, and all adding up to a portrait of Ades that is revealing, very personal and sometimes difficult to come to terms with...recommended for its potential controversy. --Gramophone, January 2013

Book Description:

Thomas Adès: Full of Noises: Conversations with Tom Service is an unprecedented glimpse into the creative mind and influences of one of the most intriguing and successful contemporary composers.

About this edition

• Publisher: Faber & Faber
• Publication date: 2012
• ISBN 10: 0571278973
• ISBN 13: 9780571278978
• Binding: Hardcover
• Number of pages: 208