Book contents
- Thomas Adès Studies
- Thomas Adès Studies
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Music Examples
- Online Materials
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- 1 ‘Chronically volatile’
- 2 Performing Adès
- 3 ‘Fountain of Youth’, ‘River of Meaning’
- 4 ‘Oh brave new Caliban’
- 5 Chaconnes in the Music of Adès
- 6 Closing the Circle?
- 7 A World in Constant Motion
- 8 Musique automatique? Adèsian Automata and the Logic of Disjuncture
- 9 Narrating the Dance of Death
- 10 Hearing Voices in Adès’s Operas
- 11 The RICH Logic of Adès’s The Exterminating Angel and The Tempest
- 12 Sonic Allegory in Adès’s The Exterminating Angel
- Bibliography
- Index
7 - A World in Constant Motion
Adès’s In Seven Days
Published online by Cambridge University Press: 18 November 2021
- Thomas Adès Studies
- Thomas Adès Studies
- Copyright page
- Dedication
- Contents
- Figures
- Tables
- Music Examples
- Online Materials
- Contributors
- Preface
- Acknowledgements
- Notes on the Text
- 1 ‘Chronically volatile’
- 2 Performing Adès
- 3 ‘Fountain of Youth’, ‘River of Meaning’
- 4 ‘Oh brave new Caliban’
- 5 Chaconnes in the Music of Adès
- 6 Closing the Circle?
- 7 A World in Constant Motion
- 8 Musique automatique? Adèsian Automata and the Logic of Disjuncture
- 9 Narrating the Dance of Death
- 10 Hearing Voices in Adès’s Operas
- 11 The RICH Logic of Adès’s The Exterminating Angel and The Tempest
- 12 Sonic Allegory in Adès’s The Exterminating Angel
- Bibliography
- Index
Summary
Thomas Adès’s piano concerto In Seven Days (2008) outlines the biblical creation story in seven connected movements, merging the figurative and the abstract to parallel modern allegorical readings of Genesis 1:2. This capacious model of musical growth and transformation will include the development of a vast tonal edifice from two primary harmonies, reference the birth of the modern orchestra and repurpose traditional compositional techniques from the Renaissance to the present. But In Seven Days embraces a meta-musical role as well, through allusions to select works that have broached the subject of creation. As the composer avers, it tells ‘the story of the material and also of “material”, all of it, in the world’ writ large, as a musical paradigm of world-building that draws on medieval, Baroque and contemporary compositional techniques to recover the inexhaustible promise of the musical past.
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- Chapter
- Information
- Thomas Adès Studies , pp. 138 - 162Publisher: Cambridge University PressPrint publication year: 2021