Thomas Adès

0:05Welcome to This Cultural Life, the series in which some of the world's leading artistic figures choose the most significant influences and experiences that have inspired their own creativity. I'm John Wilson and my guest in this episode is the composer and conductor Thomas Ades, one of the most revered and prolific British classical musicians. He made his name with his 1995 opera Powder Her Face, written when he was just 24. His orchestral composition Assyla was nominated for the Mercury Prize for Album of the Year in 1999. Recordings of his opera The Tempest and more recently his score for their ballet The Dante Project have both won Grammy Awards.

0:45His ten symphonic works, three operas and numerous chamber pieces are performed all around the world. In 2024, Ades was presented with the Royal Philharmonic Society's prestigious gold medal, previous recipients of which include Stravinsky, Brahms and Elgar.

1:10Thomas Addis, welcome to This Cultural Life. Thank you for having me. You are regarded as one of Britain's most acclaimed living composers. What does that mean in practice? Do you hear music in your head the whole time? In a way, I'm tormented by the need to write these things down and create works of music. To get into what that actually is and why that happens, you'd need to go, I think, right back to almost literally the cradle, I would think. and we all know there's some children who seem to have some extra dimension that the visible world is not enough and they need I think that I always had that always had that sense yes there's even a story that my mother told me that I've only realized recently might actually have some bearing on this it was always which is in those days 1972 three early Dr.

2:03Benjamin Spock was very fashionable and who said if your child is crying leave it it will stop eventually it's good for it so one time my mother decided to follow this advice and i remember it i must have been since i was in my ones or maybe nearly two but i remember it in well as my first conscious thought in that sense what i remember is sort of you know blackness and night and nothing and presumably crying and And I remember thinking, this isn't working. She's not coming back. She's not coming. And therefore, I'm going to have to create more sound. I was aware that the necessity of whatever it was that I was crying for was no longer there.

2:48I didn't need it anymore. And I should probably just be going to sleep and stopping. But I thought, I need to manufacture some more of this. And what I remember, it's as though it was me now thinking, I've got to make more sound. I cried for four hours, according to my mother, and then she gave in. And that was that. But I felt I'd sort of, as a result of creating the new sound, I had prevailed and sort of won the argument. That's astonishing. I mean, there is musicality to a baby's cry. That's your first composition at the age of one. I suppose so. And ever since then, I suppose I've been creating sounds against the moment when they're going to be really needed to express something.

3:25It's only quite recently that I connected this story with the imposter composed, but I actually think there's something there. So that was the starting point in the cradle. Decades later, generally, what is the starting point for a new composition? Well, it's quite similar, really. You have an impulse. There's something missing in the world, to me. No one else might realise it's missing, but to me it's something missing, but it's also that lack is, I feel, as an obstacle in my path. It's like I can't get it. past it and it is actually almost like a i picture it sometimes also since childhood as like an immensely dense heavy mass like everything at once all these sounds or weights in one huge thing and then my task is to untangle it and the untangling becomes the piece of music if i get it right and then i can move forward or kind of breathe again that's astonishing So the music exists in a different form and then you're kind of rearranging the form.

4:26In my mind, it's almost like the sculptor with the big block of marble, which is the same material, but then is transformed through the work. Yes, it's very like that. But except with music, if you imagine that the big block of marble is actually more like an enormous tangle of string or elastic bands or whatever it is. And I have to untie the knots correctly. and I remember it as a sort of suffocating presence. It's almost literally as though I can't properly breathe while this thing is in my way. So you remember it, you mean going back to that as a memory or is that the feeling you still have?

5:00I think that's the feeling but I now have recognised and identified that what that is is a piece waiting, it's some kind of piece, it needs to come out as a piece but I used to, here's the other thing from childhood that was what I now know were actually panic attacks but it didn't feel like that at the time. The first time I just remember, I was old enough to know I had some special ability for music. I was probably 13 or 14 or something. But I also liked to sit around and do nothing and watch telly. I was that sort of child, not terribly active. But I suppose the music in some form was brewing away all the time, bubbling up.

5:38But not even in my head, it was sort of in my body or lungs or something. anyway one day I was you know again wasting time watching some nonsense some marvelous probably BBC program um after school but had this funny feeling of I'm wasting my time what I should be something playing the piano so I did already write some music in that at that time wasn't very good but I was trying and um suddenly this sort of wave of suffocation came over at me it It was a very strange physical feeling, sort of like a hot flush wave of suffocation. And I thought, something's wrong with me, my heart. Then it would happen over the years, occasionally and always somehow linked to a feeling of being blocked from music.

6:28The last time was when I was much older, 26, late as usual with a piece that I was writing, orchestrating late into the night and went to bed. and this happened but really quite severely and it was connected with breathing while I was writing music up breathing in the rhythm of the music and I actually drove myself to hospital rather dramatically because I really thought my heart would stop but it feels like that that's when finally someone explained to me the simple physiological facts of a panic attack and then once I understood the mechanics of it it's not really happened again but I completely connected to not having time to work, not working.

7:13On This Cultural Life, Thomas Addis, my guests discuss their most significant creative influences and experiences, and your first choice is your family home. You were born in 1971 in North London to an art historian mother and a poet father, so a very cultured upbringing then. I certainly was, but to me that was normal. Whether I was lucky or I was, or whether that's the reason I'm working in where I am in the arts, I don't know. But the environment was one of books, reading, my mother going to teach, do lectures at Essex University, my father covering endless backs of old envelopes with what I now know were translations of poetry.

7:55We had a piano, an upright piano, which I think became my sort of favorite place to be there and in the bedroom reading books. Where was this? In Highgate, in North London, yes. And what was the house like? What are your memories of that environment? Kind of roomy and gloomy in terms of light. It's quite a dark house. There's a lot of trees around it. And on the walls, the walls were covered with pictures, objects, strange things, much of which was actually surrealist art. That was your mother's speciality? Yeah, one of them, that, and also pre-Columbian Mexican art. Do you think there is a visual aspect to your music that you've taken from her?

8:35Yes, I think I actually find it easier to talk about music in terms of visual art and painting. The big difference is it's many painters that are trying to represent something that's in front of them physically. But with music, it's invisible. But it's as real to me as an architecture that is only there once it's been built. I have to think of it as something that's physically real. I was so used to being surrounded by art, pictures, things like that, that it took me a little while to actually see what painters were doing. And it was when looking at Francis Bacon painting in an exhibition my mother had been involved in organising.

9:07It's a picture of a man and the lapel of his suit is just the canvas. And I thought, oh, he's coming out of the canvas. He's in it. That's what Bacon is trying to do. That's probably what any artist in some ways is trying to make reality again. So I felt that these pieces of music are something that comes out of me, but it's also out there somewhere. So the process of finding it is it's all me, but also none of it's me. There's no free will in it. So your mother was working with Bacon at one point, putting on an exhibition. Did you know him? Yes, yes, I met him. I think I was 13 years old, possibly 12, actually.

9:41It was my first prom, and I'd gone to the prom alone, and my mother picked me up because I was still a little young to be wandering around on the tube at 10 o 'clock at night. And she said, I'm in the middle of dinner with someone, and she was in a restaurant in South Kensington with Francis Bacon. And so we talked and I was quite a precocious child. You'd read T.S. Eliot and things like that for very few reasons. And so we talked about that. I remember clearly the slightest hint from him of, oh, I'm talking to a child. I'm going to talk differently. It was just very exciting. I thought, oh, this is a, I'm being, I'm an adult.

10:15And were you aware of who he was and his significance and his status? I don't think, I just knew he was a very great painter, famous, but I mean, I just knew the images. I didn't he didn't seem like a grand person at all. He wasn't an off-puttingly remote distant person. He was very approachable actually. What was school life like? I recognize now I was at a school that was very good for me at UCS because it is very artistic. They have a good theater. They had a wonderful music master Colin Miles who was very inspiring. I mean I'm sure I could have complained any school you put me into. At the time I would have thought oh this is so difficult.

10:52I hated much of the subject. I didn't like the rough and tumble of school life. I just wanted to be at home with my records and books. So you say it was so difficult. You mean socially it was difficult? I suppose so, yes. It was, you know, I was the kind of child that gets picked on a bit for all the utile reasons. I wasn't very cool, you know, kind of ungainly, terrible at sports, fairly sort of flamboyant. But also those influences that you've already talked about, your father's poetry translations, and your mother taking for dinner with Francis Bacon. That's quite unusual. So were you seen as different in that way?

11:30Well, I don't want to exaggerate, because it was the kind of school where the children of people in the arts would go. Right, that wasn't unusual. No, it wasn't unique. You sent us an email in which there was a whole lot of influences, a lot of films, actually, that you cited, a really eclectic and diverse list, which ranged from Bunuel to Bagpuss. But you also included Peter Greenaway, Ken Russell, Derek Jarman, arthouse films. I mean, where would you have seen these films? At home, on video? Mostly on the television and I would record them on video. And then we also had the Everman Cinema right near my school where I would spend a lot of time actually.

12:08The Bunuel, again, I think I was 12 or 13 years old and there was a big season on the BBC and that was someone who, because he was a surrealist, My mother had written about him and knew much about him. And encouraged you to watch it? Oh, yes, yes. We'd sit down, we'd record them. They're not a million miles, some of them, away from that sort of fantasy that you had, starting with Monty Python, which is a little bit before my time. But when, you know, even the children's programmes then, there's a lot of, like Bagpuss, you've mentioned, transformation and everyday objects suddenly coming to life.

12:43And Bagpuss was wide awake. And when Bagpuss wakes up, all his friends wake up too. I suppose also if you're very musical, perhaps the physical reality is much more changeable than for someone who's working in sculpture, objects, or the real world of any kind. So I think Buñuel particularly kind of went in as someone. I sort of felt very safe watching them, ironically, even though that's the opposite of what most people feel, they're incredibly disconcerting. Well, his 1962 film The Exterminating Angel was actually adapted by you as an opera in 2017. A really strange film because it's people turning up at a dinner party and then they find that they can't leave and all the social conventions break down.

13:30It becomes very anarchic and terrifying.

13:40So what was it about that scenario that appealed to you so much? That would be the one which was most like an opera. I mean, you know, opera is such a strange medium. At one level, you think, if they all just walked off stage, none of this would happen. Why don't they just leave? It's as though there's someone seen force keeping them there. And Bunewell turns that into an actual rule. I mean, it's sort of an enormous joke. It's a brilliant joke. about why we do anything ever. And also, it's all observation. Everything in that film is things that he saw actually happen. And I'm so attuned to a situation where people are trying to leave and just somehow nobody does and nobody can.

14:15I see the exterminating angel every day, all the time now. I think in the original Boonewell film, it's all dialogue. There is no musical soundtrack. So did that provide a sort of an empty page? Yes, that was a huge help. The only music in the film is when somebody sits down and plays the piano In my opera, they sit down and play a piece by me. He very rarely has a soundtrack in his films. It's just usually bells and sort of bleating sheep and things like that. Sound effects. Sound effects. But I watch the film and I feel there's a kind of underground river of music which is running underneath and my task was to bring that to the surface.

15:00You mentioned another film actually in your notes, Terry Gilliam's Time Bandits. Again, really very rich visual imagery there. I loved Time Bandits. I watched it the other day. It's just absolutely out of this world. It's this idea that was very much in the air that time of children. You could simply fall through a hole in a bedroom wall and you'd fall into the ancient Greece or into the Proleonic Wars. It was so freewheeling. and also very funny and silly. It's total joy. It's still really, in a way, my favourite film. Freedom is really important there, the way you're describing. Do you think that's always been important to you and you've taken that aspect of Gilliam possibly in a way?

15:45No rules, you can just do what you want. That's right, that's very important. I also like the way he sort of winks at you. The same thing I was saying of it, sometimes it's all very funny and very silly but it can also be terrifying at the same time. I think that's a thing that we are lucky to have in Anglo culture a bit. There's a kind of wink that can happen that means that things can be beautiful and also ironic at the same time. That to me is very important in opera to stop it being too sort of dull. Was there a point you first started composing that you started writing music down? Do you remember when that happened?

16:22Yes, I do. I was very proud. I wrote this tune down. and I must have been, I would say, nine. I mean, we found it the other day, actually, in a drawer. Of course, it turned out I'd just written down the middle section of a piece by Chopin and thought it was my own. And it evoked all sorts of landscapes and things like that. And then I would go from there to just inventing things of my own. And it wasn't until I was about 19 and decided not to pursue being a pianist because I was playing the piano sort of okay. You say okay, you reached the semifinals of the BBC. You see, young musician of the year.

16:56Yeah, that was a sort of near catastrophe because if I'd won, I would have had to play a concerto that I absolutely could not play. I'd put down one that was much too hard. Just my usual way, thinking, I'll never get anywhere near the final. What was that? It was going to be Bartok's second concerto. It was far too difficult for me. But I thought I'd never get anywhere near the final. And then as I progressed through winning one round after another, I kept thinking, this actually might happen. What am I going to do?

17:24the second prize to Thomas Ades Thomas Ades thrilled us again tonight just as he did in the same final his high spot was the performance of Messia which had tremendous concentration and intellectual grass so thank goodness I came second it was the best possible outcome that could have happened in terms of my life as it turned out. Because it steered you into the way of composition. Is it also because you think it would have been disastrous and embarrassing to have played that? Oh, I think I would have had to change the piece at the last minute, but it would have been traumatic. But it was useful that it forced me to, as I say, it's not really a choice, it forced me to go home and think, right, this composing, I'm going to have to take this more seriously, but what is going to make this really stick for me and be a kind of real solid concrete road that I can begin to put the first steps on.

18:30Your next choice for this cultural life, Thomas Ades, is your grandmother. Why was she so important to you as a creative influence? I was very close to my mother's mother. I would go down and stay with her in the country she had quite a large extensive classical record collection so she loved music and she also loved bird watching and those are the two things that probably make me the person i am today actually and she would occasionally and i'd spend as much time as i could any time i you know there were probably quite a few phantom illnesses and tummy aches and things like that that i would go down i was even found once like trying to get on a train when I was too small to know what I was doing, with a little suitcase full of old coins because I wanted to go down to see her rather than go to school.

19:18Yeah, I sort of ran away from her. Anyway, it was very much a strong draw to be down there and I could spend all day listening to music. And another really early memory is being on the floor, staring, looking up at the ceiling. And because it was on a mill pond, you had these beautiful lines of light that were on the ceiling. And it was... The reflections. Yes, that's right, sort of playing the light of the sun and everything. But it was from the water, and Schubert's Trout Quintet was on the gramophone.

19:52I couldn't distinguish between the light patterns and the music. They were one thing to me.

20:03Everything was music around me. Is that a form of synesthesia? I suppose I don't know what the technical, but I've always felt that every sensation that is physical, that's inside me of sort of volume or light or mass or weight or shadows, all of these things I feel as three-dimensional musical sensations. Well, it suggests that you hear movement and you see music. I mean, the two things are interchangeable. That's very accurate. but that was one of the first times I remember the music kind of coming outside of me and being on the ceiling in that way.

20:43But she also had some 20th century music rather unusually. She had Stravinsky, she had Petrushka at the Right Spring, she had a Messiaen record because of the bird watch. She had a record of the Don Chorus, Graveille des Oiseaux, which is just still one of my favourite things. because I knew what those birds were and I knew what the feeling of being there at dawn in the forest, listening to the dawn chorus was.

21:13Children's voices in the orchard Between the blossom and the fruit time She loved Alec Guinness, the actor, and she had a tape of him reading T.S. Eliot, which I recommend is simply that voice, the sort of feline voice, and he captures this strange tone so beautifully. I don't know if I understood everything that he was saying in kind of literal terms, but I loved that tape. I went over and over again. Golden-haired black wing, cling, swing, spring, sing, swing up into the apple tree. I identified these five landscapes as being ones that maybe I could set them to music. So actually that did become my opus one.

21:54I came back from that becoming second in the piano. competition and wrote those songs. And were you evoking the words of Eliot in the musical? Could you imagine that were the words being spoken in your mind over the top of the music? No, no, I was setting the words to music. They're very evocative, incredibly evocative poems. The first one, children's voices in the orchard. You can hear the old swing going backwards and forwards and you can sort of smell the apple trees.

22:34This is, you know, mid-1980s, North London, quite unusual musical taste that you had. What about rock, pop, dance music of the time? Well, what was around us at that time, we had madness around us, and that was really local actually. Well, because they're like a local band. Very much so, yes. And I still love it. I'd love to hear that. But I wasn't terribly interested in sort of American, well, until much later. What I did, I have to say, I had a, some people might say, deplorable taste. I loved musicals and even Gilbert and Sullivan. I used to love going to see that, which is, there's nothing more unfashionable than Gilbert and Sullivan now.

23:14But there's something about it. It also has this wink that there's this, and English, incredibly beautiful, even sort of sexy music, beautiful, and then these ironic words. Take all these, you lucky man, Take and keep them if you can. And it's something, you know, you just know, it's not what you get in continental opera, there's no tragedy, there's no violence, but there's this sort of irony. And I also have to admit, I liked things like some of the Lloyd Webber musicals, especially Evita, because if you listen to it now, the original one, it's incredibly freewheeling. It starts with a movie soundtrack that then winds down and then you have this kind of weird rock opera thing and then you've got Latin music and operatic things.

24:00It moves very quickly between these different things. But in the end you could not deliver Sing you fools but you got it wrong Enjoy your prayers because you haven't got long I think at that age, 10, 11, something, I found it very alluring. I just enjoyed the freedom of it, and possibly that might have pointed away a little bit later on. When, you know, the academic music I was studying didn't have that. It felt a bit trammelled in comparison. In 1999, a recording of your orchestral composition, Assyla, was nominated for the Mercury Music Prize. I think that year alongside Blur and Chemical Brothers and other big names from the rock and pop world.

24:48And it's a piece which really explicitly references electronic dance music evoking the sound of a nightclub, that big thumping bass drum.

25:01Were you a raver? I mean, not a particularly professional good one, but I did occasionally experience it. It was more that I had this really strong sensation that to push forward, music was more available to be repetitive then than it had been previously. But I couldn't quite figure out how to do it in my own voice, my own breath somehow. And I knew this had to be some kind of dance movement, fast dance movement. I didn't know what that meant. And then it suddenly, it was like a screen bursting open or something, an explosion of light. I just suddenly saw that it was going to be this scene of a rave.