Thomas Adès: “If I’m conducting, I can get as close as I can to what I want”.
Together with the press release, the BBVA Foundation has sent to the media the interview with the English composer, which is reproduced below, after notifying him of the award.
The jury has highlighted “the communicative capacity of your music, which connects transversally with diverse audiences around the world”. Would you say that you have achieved this by balancing the rational or intellectual dimension of your music with an appeal to the emotions?
Well, when I’m working, I just work mostly by instinct and it’s a way, a sort of survival to get from one point to the next. So if I’m balancing sometimes, what you might call rational ideas or processes with instinctive things, that may be how it seems from the outside.
I’m just obviously very moved and touched that this has been felt by listeners, by others, and this kind of recognition is very rare and very encouraging and inspiring in our field.
Do you think that your capacity to communicate with broad audiences is also derived from your ability to incorporate diverse musical resources into the classical tradition or, the other way round, through a reinterpretation of the classical genres and pieces, such as a chaconne or a waltz, and making them part of the contemporary culture?
Well, I like my music to be timeless and if you like, free of place or time, …free, and I think that the problems facing someone like me, when you stare at a blank page, what happens next or however it may be, in some ways, they are the same problems that would have faced anyone in 1400 or 1826, or 1603, it doesn’t matter.
What do you do next? What’s the next step on the path? How do you continue to plow this field? whatever it is, in a way that is right, that makes some kind of musical story. So if I find myself using one or another structure or pattern that is available to me, that’s just the way it is, you know, so be it.
And I think that one has to remember – that if you use an analogy, like medicine or whatever – that there are huge advances in what we know, how we do things, but we’re still dealing with the human body.
Could you tell us about your ties with Spanish culture and specifically with the Spanish surrealist movement?
Well, I grew up if you like with surrealism all around me because my mother is an historian of surrealism, and has written books about, for example, Salvador Dali, whom she knew. And it struck me today that the first time I ever saw any land that was not the island on which I was born, Great Britain, was Spain.
We got a boat when I was a very small child in the mid-1970s, across the Bay of Biscay. And Bilbao was the first time I had seen another land, so for a small boy for a small child, that I suppose means Spain in some ways, always was the archetypal island or another place on the horizon. And that might be, you know, when I’m working what I think to myself always is… I want to find new lands or if you like set sail towards the horizon towards a new horizon in the work I do.
So it may be that at some level, Spain is looking archetypal, for that, for me still.
You have composed pieces that have been performed by some of the most important orchestras around the world and you have also conducted them. What differences do you find between these two roles, as a conductor and as a composer, and how do they enrich you as a musician?
Well, composing is essentially a solitary activity that you spend, what, consume endless hours and days and weeks at home working on this score
The score is really just a map of a soundscape or if you’d like a blueprint for a vehicle, which is going to be the piece and that only really comes to life in performance. So when I go out into the real world to conduct the piece, I am able to present it in a way, that I suppose, is the more idealized way, and I can show with my gestures, I hope as best I can, how I intend these sounds to be.
And it’s also, of course, nice for me as an essentially, someone with an instantly solitary job, to spend time with people with actual musicians and I love the moment of, if you like, contact between what can be sounds that only exist in my head so far.
And then I transfer to a sort of code on paper in the musical notation and the contact with somebody holding a violin or hitting a drum is very exciting. And I think if I’m conducting, I can say, you know, actually, could you hit it there rather than there, or could you play the violin slightly more like this here or there? I can say, get as close, close as I can, in the time available to what I want.