DMA Option 2 Thesis and Option 3 Scholarly Essay DEPOSIT COVERSHEET University of Illinois Music and Performing Arts Library
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DMA Option 2 Thesis and Option 3 Scholarly Essay DEPOSIT COVERSHEET University of Illinois Music and Performing Arts Library Date: DMA Option (circle): 2 [thesis] or 3 [scholarly essay] Your full name: Full title of Thesis or Essay: Keywords (4-8 recommended) Please supply a minimum of 4 keywords. Keywords are broad terms that relate to your thesis and allow readers to find your work through search engines. When choosing keywords consider: composer names, performers, composition names, instruments, era of study (Baroque, Classical, Romantic, etc.), theory, analysis. You can use important words from the title of your paper or abstract, but use additional terms as needed. 1. _________________________________ 2. _________________________________ 3. _________________________________ 4. _________________________________ 5. _________________________________ 6. _________________________________ 7. _________________________________ 8. _________________________________ If you need help constructing your keywords, please contact Dr. Bashford, Director of Graduate Studies. Information about your advisors, department, and your abstract will be taken from the thesis/essay and the departmental coversheet. ÓCopyright 2018 Kyle Shaw PROMISCUITY, FETISHES, AND IRRATIONAL FUNCTIONALITY IN THOMAS ADÈS’S POWDER HER FACE BY KYLE SHAW THESIS Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in Music with a concentration in Music Composition in the Graduate College of the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018 Urbana, Illinois Doctoral Committee: Associate Professor Reynold Tharp, Chair and Director of Research Assistant Professor Carlos Carrillo Professor Stephen Taylor Professor William Heiles ii ABSTRACT While various scholars have identified Thomas Adès’s primary means of generating pitch material—various patterns of expanding intervals both linear and vertical—there remains a void in the commentary on how his distinct musical voice interacts with the unique demands of articulating a coherent musico-dramatic art form. After a brief synopsis of the plot, the present study adopts a three-pronged approach to accounting for Adès’s pitch structures in Powder Her Face: the first chapter is devoted to analyzing the role of musical borrowing—quotation, allusion, and the like. The second chapter summarizes Adès’s expanding interval techniques— his so-called “signature scale” and aligned interval cycles. Various elaborations on these techniques allow for the integration of borrowed material. The final chapter is devoted to a discussion of how Adès’s core techniques, among other aspects of his musical voice, enable certain intersections between his own musical thinking and modes of musical thinking commonly associated with tonality. iii ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to Dr. Reynold Tharp, whose patience, generosity, and meticulousness in combing through multiple drafts of this text cannot be understated. The depth of his analytical insights inspired me to undertake a project of this nature and greatly improved the quality of my work. I owe many thanks as well to the other members of my committee, Dr. Carlos Carrillo, Dr. Stephen Taylor, and Dr. William Heiles, for collectively providing me with an education whose quality is second to none, and whose commitment to their students transcends the borders of their classrooms. I owe more than I can say to my parents, whose many years of support and driving me to music lessons undoubtedly went a longer way than they intended; and to my daughters, Audrey, Julia, and Margaret, for keeping all things in life in proper perspective for me. Finally, I am pleased to report that the final paragraph of an acknowledgements section of a thesis, devoted to one’s spouse in many that I have read, is far more—certainly in my case— than a perfunctory, rhetorical gesture. Above all I owe my gratitude to my wife Tess, without whose love and unwavering support this would have been far from possible. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1 Chapter One: Promiscuity ............................................................................................................... 9 Chapter Two: Fetishes .................................................................................................................. 40 Chapter Three: Irrational Functionality ........................................................................................ 81 Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 127 Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 129 1 Introduction Born in London in 1971 to a linguist and a historian of surrealist art, Thomas Adès is a consummate musician. He studied piano with Paul Berkowitz at the Guildhall School of Music in London and was runner-up for the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 1989. He has recorded albums of others’ music as both soloist and chamber musician and has published about Janáček’s piano music. Additionally, he was a gifted percussionist, performing on marimba and in orchestras both at Guildhall and at King’s College Cambridge after he had shifted the primary focus of his studies toward composition. Not only does Adès also perform and record his own works at the keyboard, he does so as conductor as well, leading top orchestras in premieres, performances, or recordings of all of his works for large forces (in addition to works from the standard and contemporary repertoire by other composers). Thus, when he, as composer, puts notes onto a page, his relationship to those notes is multifaceted to a degree scarcely paralleled by other living practitioners in the Western classical tradition. As conductor, his relationship with his notes in interpreting and performing them is augmented by his embodied relationship with them as a performer. As composer, his artistic and creative relationship with his notes is deepened by his intellectual and reflective relationship with them. Perhaps in part because of his uniquely multifaceted musicianship, Adès writes music that is at once scintillating and challenging—quickly attractive, yet possessing a depth and richness which continually repays repeated listening. Alex Ross has described Adès as a composer who “traffic[s]” neither “in the antagonistic complexities of modernism…[n]or in the pandering simplicities of postmodernism…His music is at once complex and direct.”1 Even so 1 Alex Ross, “Roll Over Beethoven: Thomas Adès,” New Yorker, 26 October 1998, 112. 2 implacable a critic as Richard Taruskin has praised Adès’s “phenomenal success at toeing the line…between the arcane and the banal. The music never loses touch,” he asserts, with its base in the common listening experience of real audiences, so that it is genuinely evocative…Better yet, [Adès’s] music makes more than a vivid first impression. Subtly fashioned and highly detailed, it haunts the memory and invites rehearings that often yield new and intriguing finds.2 Doubtless these qualities of his music—complexity tempered by immediacy, or freshness seasoned with familiarity—helped to spark his meteoric rise to fame as a young composer and secured him in his position of continued prominence in the contemporary classical music scene. These qualities also make the music of Thomas Adès fertile ground for analysis. While many are understandably reticent to identify an overarching aim of the project of music analysis, David Lewin offered four possible motivations. First, one’s purpose in analysis might be theoretical. The products of analysis might in such a case serve as evidence to support a postulated general characteristic of a given body of literature. One’s purpose in analysis might be historical. Analyses might serve to demonstrate how composers’ styles change over time. The analyst’s aim might also be to acquire compositional craft, picking apart a specific work in an attempt to discover what makes it tick, so to speak, and thus gain the ability to make one’s own pieces tick. Finally, the analyst might find the project useful as an aid to prepare for a performance. But whatever the analyst’s motivation, Lewin continues, the goal is simply to hear the piece better, both in detail and in the large. The task of the analyst is ‘merely’ to point out things in the piece that strike him as characteristic and important (where by ‘things’ one includes complex relationships), and to arrange his presentation in a way that will stimulate the musical imagination of his audience. Hence the only complete, faithful, and 2 Richard Taruskin, “A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism,” New York Times, 5 December 1999. 3 properly presented analyses of a piece are (various) legitimate performances of it. However, for various applications, verbal analyses, while inevitably partial and distorted, are very useful.3 It is the author’s present aim, in however necessarily incomplete a way, to stimulate the reader’s musical imagination toward Adès’s first opera, Powder Her Face. Perhaps along the way one can sharpen one’s compositional craft or begin to see more clearly how Adès has developed his style and technique over the course of his career. At any rate, the present analysis will succeed if by the end the reader