Thomas Adès Studies

Thomas Adès Studies, co-edited by Edward Venn and Philip Stoecker, is to be published in late 2021, a few months after Adès’s fiftieth birthday. Its appearance,  some two decades after Richard Taruskin’s influential survey of Adès’s music, enables the volume not only to take stock of the evolving body of scholarly work dedicated to Adès, but also to point to future directions for the growing field of Adès studies. In this way, it will be ideally positioned to make a significant contribution to the literature on Adès’s music.

The contributors to Thomas Adès Studies represent a wide cross-section of Adès scholars in the United Kingdom and North America (locations that account for the vast majority of publications on Adès’s music). At one end of the continuum there are early career researchers; at the other, established authors and professors. The volume is wide ranging in terms of methodological and theoretical approaches as well as its coverage of Adès’s music – nearly all of Adès’s major works are discussed at some point, and some (particularly the operas) are given close readings from multiple perspectives. Yet the diversity of approach is counterbalanced by a genuine sense of shared scholarly purpose, fostered through opportunities for authors to disseminate and critique one another’s work-in-progress in conference sessions (a 2017 event dedicated to Adès’s operas, and a 2019 special session at the Annual Meeting of the Society for Music Theory) and, most significantly, in a series of on-line virtual workshops during the summer of 2020. The generosity and communality that informed the discussions, formal and informal, in the writing of this volume led not only to a deepening of the arguments that are contained within it, but to the illumination of themes and concepts that cut across, in sometimes surprising and unexpected ways, work that ostensibly faces in different directions.

Contents:

1. 'Chronically volatile': Gesture in Adès's Living Toys and America: a prophecy - Philip Rupprecht
2. Performing Adès - Edward Venn with Henry Weekes
3. 'Fountain of Youth', 'River of Meaning': Aesthetics of the Superficial in Powder Her Face - Nicholas David Stevens
4. 'Oh brave new Caliban': Postcolonial Perspectives on Adès's The Tempest - Jane Forner
5. Chaconnes in the Music of Adès - Philip Stoecker
6. Closing the Circle? Tevot and the Question of Symphonic Resolution - Richard Powell
7. A World in Constant Motion: Adès's In Seven Days - Amy Bauer
8. Musique automatique? Adèsian Automata and the Logic of Disjuncture - Brian Moseley
9. Narrating the Dance of Death: Morality and Social Critique in Adès's Totentanz - Scott Lee
10. Hearing Voices in Adès's Operas - Emma Gallon
11. The RICH Logic of Adès's The Exterminating Angel and The Tempest - John Roeder
12. Sonic Allegory in Adès's The Exterminating Angel - Yayoi Uno Everett