Contemporary Music Studies

ID:1257212

In its dialectical nature, in its role as criticism, and in its seeking not to displace the
classical masters but to join them, Brahmss music has served as the most important model
for composers of the past hundred years, challenged only by the influential avant-garde
movements after the Second World War - J. Peter Burkholder.
In a postmodern situation characterised by the dethroning of the avant-garde, to what
extent can Burkholders assertion be seen to hold in the work of a currently successful
composer like Thomas Ads?
ID: 1257212
Composer, conductor, and pianist Thomas Ads is undoubtedly one of the worlds leading
composers, and certainly the youngest to be held in such high regard. An interviewer wrote in 2008
that while many contemporary composers note that getting a premiere is not as difficult as being
asked back for subsequent performances [] much of Adss work has entered the
repertoire (Wroe 2008), evidence for which has become even clearer in recent years. After
retrospective festivals (such as Traced Overhead at the Barbican in 2007) and new international
productions of his enormously popular 2004 opera The Tempest, in October 2014 Sadlers Wells
presented Thomas Ads: See the Music, Hear the Dance. In this mixed programme of four dance
works choreographed to established concert pieces by the composer, his works are treated as
fixed entities ripe for and worthy of interdisciplinary interpretation. That by his early forties Ads has
found so much of his music firmly canonised is testament to its popularity with both concert-going
audiences and the contemporary music elite of critics and academics - a rare success that Ads
has achieved by composing music that follows a model established Brahms, that which J. Peter
Burkholder has termed the museum piece.

In Museum Pieces (1983) and Brahms and Twentieth Century Classical Music (1984),
Burkholder traces the nineteenth century conversion of the concert hall into a museum, becoming
a place for the performance of a fixed canon of masterworks where appreciating the music played
was primarily a learned rather than culturally native activity (Burkholder 84: 177). He cites Brahms
as foremost among the first generation of composers to have to respond to an established
historical repertory and compose for the concert hall museum by writing music that met the
requirements of a museum piece:

Contemporary Music Studies

ID:1257212

(1) it must visibly participate in the tradition of serious art music; (2) it must have
lasting value, rewarding rehearings, study, and analysis, becoming loved as it
becomes familiar; and (3) it must proclaim a distinctive musical personality,
different enough from other works in the collection to justify its inclusion while not
so radically different as to exclude it entirely (Burkholder 1984: 77)

The vast majority of Adss music also matches these requirements, though it is ironic that the first
example Burkholder uses to demonstrate his point - the chaconne finale of Brahmss Fourth
Symphony - has been dismissed by Ads in his typically provocative fashion as a terrible waste of
space (Ads and Service 2012: 174). Nevertheless, Adss most recent orchestral work Totentanz
(for mezzo-soprano, baritone and large orchestra and premiered at the 2013 BBC Proms) clearly
corresponds in its similar adherence to the conventions of museum pieces. The work can be seen
to situate itself with the mainstream classical repertory from its title alone, inviting comparison with
famous Death Dances from the repertory - most obviously Liszts own Totentanz (1859), but also
Saint-Sans Danse Macabre (1874), and the second movement of Mahlers Fourth Symphony
(1900), to name but three. Despite this, Adss Totentanz possesses many distinctive features that
have come to be recognised as typical of his musical personality; much of his music, particularly
his larger-scale orchestral and stage works, operate at an expressive level of heightened, volatile
drama sometimes verging on hysteria, characterised by extreme textural complexity and sudden
stillness. In order to achieve such contrasts Ads is known for requiring great virtuosity of his
players, with intricate rhythms often played at extreme tessituras, and a particular predilection for
stratospherically high string harmonics and inventive use of percussion (Totentanz requires eight
percussionists playing a vast array of instruments, including a selection of whistles, eighteen
animal bones, and a sixty-inch Japanese Taiko drum). However, alongside these distinctively
Adsian' properties and other progressive musical features - not least its extended and often very
dissonant post-tonal harmony - are conspicuous elements of more conventional museum piece
practice, so as to ensure its inclusion in the tradition. In keeping with its broad and historicallyinformed subject matter - Ads draws his libretto from a medieval German poem depicting all ranks

Contemporary Music Studies

ID:1257212

of society from Pope to infant in turn being forced into a dance with death - Totentanz
acknowledges its place in a lineage of classical music on the theme of death by conspicuously
basing its main musical figure on the oft-quoted Dies Irae Latin hymn (ex. 1). Elsewhere the work

Ex. 1: Extract from Dies Irae and quotation in Totentanz b. 21

unmistakably hints at the music of composers from the canon; after the premiere critics pointed out
features they felt were variously Mahlerian (Telegraph), Straussian, and Bergian (Guardian),
and other moments, such as the arrival of the peasant heralded by dancing pastoral horn calls
towards the end of the piece, are clear references to the conventions of Classical topoi. The result
is that it seems at once traditional and fresh, ancient and forward-looking, and its aspiration to the
label classic is unmistakable (Burkholder 1984: 78). Although Burkholder was writing with
reference to the finale of Brahmss Fourth Symphony, the description applies just as well to
Totentanz.

It is then primarily the complexity of the orchestral writing, and its web of allusions (Burkholder
1984, 80) to serious art music of the past that causes Totentanz to reward subsequent hearings,
and ensures that it is worthy of study (although an in-depth analysis has yet to be published).
Burkholder describes webs of allusions such as that which is demonstrated in Totentanz as being
the core of modern music (Burkholder 1984: 80), as established by Brahms in response to the
concert hall museum. However, whilst for modern audiences Brahms can appeal to both the
musically educated and the more casual listener, with the allusions acting as an extra layer of
detail for those who can appreciate them, Burkholder argues that:

If to experience Brahmss music fully one must know what Brahms knew about
music, and if the same hold true for Schoenberg, then to experience Babbitts
music - which cannot even be approached without an understanding of the music

Contemporary Music Studies

ID:1257212

of the Schoenberg school - will be an impossibility for all but the very few. Here is
where something has been lost [] with a few exceptions modern music has lost
its ability to appeal to the naive listener (Burkholder 1984: 81)

Totentanz is just such an exception. In the music, amongst the allusions to Romantic composers
and Classical topoi, are onomatopoeic references that echo the words being sung and help to
orient the listener, such as the sound of tolling bells that introduces the Abbott, the use of clanking
metallic percussion and snare drums to signal the Knight, and the irregular rhythmic clicking of a
typewriter that underscores the music sung by the bureaucratic Mayor. With regard to appealing to
the naive listener the most striking feature of all, however, is Adss sudden use of functional
tonality for the works poignant and affecting conclusion, as an infant sings O Death, how can I
understand? I cannot walk, yet I must dance! to a plaintive melody underscored by warm
alternating I-V chords, the switch from dissonance to consonance signalling a newfound
expressive sincerity.

Many other appearances of conspicuous consonance and functional harmony can also be found
elsewhere in Adss oeuvre. At the end of the second movement of his Violin Concerto (2005),
after a protracted and heavily dissonant uphill struggle the solo violin stumbles upon and uncovers
an oasis of major chordal harmonies, which sound all the more blissful after the preceding chaos.
As Ads acknowledges, there was a time thirty years ago when a C major chord was a shocking
thing in the context of modern music. But now it all depends [] on context (Ads and Service
2012: 38). Adss willingness to move freely between extremes of dissonance and consonance for
the purposes of expression - emphasising the qualities of one by establishing it in a discourse with
its opposite and exploring everywhere in between - is just one example of his dialectical approach
to composition. In addition to unambiguous elements of consonant harmony, Adss music is full of
other features plucked from the past to jostle alongside more conventionally contemporary
elements, particularly with respect to structure and form; whilst the large-scale orchestral work
Asyla (1997) is a four-movement symphony in all but name, with a singular kind of third movement

Contemporary Music Studies

ID:1257212

scherzo, Adss Piano Quintet from 2000 is in strict sonata form complete with a full repeat of the
exposition. At the works German premiere in 2002 such a gesture was considered so
provocatively archaic that a palpable shock ran through the avantgardiste audience when Ads
turned back 16 pages of score to begin the repeat (Fox 2004: 48). In more recent work, Adss
piano concerto In Seven Days (2008) features theme and variation development and a fugal
movement, while many have noted the orthodox structure of his second opera, The Tempest, with
Christopher Fox commenting: it looks like an opera and it behaves like an opera, offering a
musical drama in which the traditional operatic virtues of musically delineated characterisation and
musically satisfactory dramatic pacing are wonderfully sustained (Fox 2004: 53). Similarly, whilst
he has written for a variety of unusual instruments, - particularly percussion - in orchestral contexts,
Ads consistently favours writing for traditional ensembles like string quartets and orchestras,
explaining simply that the orchestra, as a basic palette, still has the most variety (Ads and
Service 2012: 71). Given the enormous amount of detail present in his scores it would not seem
surprising for Ads to wish to venture into electronic music, where the final product does not
involve handing control over to performers. However, he has definite reservations; when asked if
he could ever see himself writing electronic music, he says never say never. But I doubt it (Ads
and Service 2012: 99), elaborating that he doesnt know how electronic music operates
expressively compared to acoustic music - its to do with the organic nature of somebody picking
up an instrument and blowing or scraping it, and it makes a noise and its your work (Ads and
Service 2012: 96).

Clearly, Ads does not subscribe to modernist or avant-garde notions of progress for the sake of
progress, but rather is concerned primarily with making his music communicate as expressively
and intelligibly as possible, and is happy to participate in whichever tradition he feels best
facilitates that goal. It is in this respect that Adss approach differs somewhat from Brahmss;
whilst Brahms laboured under the great weight of the canon, worrying over his first symphony for
fourteen years for fear of doing a disservice to the form and his predecessors, Ads is a typical
postmodernist, displaying a cheerily flippant attitude towards his musical heritage as he rummages

Contemporary Music Studies

ID:1257212

through it at will. Summed up by his comment that its not just a pluralistic world we live in, its also
one where times and eras no longer have to be put in a particular order one can use any model
and still be in the present (Wells 2012: 6), his postmodern outlook is apparent in another dialectic
his music addresses - that of high and low musical genres, the free mixing of which helps his
works museum piece credentials by further cementing its distinctive musical personality. For
example, within the symphonic structure and swirling, intricate soundworld of Asyla sits its third
movement, the famous Ecstacio, a sudden blast of electronic dance music thrashed out on
pounding bass drum and cumulative layers of syncopated chords, seemingly entirely at odds with
the idiom not just of the rest of the work, but with serious art music of the late 1990s in general.
Elsewhere, Adss first opera Powder Her Face (1995) caricatures early-twentieth music hall
genres, the third movement of the Violin Concerto is suffused with jazz harmony, and prominent
use of repeated melodic cells in America: A Prophecy (1999) and In Seven Days recall 1970s
American minimalism. However, despite this plethora of contrasting styles, Dominic Wells warns
against characterising Ads as a polystylist, which implies the often-harsh juxtaposition of
disparate musical styles, whereas Adss music generally avoids this extreme conflict. Rather than
a polystylist, he is a stylistic pluralist, allowing his music to converse with whatever music he hears,
be it low or high art, historical or contemporary (Wells 2012: 2). When speaking of [Adess]
music as opposed to the music [Ads] hears, Wells is referring to the composers distinctive
musical personality not only in terms of the recurring features discussed earlier (textural
complexity, extremes of pitch, etc.), but also to a specific musical signature that can be traced
across at least ten of his works. Wells points out occurrences of this 5+2 progression, consisting
of a stable perfect fifth or fourth undermined by the introduction of a minor second, at the start of
pieces ranging from 1992s The Origin of the Harp to the Violin Concerto in 2005, arguing that
while allusions to earlier composers have been noted by journalists and musicologists, there has
been scant mention of the composer to whom Ads refers most frequently of all: himself (Wells
2012: 7). This self-reference makes clear another, even more significant dialectic at work in Ads
music: that of the play between originality and emulation. Thus, a recent Ads work such as the
Violin Concerto demonstrates three interrelated levels of dialectical interaction (eg. 2).

Contemporary Music Studies

Emulation
High Art
Old Musical Style
Traditional threemovement concerto
form
Consonant harmony
in the second
movement.

New Musical Style

Dissonant harmony
Virtuosic writing
Complex textures

ID:1257212

Originality
5+2 harmonic
Popular Art
signature
Jazz harmony in
third movement.
Dance-like

rhythms in third
movement.

Eg. 2: Interrelation of Old/New, High/Popular, and Emulation/Originality

dialectics in Adess Violin Concerto (2005)
Again Ads is following a model established by Brahms, whose music, despite a very different
overall aesthetic, similarly engaged in multiple dialectics, addressing not only the opposition of old
and new musical styles and techniques, but also, even more importantly, the tension between
emulation and originality [] This kind of dialectic within music approaches a species of criticism,
as if Brahms were writing in his music a commentary on his own experience as a musician, or
indeed, given his wide knowledge, a rumination on the entire previous tradition of
music (Burkholder 1984: 79). This use of dialectics as a form of musical critique is also apparent in
works by Ads, and it doesnt appear to be a coincidence that nowhere is it seen more clearly than
in his piece Brahms (2001), a five minute work for baritone and orchestra. Something of a curiosity
in the wider context of Adss oeuvre (it doesnt even get a mention in his 2012 book of interviews
with Tom Service, despite pages dedicated to discussion of Brahms), the piece is a setting of a
tongue-in-cheek poem by Alfred Brendel, satirising Brahmss unavoidable influence on modern
music by depicting the composer as a ghost haunting the music room of a house and irritating its
residents with his late-night piano playing. In Thomas Ads and the Spectres of Brahms (2015)
Edward Venn demonstrates, using the aptly analogised Derridean theory of hauntology, that in his
setting of the poem Ads renders Brendels satire in purely musical terms, ironically forcing the
ghost of Brahms to have a taste of his own proverbial medicine by writing a critical gloss of his
music in the same way that Brahms did to the music of his own past, but with none of his signature

Contemporary Music Studies

ID:1257212

reverence. By unsympathetically exaggerating Brahmss compositional tics, such as consecutive

descending thirds, rendering them absurd and mechanical, and hanging quotations from Brahmss
oeuvre in front of dissonant backgrounds so that they sound strange and uncanny, Ads creates an
austere and alienating musical idiom that has much more in common with the music of the Second
Viennese School than with Brahms himself. In inviting this comparison Ads inevitably alludes to
Schoenberg, and specifically his influential characterisation of Brahms as a musical progressive.
Thus the conflicting ghosts of both Brahms the progressive and Brahms the historicist are
summoned into the work, and by being forced to face both forwards and backwards in history
Brahms becomes unstuck in time, providing a compelling critique of Brahmss multifaceted
reputation and seemingly perpetual presence as a model for twentieth and twenty-first century
composers. Furthermore, Ads manages to articulate this complex multilayered critique in Brahms
within the confines of Brahmss own model as interpreted by Burkholder: that for the modern
audience his music can be appreciated by both the musically educated and the more casual
listener. For the naive listener, the harshly dissonant and alienating musical idiom is expressively
justified by the face value of the comical supernatural narrative unfolding in the text, with the layers
of satire and critique adding an extra layer of detail to the unfolding narrative for those able to
share that pleasure (Venn 2015: 189).

In Aimez-vous Brahms? Reflections on Modernism, Peter Gay argues that Brahms can be viewed
as a compound, a combination of seemingly contradictory elements without a contradiction:
Brahms was both a traditionalist and an innovator, both a conservative and a radical, both a
craftsman and a creator; he was an emotional intellectual, without crippling conflicts, without
paradox (Gay 1977: 34-35). In his own postmodern context, Ads has achieved the same status
by decisively rejecting the air of crisis, the self-conscious historicising and the rigid commitment to
notions of progress that characterised post-war avant-garde movements and much subsequent art
music of the twentieth century, favouring instead a broader, freely dialectical approach, managing
to critique and innovate without alienating his audience in the concert hall museum. Thus
Burkholders assertion that Brahms music has served as the most important model for composers

Contemporary Music Studies

ID:1257212

of the past hundred years (Burkholder 1984: 80) holds remarkably well when applied to the work
of Thomas Ads, whose compositional method, comprising a dialectical approach, use of music as
critique, and association with the composers of the past, is substantially inherited from Brahms.,
and neatly summed up by Adss proclamation that were in a time of total freefall. Not even
freefall - zero gravity (Ads and Service 2012: 45).

Word Count: 3,012

Bibliography
Ads, T. and Service, T. (2012) Thomas Ads: Full of Noises. Conversations with Tom Service.
Faber and Faber.
Burkholder, J.P. (1984) Brahms and Twentieth Century Classical Music. 19th-Century Music, 8
(1): 75-83.
Burkholder, J.P. (1983) Museum Pieces: The Historicist Mainstream in Music of the Last Hundred
Years. The Journal of Musicology, 2 (2): 115-134.
Clements, A. (2013) Prom 8: BBCSO/Ads - review. [Online]. Available from: http://
www.theguardian.com/music/2013/jul/18/prom-8-bbcso-ades-review [Accessed 01/10 2015].
Fox, C. (2004) Tempestous Times: The Recent Music of Thomas Ads. The Musical Times, 145
(1888): 41-56.
Gay, P. (1977) Aimez-vous Brahms? Reflections on Modernism. Salmagundi, (36): 16-35.
Goehr, A. (1998) "Brahms'sAktualitt" In Finding the Key Faber and Faber. pp. 175-188.
Hewett, I. (2013) Proms 2013: Thomas Ads, review. [Online]. Available from: http://
www.telegraph.co.uk/culture/music/proms/10187948/Proms-2013-Thomas-Ades-review.html
[Accessed 01/10 2015].
Roeder, J. (2006) Co-operating Continuities in the Music of Thomas Ads. Music Analysis, 25
(1-2): 121-154.
Schoenberg, A. (1975) "Brahms the Progressive" In Stein, L. (ed.) Style and Idea: Selected
Writings of Arnold Schoenberg University of California Press. pp. 398-441.
Venn, E. (2015) Thomas Ads and the Spectres of Brahms. Journal of the Royal Musical
Association, 140 (1): 163-212.
Wells, D. (2012) Plural Styles, Personal Style: The Music of Thomas Ads. Tempo, 66 (260): 2-14.
Wroe, N. (2008) Ads on Ads: Interview by Nicholas Wroe. [Online]. Available from: http://
www.theguardian.com/books/2008/jul/05/saturdayreviewsfeatres.guardianreview15 [Accessed
01/10 2015].