The Glossary

Abstract

This chapter considers Adès’s compositional priorities by exploring his works which respond to complete, pre-existing musical pieces. I refer to these efforts collectively as Adès’s glossary. These glosses refract an existing piece through the lens of his own aesthetic, and also constitute a kind of commentary on practices through which composers have historically recruited music of the past into their work. Moreover, Adès’s engagements with composers ranging from Dowland to Nancarrow can be grouped according to a few overarching goals. Some of his glosses seek to comment or clarify on the harmonic or structural features of a piece; others focus on questions of performativity. In the case of his reconfiguration of his own music, Adès engages in a process of intensification of the source material, resulting in self-borrowings which distill the sometimes uncanny—or even disturbing—qualities present in the originals.