Tutor HuntResources Music Resources

Review: Edward Venn, Thomas Adès: Asyla (routledge, 2017)

Date : 08/06/2019

Author Information

Alexi

Uploaded by : Alexi
Uploaded on : 08/06/2019
Subject : Music

The field of scholarship on Thomas Ad s is quickly growing, and Edward Venn s Thomas Ad s: Asyla the first monograph on the composer is a welcome addition. It is also fitting that his four-movement quasi-symphony Asyla should be the subject, as this is Ad s s most popular work. Since its extremely positive critical reception, Asyla has become part of a small canon of frequently-programmed contemporary works within Britain, and it catapulted its composer to a modernist superstardom rarely seen for someone so young.

The book begins with two short chapters, the first of which places Ad s in the context of 1990s British musical scene both artistically and in terms of discourse on national identity, and the second of which discusses musical devices in his early works that reached full development in Asyla. In chapters three to seven, the core of the book (xvi), Asyla is subjected to a detailed technical and hermeneutic analysis. Venn reads each movement from start to finish, describing the music s progress in terms of guiding metaphors linked to the many meanings of the term asyla , the plural of asylum . The analysis of the first movement stages tension between an arcadian pastoral idyll and grim urban dance the second movement is described in terms of a sanctuary or haven the third is read as a promise of hedonistic escapism linked to electronic dance music (EDM), and the fourth is read in terms of the choral topic and its associations with communal singing and loss. In the seventh chapter, Venn turns to popular criticism, journalism, and theoretical tools in order interpret the work more generally. The eighth and final chapter focuses on the ways in which stylistic tensions left hanging in Asyla are developed and extended in later pieces.

Venn s methodology, as in most scholarship on Ad s to date, is largely theoretical. But Venn s writing is extremely lucid. He clearly communicates the ways in which Ad s plays with and expands very basic compositional processes in order to create a musical sound that draws the ear in its immediacy, but also rewards further contemplation and study. In this respect, Venn s prose is much like Ad s s music: he manages to convey these processes in all their intricacy, inviting intense consideration while maintaining an overall compelling flow. Among the concepts discussed are the expanding intervallic series, for example, in which Ad s embrace[s] all the possible intervals smaller than an octave in as short a span as possible (18), and the Berg-esque tonal palette that arises from these intervallic sequences, in which a large number of the resulting harmonies are commonplace ... [but] the logic that governs the progression from one to the next is not that of traditional tonality (16). A more central theme is Ad s s propensity for setting up musical patterns and then disrupting them for expressive purposes. Venn occasionally overstates the aural effect of these disruptions in order to highlight their metaphorical properties: how easily do we really hear the Duchess s final G# at b. 400 of Powder Her Face, which grammatically disrupts the ascending expanding intervallic series of her sung line at b. 396, as an acoustic phenomena [sic] (35)? How does it convey a dramatic function , that serves to draw attention to fact that despite the Duchess mounting excitement and hopes of a future of unimagined wealth something is wrong (19)? This early blurring between music-as-heard and music-as-read leads to ambiguities later: in what sense does the cadential F#, which deviates from the octatonic set of the melody at b. 18 in the first movement of Asyla, present as a kink in the tail, establishing a musical tension (44)? By begging these questions, Venn invites a consideration of the dialectical relationship between score analysis and the immediate impact of the music. This allows him to foreground certain points as musical problems (xvi) that draw the listener in, demanding an interpretive response.

In terms of the overall argument, Venn is undoubtedly original, since he manages to blend theoretical work with a political dimension that has been absent from Ad s scholarship up until now. Asyla made its impact on audiences throu gh allusions to rave music, and the moral panic about illegal narcotics this music elicited, in the third movement, Ecstasio is it ecstasy or Ecstasy? (1). Venn follows and expands upon these popular responses by reading the whole of Asyla in terms of British national anxieties, complementing his analysis by drawing liberally upon manifestations of these themes in the media. He focuses, laudably, on the fears of immigration and asylum-seeking that were at the forefront of public attention in the late 1990s (47), and more broadly, the notions of madness, freedom, drug culture and religion [that implicate Asyla] more explicitly within social and cultural discourses (xv). All of this, however, with the important caveat, occurring just before the bulk of the analysis, that

To interpret the music in this light is not to point to the depiction of any specific group of refugees, but rather to examine the ways in which musical procedures can be considered analogous to the general experience of seeking asylum. Instead of asking who is fleeing, from whom, via what route, and why (and so on), one might ask how the music can be understood as evocative of flight, danger and particular environments (47).

On one hand, the deconstruction of these discourses into their component metaphorical parts is necessary if they are to serve analytical or interpretive aims. But on the other, we might also wonder why the realities of these political implications are downplayed almost as quickly as they are raised.

This points to a certain tension underlying Venn s narrative. The attempt to read Asyla in terms of British politics jostles for space with a fundamental composer advocacy that sits at the heart of the book and has served much (if not all) scholarship on Ad s to date. Asyla is a work Venn has listened to, studied and enjoyed for nearly two decades , and he hopes to demonstrate to the reader why the music moves me in the way that it does (xv). This sounds fair enough, but a detached assessment might have allowed more space for critical reflection: certainly, Asyla s historical and cultural importance alone is enough to warrant a monograph. Fans of Asyla will find the kind of step-by-step analysis Venn presents here extremely enjoyable, but without a fundamental interest in listening to the music, the analysis can seem a little too much like a blow-by-blow descri ption of the piece, its guiding metaphors spread a little too thin. The relative lack of space devoted to political interpretation and social context is somewhat at odds with the central aim of the book as stated by the author.

Occasionally, this inequality risks doing injustice to the realities of the political subject matter. The enigmatic end of the work, for example, leaves us pausing at the asylum gate. It is for the individual listener to decide whether to enter, to turn away, or to remain at the threshold (135). But for those up against the UK Border Control, gaining asylum is contingent on more than interpretive choice. We might also read with discomfort the way Venn describes his personal stake in the topic by means of an example of displacement in his career: he found himself seeking refuge (xvii) after having no academic institution at which to take up the Leverhulme Fellowship that would allow him to carry out research for the present book, before being granted eventual asylum (xvii) at the University of Leeds a far cry from the refuge sought by those fleeing conflict in Bosnia and Kosovo in the mid-90s.

These small problems are overcome, however, in the vast majority of Venn s political interpretations, as in his discussion of the third movement, Ecstasio , which plays with the norms of rave music and all its connoted social and racial tensions. Beginning his discussion with the controversial Criminal Justice and Public Order Act of 1994, which attempted to crack down on rave by giving police the power to disperse gatherings in which people were listening to sounds wholly or predominantly characterised by the emission of a succession of repetitive beats (98), Venn reads the many facets of Ecstasio its tonal language (100), its motifs (107, 109), and its textural shifts that suggest beat-dropping (107-108) in terms of a productive tension with the stylistic norms of EDM. At a broader level, Venn sees its structural focus upon repetition as not merely characteristic of dance music, but also as a large-scale exploration of the repetitive, cyclic qualities found in the first two movements (99). Venn points out that the coda of the movement does not bring back the EDM material from the start after two unsuccessful attempts to restart the dance , it has effectively been abolished (112), and here Venn s analysis is politically compelling. Expanding upon a parallel drawn by Ad s in his conversations with Tom Service (Faber, 2012) between the end of the movement and the end of Act II of Parsifal, in which Parsifal brings down the walls of Klingsor s Zauberschlo , destroying the vision of a bounteous garden that quickly withers to a wasteland (113), Venn suggests that we can hear the coda of Ecstasio as a denouncement of rave culture as an illusory refuge, no more able to provide asylum than the wastelands of the first movement (113).

The most arresting political interpretation occurs in the penultimate chapter. Here, Venn provides a reading of the movement in which the horn theme is a protagonist that struggles against an un-named antagonist. Ad s reworks this relationship in the final part of the movement, at which point the horn theme disperses to become background while the originally antagonistic material becomes foregrounded, and thus thematised (141). Venn asks, Are listeners, after all, to identify with the oppressors? Have we been the oppressors all along? And if so, who is this we and why do we exclude? (141). In this set of questions, the problems posed by Asyla are communicated with full force.

In this chapter, Venn also discusses the extent to which the reception of Asyla is conditioned by Ad s s own often contradictory self-fashioning and dissembling (137). In so doing, he broaches a sensitive topic that has long been left unexamined. While Venn concisely describes Ad s s relationship with the press as suggest[ing] a playful courting of the media, of courting controversy whilst simultaneously distancing Asyla from it (138), he is still disinclined to criticise Ad s overtly. A less forgiving reader might see Ad s s use of popular, low, or politically-charged musical sources as merely one recent example in a long series of appropriations that has extended back to the time that Stravinsky first lied about his use of folk sources: it is no triviality that some journalists saw in Asyla a contemporary Rite of Spring (142-143).

Since the deliberately provocative British subject matter of Asyla and the opera Powder her Face set in the explosive late-90s British capital, in which there is a dissonance between the established London culture, and the new, rougher one (Ad s, quoted 10) Ad s s work has become increasingly distant from British popular culture, more nonrepresentational, more traditionally modernist-cosmopolitan. At the same time, his identity as a populist saviour lives on through the persistent presence of Asyla in contemporary discourse, despite the fact that this work is an exception in terms of its political themes. It is important to address the ethics of this contradiction as the field of Ad s scholarship grows, and foreground epistemological questions to do with advocacy and criticism that will be important in the future. We must also be aware of the ways in which the growing field of Ad s scholarship is playing an active part in myth-making. That Thomas Ad s: Asyla makes all of these questions possible, however, reflects its significant contribution to scholarship in this field. Overall, this book is a long-overdue critical analysis of Ad s s cultural impact, and if there are any missteps it is only because Venn is truly breaking a new path.

This resource was uploaded by: Alexi