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Ifirst heard the music of Thomas Ades on a gloomy spring day in Aldeburgh, England, in 1995. The composer was then twenty-four--a nervously confident youth who spoke in rumbling bass tones, like a very English Ving Rhames. The piece on display was "Living Toys," which featured the sort of everywhere-scurrying, chaos-theory music that composers under the influence of Gyorgy Ligeti were writing at the time. But I heard something else, too--an articulate melancholy, which gathered itself into brief, sobbing pleas. Through a maze of styles and moods, the work took listeners far into a private world. Here was a composer who seemed capable of anything.
In the years ...