Yayoi Uno Everett: "Sonic Allegory in Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel (2015)"

Friday, February 9, 2018 - 3:00pm to Saturday, February 10, 2018 - 2:55pm

Yayoi Uno Everett (University of Illinois at Chicago)

622 Dodge Hall, Columbia University, New York NY 10027

Sonic Allegory in Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel (2015)

In Walter Benjamin’s late writing on Baudelaire, allegory arises through an intuitive apprehension of the world and an inner experience that is fragmentary and enigmatic, characterized further by abrupt discontinuity and change of referentiality. Taking cues from Benjamin, this paper focuses on sonic moments that take a sharp allegorical turn in Thomas Adès’s The Exterminating Angel (2015). In adapting Luis Buñuel’s 1962 film El ángel exterminador for opera, Tom Cairns’s libretto retains the surrealistic fabula of the film narrative, while Adès’s music mocks the impropriety of high-society elites through distortion of musical topics, time, and place. The Onde Martenot’s uncanny presence as the voice of the exterminating angel and the opera’s fractured temporality lead us to wrestle with the opera’s allegorical significance at several registers: is it a commentary on the oppression of the Franco regime or on the passivity of the bourgeoisie in general? In concluding, I will explore the intersection between hermeneutics and cognitive psychology in constructing a broader framework for analyzing sound as a source of allegory in contemporary opera.