Mark Adderley: Bad Language – Ensemble Ernst

Adderley’s language

You don’t have to have listened for very long before these works reveal their creator. Adderley opens many of his pieces with a personal signature, a sort of “warming up” motif – then the music dives straight into a maelstrom of notes, motifs and musical characters. Adderley’s scores are like volcanic rock, the solidifi ed results of an eruptive, creative process. Compatible and incompatible musical material (often in the form of fragments of other “musics” and “styles”) melts and solidifi es in this mass of lava. In performance all the untameable energy is released again to produce a brilliant, driving torrent of musical fragments and gestures.

Mark Adderley (born 1960) studied at the Guildhall in London. He moved subsequently to Oslo where he embarked on composition studies at the Norwegian Academy of Music, eventually gaining his diploma degree in composition. He has since lived in Norway, making a name for himself as one of the most original composers of his generation. Adderley can be described as a “virtuoso” composer, both because of the way he treats differing styles of music in his works, and in the way in which his music offers great enjoyment and poses challenges to its performers.