Living Toys in Thomas Adès’s Living Toys: Transforming the Post-Tonal Topic

Abstract

Through an analysis of Thomas Adès’s (b. 1971) early chamber orchestra work Living Toys (1993), this article explores how pitch material associated with certain topics and topic-like objects can function as nodes of a transformational network. I build a network from two perspectives: first, three topics are related through Expansion (EXP) and Compression (CMP) transformations, and second, two further topics are related through common tonally suggestive intervals. Freed from tonal syntax, this tapestry of semantically rich objects provides an entrance to understanding the work’s harmony. But given the listener-dependence of topics—allied with transformational theory’s kaleidoscopic flexibility—these two complementary viewpoints model multiple simultaneous understandings of the harmonic language, depending on the objects prioritized.