Benjamin Britten died before most of his closest friends and colleagues, so in one important sense his legacy ensured their participation in the continuation of the special contribution to local and national musical life represented by the Aldeburgh Festival. More than forty years after his death, that legacy remains a living force. It was a measure of Britten’s perceived significance in the years that passed between his death and his birth centenary thirty-seven years later that attempts to trace his possible impact on younger composers are often combined with critical perceptions concerning the many substantial publications about him. Collections of letters and diaries, biographies, overviews of the music, and more specialised studies of particular works have flowed in profusion at the same time. Thisexamines Britten’s influence – or lack of influence – on, and his continued intersections with, successive generations of composers.

Thomas Adès has mused on symphonic form in terms of logic and resolution – as ‘something which closes a circle’. Nevertheless, his interest in the symphonies of Jean Sibelius is sparked by their resistance to this trend; the one-movement Seventh Symphony, in particular, is a work he hears as ‘painfully inconclusive’. This contradiction plays out in Adès’s own one-movement symphony, Tevot (2007). In both works, audible developments are underpinned by a carefully managed network of tempos. Recurring sonorities not only delineate this structure but also prompt perceptual shifts, underlining forms that are at once stable and volatile, recurrent and changing, static and dynamic, closed and open. In this chapter, the Seventh Symphony offers a potent lens through which Tevot can be viewed, shedding light not only upon Adès’s navigation of symphonic resolution, but also upon the way in which he – like Sibelius – engages with symphonic traditions at large.

In this chapter I offer a reorientation of Thomas Adès’s relationship to surrealism by positioning his music in the context of automatism, wherein surrealism's famed incongruities become legitimate, logical manifestations of our unconscious. This perspective allows us to incorporate works that have not often been understood as surreal, like the Mazurkas studied here. Second, automatisms link Adèsian surrealism to the compositional logic that theorists have uncovered in the past twenty years. And finally, Adès’s automatism suggests a way of composing genuinely surreal music. André Breton, surrealism's founder, thought music was ‘confusing’, and much literature on Adès’s music has established such a connection only by suggesting the music's surreal qualities are found in its painterly traits. I, on the other hand, suggest that through automatism we are able to imagine those marvellous sounds that emerge from logical processes of structured time as themselves fundamentally surreal.

Although Adès scholarship has made significant inroads towards understanding the analytical and interpretative richness of his music, the actual sound of it, and the range of meanings a performer might tease from it, have barely begun to be addressed. In this chapter I propose ways in which musical structure in Adès’s music might be reconceived in response to performance. Adès’s own analytical and recorded accounts of Janáček’s ‘In memoriam’ are used to provide preliminary theoretical and methodological orientation, after which I examine Adès’s Mazurkas Op. 27 to consider the dynamic interaction between structures, genres and performance traditions in recordings by multiple pianists. Finally, I turn to recordings of Darknesse Visible to consider the role performance can play in rethinking the relationship of expression and structure in Adès’s music. Underpinning both accounts is a sense of how performances can access the temporal experience of how time passes in Adès’s music.

In this chapter I argue that Adès’s Totentanz, for mezzo-soprano, baritone and orchestra, functions as a musical commentary on the allegory of the Dance of Death. Translating into music Bernt Notke’s famous fifteenth-century frieze, which depicted wraith-like skeletons taking part in a Dance of Death with members of society in strictly descending order of societal importance, Adès’s Totentanz is an act of narration which reveals a message of social critique centred on the corrupting materialism and hierarchical structure of society. Adès sheds light on his priorities as (musical) storyteller through a number of narrative strategies, including foreshadowing, intertextual references, topical allusions, pacing and proportion and musical characterisation. Chains of thirds and fifths, serving as narrative motives and functioning as symbols for the ideas of damnation, salvation and human suffering, link together the music for many characters, and signifiers of death and the demonic, such as the Dies irae, permeate the music.