Amy Marcy Cheney Beach (1867–1944) was a musical prodigy whose professional career vacillated between piano performance and composition. Her professional debut was delayed until age sixteen because of parental misgivings, and then her performance career was curtailed at age eighteen when she married a prominent physician, Dr. H. H. A. Beach. His insistence that she devote her energies to composition rather than performance, along with his desire that she remain self-taught, inspired her to develop a unique late-Romantic compositional style. With the support of the Boston Symphony Orchestra and its musicians, she produced a Mass with orchestra, a symphony, a concerto, and numerous chamber works. Her trailblazing accomplishments included many firsts for American women composers. After the death of her husband and mother in 1910 and 1911, she reinvented herself as a virtuoso performer while still composing. Her compositional output is widely varied in genre, instrumentation, and musical style.

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.