ABSTRACT
The music of the British composer Thomas Adés offers fertile ground for a closer examination of the status of coherence in post-1980s art music. This chapter presents three overlapping formal perspectives upon the work in order to highlight different aspects of its aesthetic coherence: variation, thread and mosaic. The details of Adés's compositional processes have likewise been mined for their broader significance: John Roeder uses analyses of carefully selected extracts to demonstrate his frequent reliance upon multiple, interlocking temporal processes, with these layered continuities then taken as an indicator of the postmodernism of Adés's work. The string quartet Arcadiana is a powerful example of Adés's ability to fuse stylistic eclecticism and formal complexity in the service of a coherent aesthetic. Adés has spoken of the 'Chinese box effect' produced by his approach to musical form, where 'he answer one instability with another'. In the case of Arcadiana, the focal idea around which these fragments coalesce is the image of Arcadia.
