DMA Option 2 Thesis and Option 3 Scholarly Essay

DEPOSIT COVERSHEET
University of Illinois Music and Performing Arts Library

Date: 17 April 2018

DMA Option (circle): 2 [thesis] or 3 [scholarly essay]

Your full name: Kyle Shaw

Full title of Thesis or Essay: Promiscuity, Fetishes, and Irrational Functionality

in Thomas Adès’s Powder Her Face

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Thomas Adès
1. _________________________________
Powder Her Face
2. _________________________________

3. _________________________________
Opera
Analysis
4. _________________________________

5. _________________________________
Interval Cycles
Quotation
6. _________________________________

7. _________________________________
Musical Borrowing

8. _________________________________

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thesis/essay and the departmental coversheet.
ÓCopyright 2018 Kyle Shaw
PROMISCUITY, FETISHES, AND IRRATIONAL FUNCTIONALITY IN THOMAS ADÈS’S

POWDER HER FACE

BY

KYLE SHAW

THESIS

Submitted in partial fulfillment of the requirements

for the degree of Doctor of Musical Arts in Music
with a concentration in Music Composition
in the Graduate College of the
University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign, 2018

Urbana, Illinois

Doctoral Committee:

Associate Professor Reynold Tharp, Chair and Director of Research

Assistant Professor Carlos Carrillo
Professor Stephen Taylor
Professor William Heiles
 ii

ABSTRACT

While various scholars have identified Thomas Adès’s primary means of generating pitch

material—various patterns of expanding intervals both linear and vertical—there remains a void

in the commentary on how his distinct musical voice interacts with the unique demands of

articulating a coherent musico-dramatic art form. After a brief synopsis of the plot, the present

study adopts a three-pronged approach to accounting for Adès’s pitch structures in Powder Her

Face: the first chapter is devoted to analyzing the role of musical borrowing—quotation,

allusion, and the like. The second chapter summarizes Adès’s expanding interval techniques—

his so-called “signature scale” and aligned interval cycles. Various elaborations on these

techniques allow for the integration of borrowed material. The final chapter is devoted to a

discussion of how Adès’s core techniques, among other aspects of his musical voice, enable

certain intersections between his own musical thinking and modes of musical thinking

commonly associated with tonality.

 iii

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS

I owe a tremendous amount of gratitude to Dr. Reynold Tharp, whose patience,

generosity, and meticulousness in combing through multiple drafts of this text cannot be

understated. The depth of his analytical insights inspired me to undertake a project of this nature

and greatly improved the quality of my work.

I owe many thanks as well to the other members of my committee, Dr. Carlos Carrillo,

Dr. Stephen Taylor, and Dr. William Heiles, for collectively providing me with an education

whose quality is second to none, and whose commitment to their students transcends the borders

of their classrooms.

I owe more than I can say to my parents, whose many years of support and driving me to

music lessons undoubtedly went a longer way than they intended; and to my daughters, Audrey,

Julia, and Margaret, for keeping all things in life in proper perspective for me.

Finally, I am pleased to report that the final paragraph of an acknowledgements section of

a thesis, devoted to one’s spouse in many that I have read, is far more—certainly in my case—

than a perfunctory, rhetorical gesture. Above all I owe my gratitude to my wife Tess, without

whose love and unwavering support this would have been far from possible.
 iv

TABLE OF CONTENTS

Introduction ..................................................................................................................................... 1
Chapter One: Promiscuity ............................................................................................................... 9
Chapter Two: Fetishes .................................................................................................................. 40
Chapter Three: Irrational Functionality ........................................................................................ 81
Conclusion .................................................................................................................................. 127
Bibliography ............................................................................................................................... 129
 1

Introduction

Born in London in 1971 to a linguist and a historian of surrealist art, Thomas Adès is a

consummate musician. He studied piano with Paul Berkowitz at the Guildhall School of Music

in London and was runner-up for the BBC Young Musician of the Year in 1989. He has recorded

albums of others’ music as both soloist and chamber musician and has published about Janáček’s

piano music. Additionally, he was a gifted percussionist, performing on marimba and in

orchestras both at Guildhall and at King’s College Cambridge after he had shifted the primary

focus of his studies toward composition.

Not only does Adès also perform and record his own works at the keyboard, he does so as

conductor as well, leading top orchestras in premieres, performances, or recordings of all of his

works for large forces (in addition to works from the standard and contemporary repertoire by

other composers). Thus, when he, as composer, puts notes onto a page, his relationship to those

notes is multifaceted to a degree scarcely paralleled by other living practitioners in the Western

classical tradition. As conductor, his relationship with his notes in interpreting and performing

them is augmented by his embodied relationship with them as a performer. As composer, his

artistic and creative relationship with his notes is deepened by his intellectual and reflective

relationship with them.

Perhaps in part because of his uniquely multifaceted musicianship, Adès writes music

that is at once scintillating and challenging—quickly attractive, yet possessing a depth and

richness which continually repays repeated listening. Alex Ross has described Adès as a

composer who “traffic[s]” neither “in the antagonistic complexities of modernism…[n]or in the

pandering simplicities of postmodernism…His music is at once complex and direct.”1 Even so

1
Alex Ross, “Roll Over Beethoven: Thomas Adès,” New Yorker, 26 October 1998, 112.
 2

implacable a critic as Richard Taruskin has praised Adès’s “phenomenal success at toeing the

line…between the arcane and the banal. The music never loses touch,” he asserts,

with its base in the common listening experience of real audiences, so that it is
genuinely evocative…Better yet, [Adès’s] music makes more than a vivid first
impression. Subtly fashioned and highly detailed, it haunts the memory and
invites rehearings that often yield new and intriguing finds.2

Doubtless these qualities of his music—complexity tempered by immediacy, or freshness

seasoned with familiarity—helped to spark his meteoric rise to fame as a young

composer and secured him in his position of continued prominence in the contemporary

classical music scene. These qualities also make the music of Thomas Adès fertile ground

for analysis.

While many are understandably reticent to identify an overarching aim of the

project of music analysis, David Lewin offered four possible motivations. First, one’s

purpose in analysis might be theoretical. The products of analysis might in such a case

serve as evidence to support a postulated general characteristic of a given body of

literature. One’s purpose in analysis might be historical. Analyses might serve to

demonstrate how composers’ styles change over time. The analyst’s aim might also be to

acquire compositional craft, picking apart a specific work in an attempt to discover what

makes it tick, so to speak, and thus gain the ability to make one’s own pieces tick.

Finally, the analyst might find the project useful as an aid to prepare for a performance.

But whatever the analyst’s motivation, Lewin continues, the

goal is simply to hear the piece better, both in detail and in the large. The task of
the analyst is ‘merely’ to point out things in the piece that strike him as
characteristic and important (where by ‘things’ one includes complex
relationships), and to arrange his presentation in a way that will stimulate the
musical imagination of his audience. Hence the only complete, faithful, and

2
Richard Taruskin, “A Surrealist Composer Comes to the Rescue of Modernism,” New York Times, 5 December
1999.
 3

properly presented analyses of a piece are (various) legitimate performances of it.

However, for various applications, verbal analyses, while inevitably partial and
distorted, are very useful.3

It is the author’s present aim, in however necessarily incomplete a way, to stimulate the reader’s

musical imagination toward Adès’s first opera, Powder Her Face. Perhaps along the way one

can sharpen one’s compositional craft or begin to see more clearly how Adès has developed his

style and technique over the course of his career. At any rate, the present analysis will succeed if

by the end the reader can hear the work better.

While the body of literature devoted to analysis of Adès’s music is growing4, relatively

few scholars have focused their energy on his operatic works.5 Yet there are a number of reasons

3
David Lewin, “Behind the Beyond: A Response to Edward T. Cone,” Perspectives of New Music 7, no. 2 (Spring-
Summer 1969): 63.
4
See for instance Arnold Whitall, “James Dillon, Thomas Adès, and the Pleasures of Allusion,” in Aspects of British
Music of the 1990s, ed. Peter O’Hagan, (Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2003): 3-28; Christopher Fox, “Tempestuous
Times: The Recent Music of Thomas Adès,” The Musical Times 145 (2004): 41-56; Aaron Travers, “Interval
Cycles, Their Permutations and Generative Properties in Thomas Adès’ Asyla,” Ph.D. thesis, University of
Rochester, 2005; John Roeder, “Co-operating Continuities in the Music of Thomas Adès,” Music Analysis 25, no. 1-
2 (2006): 121-54; Kenneth Gloag, “Thomas Adès and the ‘Narrative Agendas’ of ‘Absolute Music,’” in
Dichotonies: Gender and Music, ed. Beate Neumeier (Heidelberg: Universitätsverlag, 2009), 97-110; John Roeder,
“A Transformational Space Structuring the Counterpoint in Adès’s Auf dem Wasser zu singen,” Music Theory
Online 15, no. 1 (March 2009), http://www.mtosmt.org/issues/mto.09.15.1/mto.09.15.1.roeder_space.html; Huw
Belling, “Thinking Irrational: Thomas Adès and New Rhythms,” MM thesis, Royal College of Music, 2010; Stella
Ioanna Markou, “A Poetic Synthesis and Theoretical Analysis of Thomas Adès’s Five Eliot Landscapes,” DMA
diss., University of Arizona, 2010; Emma Gallon, “Narrativities in the Music of Thomas Adès,” Ph.D. thesis,
Lancaster University, 2011; Emma Gallon, “Narrativities in the Music of Thomas Adès: The Piano Quintet and
Brahms,” ed. Michael L. Klein and Nicholas W. Reyland (Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 2012): 216-33;
Shin Young Aum, “Analysis of America: A Prophecy by Thomas Adès,” DMA thesis, University of Illinois, 2012;
Dominic Wells, “Plural Styles, Personal Style: The Music of Thomas Adès,” Tempo 66, no. 260 (2012): 2-14;
Jacqueline Susan Greenwood, “Selected Vocal and Chamber Works of Thomas Adès: Stylistic and Contextual
Issues,” Ph.D. thesis, Kingston University, 2013; Peter Van Zandt Lane, “Narrativity and Cyclicity in Thomas
Adès’s Violin Concerto,” Ph.D. diss., Brandeis University, 2013; Daniel Fox, “Multiple Time-Scales in Adès’s
Rings,” Perspectives of New Music 52 (Winter 2014): 28-56; Jennifer A. Maxwell, “Tracing a Lineage of the
Mazurka Genre: Influences of Chopin and Szymanowski on Thomas Adès’ Mazurkas for Piano, op. 27,” DMA
diss., Boston University, 2014; Philip Stoecker, “Aligned Cycles in Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet,” Music Analysis
33, no. 1 (2014): 32-64; Christopher LaRosa, “Thomas Adès’ Asyla,” in “Formal Synthesis in Post-Tonal Music,”
MM thesis, Boston University, 2015; Philip Stoecker, “Harmony, Voice Leading, and Cyclic Structures in Thomas
Adès’s Chori,” Music Theory and Analysis 2, no. 2 (October 2015): 204-18; Jairo Duarte-López, “Structural
Continuities in the First Movement of Thomas Adès’s Violin Concerto (Concentric Paths) Op. 23,” Ph.D. diss.,
University of Rochester, 2016; Philip Stoecker, “Aligned Cycle Spaces,” Journal of Music Theory 60, no. 2,
(October 2016): 181-212; Edward Venn, Thomas Adès: Asyla (New York: Routledge, 2017)
5
For a notable exception, see David Mettens, “Hexatonic and Octatonic Interval Cycles in Adès’s The Tempest”
(paper presentation, Fostering New Music and Its Audiences: The Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition 30th
Anniversary Conference, Louisville, KY, 7 March 2015); Gallon, “Narrativities,” offers a narratological perspective
 4

to engage analytically with Powder Her Face specifically. During Adès’s appointment as

composer in residence with the Hallé Orchestra from 1993-1995, the Almeida Ensemble

commissioned him to write the opera, and it was with this work that Adès began to garner an

international reputation. It marks Adès’s first foray into the operatic genre, to which he has

added The Tempest (2003) and The Exterminating Angel (2015). Thus, Powder Her Face not

only offers the analyst the most extensive view into Adès’s budding musical language in his

early works, but also represents a genre in which Adès has a perennial and continuing interest.

Analyzing opera is a daunting task, since doing so, as Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker

have suggested, “should mean not only ‘analyzing music’ but simultaneously engaging, with

equal sophistication, the poetry and the drama.”6 Herein lies perhaps the chief point of interest in

analyzing Powder Her Face. While various scholars have identified Adès’s primary means of

generating pitch material, there remains a void in commentary on how his distinct musical voice

interacts with the unique demands of articulating a coherent musico-dramatic art form. After a

brief synopsis of the plot, the present study adopts a three-pronged approach to accounting for

Adès’s pitch structures in Powder Her Face. The first chapter is devoted to analyzing the role of

musical borrowing—quotation, allusion, and the like. The second chapter summarizes Adès’s

signature expanding interval techniques before discussing various elaborations on them and how

they allow for the integration of borrowed material. The final chapter is devoted to a discussion

of how Adès’s core techniques, among other aspects of his musical voice, enable certain

on Powder Her Face and The Tempest and Nicholas Stevens’s forthcoming dissertation “Lulu’s Daughters:
Portraying the Anti-Heroine in Contemporary Opera, 1993-2013,” Case Western Reserve University, 2017, offers an
additional musicological perspective on Powder Her Face; excerpts from Powder Her Face are analyzed within a
broader context in Roeder, “Co-operating Continuities” and Venn, Asyla.
6
Carolyn Abbate and Roger Parker, “On Analyzing Opera,” in Analyzing Opera, ed. by Carolyn Abbate and Roger
Parker, Berkeley: University of California Press, 1989, 4.
 5

intersections between his own musical thinking and modes of thinking commonly associated

with tonality.

Powder Her Face: A Brief Background and Synopsis

When Thomas Adès asked novelist Philip Hensher for a libretto “about someone

encrusted with trappings, and yet disappearing inside,”7 Hensher suggested modelling a story on

the scandalous life of Margaret Whigham, Duchess of Argyll, whose divorce brought the

proceedings of the British courtroom of the 1960s to new heights of sexually graphic detail.

Inspired by Whigham’s memoir, Forget Not (1975), and Charles Castle’s then recent biography

of her, The Duchess Who Dared (1994), Hensher crafted a series of flashbacks portraying the

rise and fall of the aristocrat. Thus, while the opera was calculated to be uniquely scandalous, the

protagonist fits a well-established archetype. Adès has noted that “the woman who has been

abandoned is the classic operatic protagonist”8 and Hensher is even more specific. Citing as an

influence Wayne Koestenbaum, a cultural critic and scholar whose work has dealt significantly

with queerness and sexuality in opera9, Hensher describes thinking of opera—both generally and

of Powder Her Face specifically—as “both a way of giving women a voice and a sexual

statement, but only as a means of ultimately silencing them.”10

Synopsis:

Act 1

Scene 1, set in 1990

The curtain rises on a Maid and an Electrician—staffers at a luxurious hotel—impersonating the

Duchess, a longtime tenant, in a harshly ridiculing manner. The Duchess enters the room,

7
Richard Morrison, “Prodigy with a Notable Talent for Sounding Off,” The Times, 9 June 1995.
8
Ibid.
9
See for instance Wayne Koestenbaum, The Queen’s Throat: Opera, Homosexuality, and the Mystery of Desire,
New York: Poseidon Press, 1993.
10
Philip Hensher, “Sex, Powder and Polaroids,” The Guardian, 29 May 2008, 23.
 6

spoiling their fun and making no effort to conceal her condescension. As the Duchess changes

from her soiled coat, she enters a reverie, recalling her sumptuous past. As the curtain falls,

footsteps approach the room, which Her Grace mistakenly believes to be the Duke coming to

reunite with her.

Scene 2, set in 1934

The Duchess recalls an evening in the living room of a manor shared with her Confidante and a

Lounge Lizard—roles filled by the performers of the maid and electrician parts.11 Recently

separated from her first husband, she anxiously awaits meeting the Duke whom she aspires to

marry while her two companions sing their reservations about the potential match. At one point

over the course of the casual evening, the Lounge Lizard sings along with a popular love song on

a gramophone record in praise of the Duchess. The Duke enters the room as the scene ends.

Scene 3, set in 1936

During a pantomime of the Duchess’s marriage to the Duke, a Waitress—again performed by the

singer who plays the maid from the first scene—describes with envy and irony the luxurious life

of high society.

Scene 4, set in 1953

In a hotel room, during the coronation festivities for the Queen, the Duchess requests room

service and reveals her nymphomania by performing her infamous sexual act on the Waiter (the

same performer as the Electrician and Lounge Lizard).

Scene 5, also set in 1953

The Duke, meanwhile, exhibits no less marital fidelity in his room with his Mistress (again, the

11
Berg’s Lulu—a shared love of both Adès and Hensher—provides precedent for filling multiple operatic roles with
the same performer. The performer of the Hotel Manager in Britten’s Death in Venice also fills multiple roles. These
two works offer striking parallels with Powder Her Face: a sex-crazed woman brought low on the one hand, and a
symbol of fate bound up in the person of a hotel manager on the other.
 7

same performer as the Maid and Confidante). The mistress lets slip that the Duchess is

promiscuous and unfaithful, sending the Duke into an outrage. She tells him where to find a

photo among the Duchess’s things to corroborate her claim.

Act 2

Scene 6, set in 1955

The curtain rises on the Maid and Electrician from the first scene, now playing the roles of two

Rubberneckers outside of a courtroom. Their gossip is cut off by the entrance of the Duchess and

the Judge whose lengthy aria pronounces a diatribe of a judgment against the Duchess, who

reacts with a stoic attempt to retain her dignity.

Scene 7, set in 1970

A society Journalist (the same performer as the Maid) interviews the Duchess, who decries the

decadence of modern society and the collapse of the haute culture she knew in her prime. The

interview is interrupted several times by the Delivery Boy (same performer as the Electrician)

who brings at first outlandishly fancy hats and then a lengthy set of unpaid bills. The Duchess

tallies the amounts aloud as the final interlude transitions into the closing scene.

Scene 8, set in 1990

The source of the approaching footsteps at the end of the first scene turns out to be the Hotel

Manager—played by the same performer as the Duke and the Judge. As the final scene opens, he

enters the Duchess’s room to announce her imminent eviction. As he leaves the room, the

Duchess mournfully reflects on the servants she has had over the course of her life and her

depleted wealth and youth. When the Hotel Manager returns to inform the Duchess that her car

has arrived to take her away, the Duchess attempts to escape her fate by seducing him. The Hotel

Manager is unmoved, and the Maid and Electrician flirtingly clean the room after its occupant
 8

leaves.
 9

Chapter One: Promiscuity

I think I was—I couldn’t help myself—being happily

promiscuous with pre-existing music. I was that
age. It’s completely pretentious to imagine that you
can do without other music, ‘found’ things perhaps,
especially at the age of twenty or twenty-five…But
that mostly happens in Powder Her Face, it doesn’t
happen in many other of my pieces.1

Notwithstanding his insistence to the contrary in this chapter’s epigraph, borrowing has

been a frequent component of Thomas Adès’s poetics. His piano piece Darknesse Visible (1992)

is based entirely on a John Dowland lute song; he has transcribed for chamber ensemble the

British ska band Madness’s 1982 song Cardiac Arrest (1995), as well as numerous excerpts from

François Couperin’s Pièces de clavecin in Les barricades mysterieuses (1994) and Three Studies

from Couperin (2006) for chamber orchestra; his string quartet Arcadiana (1994) includes

quotations from Ravel’s Rapsodie espagnole and Mozart’s Die Zauberflöte in addition to its

more oblique allusions; in his piece Brahms (2001), Adès borrows, unsurprisingly, from the

eponymous German composer’s Symphony No. 4, Fantasien, op. 116, Variations on a Theme of

Paganini, and Piano Concerto No. 1; the final bars of …but all shall be well (1993) contains a

quotation of Liszt’s Romance oubliée, and in his later orchestral work America - A Prophecy

(1999) Adès includes a quotation from Mateo Flecha’s La Guerra.2 To be fair, Adès’s musical

borrowing is certainly quantifiably more extensive in Powder Her Face than in any other of his

works; when compared with the rest of his output from the 1990s, however, this fact may be in

1
Thomas Adès and Tom Service, Thomas Adès: Full of Noises: Conversations with Tom Service (New York: Farrar,
Straus and Giroux, 2012), 26-7.
2
This list of borrowings is itself largely borrowed from Hélène Cao, Thomas Adès Le Voyageur: Devenir
compositeur. Être musicien (Paris: Ed. MF, 2007), 24-5.
 10

large part due to the opera’s far greater length. With more bars in the score come greater

opportunities for musical kleptomania.

At any rate, with the exception of the duchess’s scandalous aria from Scene 4, Adès’s

self-confessed “promiscu[ity] with pre-existing music” is the most widely discussed aspect of the

opera. Following David Lewin’s assertion that “the task of the analyst is…to point out things in

the piece that strike him as characteristic and important,”3 the responsible analyst of Powder Her

Face will thus not get very far without accounting for Adès’s uses of existing music throughout

and explicating in some detail how the borrowed material contributes to the meaning of the

work. As such, that is the starting point of the following analytical excursions.

A Brief Account of Musical Borrowing in the 20th-Century

As J. Peter Burkholder is quick to point out, terms like “quotation” are too narrow to

account for the myriad ways in which composers have made use of existing music: “there are

many ways of using existing music, and it is necessary to differentiate among them.”4 Even a

moment’s reflection on the brief overview just above of Adès’s use of others’ music in his own

compositions confirms this. “Borrowing,” as used already and hereafter, is perhaps a more apt

term, encompassing not only quotation, but also allusion, imitation, paraphrase, transcription,

parody, and a host of other means of using existing music that are more nuanced than simply

“quotation.” In addition to using terms of a more expansive scope, Burkholder also encourages

the scholar to consider a more expansive historical vista when working on issues related to

musical borrowing, for, he posits,

there is much to be gained by approaching the uses of existing music as a field

that crosses periods and traditions…Knowledge of the ways existing music has
been reworked in other times and by other composers can clarify the historical

3
Lewin, “Behind the Beyond,” 63.
4
J. Peter Burkholder, “The Uses of Existing Music: Musical Borrowing as a Field,” Notes 50, no. 3 (March 1994):
855.
 11

place of those we focus on, helping us recognize what is unusual or innovative in

their approach to the uses of existing music and, just as important, what has long-
established precedent.5

It is thus helpful to have some immediate historical context for Adès’s practice of musical

borrowing.

Michael Hicks argues that the mid 20th-century saw “a genuine ars nova of quotation

technique.”6 Works indicative of what he dubbed this “New Quotation” phenomenon—a sizable

catalog including works such as Ussachevsky’s Wireless Fantasy, Kagel’s Ludwig van, and

Crumb’s Ancient Voices of Children—were characterized by stark juxtapositioning of tonal

quotations with new, atonal musical material and by the disproportionate reliance on warhorses

of the Western classical canon. Hicks’s critique of then contemporary scholars was twofold: on

the one hand, some accounted for the “New Quotation” phenomenon by considering it as the

culmination of an unbroken, evolutionary line of tradition, passing from composers of L’homme

armé masses through Mozart and Ives to the present day. On the other hand, some commentators

had the “habit of casting all contemporary musical borrowing into one aesthetic basket,”7

ignoring the wide spectrum of intentions behind and functions of borrowed material in the

relevant musical works.

If it is fallacious to lump all uses of musical borrowing together, irrespective of historical

or stylistic context, it is similarly fallacious to lump Adès together with his midcentury

predecessors. First of all, as will be shown shortly, Adès draws from styles and genres outside of

the Western canon, and the sources that he draws upon from within it could not unilaterally be

labeled warhorses. Second of all, his musical language, as will be demonstrated, is not so at odds

with the building blocks of tonality. Juxtaposition of borrowed material cannot therefore be as

5
Ibid. 851.
6
Michael Hicks, “The New Quotation: Its Origins and Functions,” DMA thesis, University of Illinois, 1984, 8.
7
Ibid. 10.
 12

stark since it integrates more naturally into the new musical fabric. Jarring contrasts of this sort

are not on the composer’s aesthetic agenda. When the borrowed material is at odds with Adès’s

musical fabric, it is often distorted so as to be integrated more cleanly. Finally, the paradigms

which undergirded the intentions of many mid-century composers are notably different than

Adès’s.

This last point merits further comment. For composers among the mid-century avant-

garde, acceptance of borrowing from tonal works as permissible compositional practice was,

perhaps unsurprisingly, often accompanied by lengthy philosophical justification. In his writings,

Bernd Alois Zimmermann repeatedly affirms his acceptance of the “Kugelgestalt der Zeit”—the

spherical shape of time—an idea borrowed from the medieval scholastic tradition, in order to

justify his radical admixture of his own serial musical textures with quotations from the common

practice canon.8 The issue was particularly thorny for George Rochberg, for whom the 20th-

century avant-garde “not only superseded everything that came before it but literally declared it

null and void.” He continues: “Obviously, I rejected this view—though not without great

discomfort and difficulty, because I had acquired it, along with a number of similar notions, as a

seemingly inevitable condition of the twentieth-century culture in which I had grown up.”9 A

little metaphysical gymnastics eased the acceptance of his former rejection. He adopted a view of

radial, rather than linear time, musing on one occasion: “I stand in a circle of time, not on a line.

360 degrees of past, present, future. All around me. I can look in any direction I want to. Bella

8
See Carl Dahlhaus, “‘Kugelgestalt der Zeit’: zu Bernd Alois Zimmermanns Musikphilosophie,” Musik und Bildung
10 (1978), 633-6.
9
George Rochberg, “On the Third String Quartet,” in The Aesthetics of Survival: A Composer’s View of Twentieth-
Century Music, (Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1984), 240, italics added.
 13

vista.”10 He even buttressed his temporal theory with the relevant postulates from theoretical

physics:

If the theory of curved space is correct, the irreversible arrow of time, like
Halley’s comet, must at some point in its trajectory retrace positions in space it
has already passed through many times before. The idea of cosmic return, eternal
recurrence, so deeply embedded in Oriental thought, may, in the end, find a form
of potential proof in this most recent hypothesis of Western astrophysics. And
then King Solomon’s doleful remark, ‘There is nothing new under the sun,’ will
take on implications surely disheartening to those who believe that only by
changing constantly, only by progressing to the ‘new,’ can human culture save
itself from atrophy and stagnation.11

Thus, for certain mid-century composers—and many of Hicks’s practitioners of the “New

Quotation”—borrowing from tonal works of the past required paradigmatic shifts of seismic

proportion.

However, this tectonic unrest in certain corners of the aesthetic landscape of previous

generations is foreign to Adès’s upbringing. Though the ground may still be shaky, the source of

any unsettledness is of an entirely different nature. “When Thomas Adès alludes,” Arnold

Whittall writes,

he is not…surrendering himself to something he sees as more valuable, more

venerable, than his own creativity…he makes these references, these allusions,
without any hang-ups, because he finds it pleasurable to do so; and (I presume) he
hopes that listeners will share that pleasure. Anxiety, fear, guilt or even reverence,
have nothing to do with it.12

This is of course not to say that vestiges of old modernist credos did not rear their heads in the

course of Adès’s musical training. As the composer himself relates:

When I was younger, in some institutions where I was taught it was not what you
liked and what you didn’t like, but what you should like and shouldn’t like. I, of
course, completely reject that…It’s not just a pluralistic world that we live in, it’s
also one where times and eras no longer have to be put in a particular order. In a
sense, we live closer to the extreme past than we ever have before because we can

10
Rochberg, “No Center,” in Aesthetics of Survival, 158.
11
Rochberg, “The Avant-Garde and the Aesthetics of Survival,” in Aesthetics of Survival, 216.
12
Whittall, “Pleasures of Allusion,” 5-6.
 14

hear music from any period at the click of a switch or press of a mouse. These
things, the French Baroque or Gregorian chant or Victorian parlour music or
whatever it might be, are actually not the past but our environment. Anything you
want can be your environment, so with that in mind, one can, you know, use any
model and still be in the present.13

Still, Adès’s rejection of received orthodoxy need not have been so radical and dramatic as

Rochberg’s, for instance. Since “British modernism was never as dogmatic as the European

variety,” Alex Ross writes, when “composers around the world attempted some return to the old

tonal language [in the seventies and eighties] British composers didn’t have so far to go.”14 For

instance, Alexander Goehr, one of Adès’s teachers at Cambridge, could “weave common chords

into [his] scores”15 while avoiding an overt stylistic drift into minimalism or neo-romanticism.

For Robin Holloway, another former teacher at Cambridge, borrowing “has become such a

compulsive game…that it is often hard to say where ‘he’ stops or where ‘others’ begin.”16

Adès’s pluralistic musical upbringing was far from that of “the ‘tabula rasa/year zero’ approach

of…the high-modernists.”17 His musical borrowing is thus no reactionary aesthetic assertion, but

rather, as he himself suggests in this chapter’s epigraph, youthful revelry.

Borrowing and Thomas Adès’s Poetics

This difference aside, Adès’s use of existing music does overlap in many respects with

that of other 20th-century composers. Scholars have identified various musical evocations

through which borrowing, as a poetic component, becomes a natural option available to the

composer. Numerous composers of the last century, conscious of their musical borrowing—

among them Rochberg, Zimmermann, Lukas Foss, and Luciano Berio—have referred to that

13
Thomas Adès, interview by Andrew Ford, The Music Show, ABC Radio National, 9 October 2010.
14
Ross, “Roll Over Beethoven,” 124.
15
Ibid.
16
John Fallas, “Into the New Century: Recent Holloway and the Poetics of Quotation,” Tempo 61 no. 242 (October
2007): 2.
17
Wells, “Plural Styles,” 6.
 15

aspect of their compositional practice as an evocation of a dream-state.18 Christopher Ballantine

has noted the parallel between musical borrowing and Jungian dream-symbol theory.19 In both

the process of musical borrowing (perhaps more specifically, quotation) and that of dreaming:

1) A fragmented memory of the past is chosen (however consciously or subconsciously);

2) A dialectic emerges between the distorted fragment, its semantic associations, and its new

context;

3) The new context subsumes the fragment and its associations, becoming the lens through

which the fragment is to be understood.

Thus “some order of correspondence [exists] between a dream and a composition which quotes

old materials.”20 In Powder Her Face, librettist Philip Hensher builds the evocation of dream-

state right into the nature of the work. The first and last scenes are connected musically and

dramatically. Both scenes take place in the year 1990, while the intervening scenes progress

chronologically through the preceding 56 years. The interlude between Scenes 1 and 2 consists

largely of ascending chromatic lines and the interlude between Scenes 7 and 8 consists largely of

descending chromatic lines.21 This music functions then as an indication of a transition not just

from one dramatic scene to another, but from the time portrayed on the stage into and out of a

flashback sequence. There is good reason to experience this sequence not as an objective

portrayal of past events but as memories—fragmented and distorted to be sure, and thus in line

with Ballantine’s description of the dream-state. The audience is not permitted the vantage point

of an omniscient observer external to the action, but rather one that is filtered through the lens of

18
See Hicks, “The New Quotation,” 48-9.
19
Christopher Ballantine, “Charles Ives and the Meaning of Quotation in Music,” Musical Quarterly 65 (April
1979): 167-84.
20
Ibid. 170.
21
In Britten’s The Turn of the Screw, the tonal scheme of the variations on the twelve-note “Screw” theme, which
constitute the opera’s interludes, follows a similar ascent-descent pattern as the drama straddles an ambiguous
border between the physical and the supernatural.
 16

the Duchess’s recollections. Adès’s own description of the song in Scene 2 further corroborates

the suggestion of a dream-state in the opera. He writes:

I wrote a whole song of my own in an absolutely straight-as-I-could-manage Jack

Buchanan style. Some people would say, ‘Why isn’t it more satirical?’ Because
it’s a gramophone record. Why would it be satirical, particularly? It’s supposed to
be a Twenties song, a Jack Buchanan song. A really specific thing. But it’s as in a
dream, a dream Jack Buchanan song…But there is an illusion on the surface that
it is the real thing.22

If Adès intends to evoke a sort of dream-state with Powder Her Face then it is unsurprising to

observe him doing so in part by borrowing and distorting musical fragments from the collective

unconscious of the audience.

A second evocation conducive to musical borrowing is that of madness. David Metzer

cites Berio’s Recital I (for Cathy), Schoenberg’s Erwartung, and Peter Maxwell Davies’s Eight

Songs for a Mad King, among others, as evident cases in which the evocation of madness

“provides a realm in which to indulge” the composers’ “fascination with the ways of using

borrowed materials—how they can be transformed and transplanted into new surroundings.”23

These works assert, writes Metzer, that “excessive artistic and historical reminiscences are not

‘normal.’ More than that, they are debilitating. Only the mad obsessively return to memories of

operas and poems written centuries ago, fragments of which cram their thoughts and speech.”24

In Scene 4 of Powder Her Face, as the prelude to the sexual act is well underway, the Duchess

sings “I am deranged. I must be deranged.”25 Her abnormal nymphomania—evidence of her

derangement—is on full display in Scene 4 but is also suggested in the pantomime of Scene 326

and the Duke discovers further photographic proof of it in Scene 5. Additionally, the Duchess
22
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 153, emphasis added.
23
David Metzer, “Madness,” in Quotation and Cultural Meaning in Twentieth-Century Music, (New York:
Cambridge University Press, 2003), 75.
24
Ibid.
25
Philip Hensher, Powder Her Face, (London: Faber, 1995), 21.
26
Ibid. 15-6; stage directions include portrayals of the Duchess kissing, embracing, and “on the bed...writhing
lewdly” with the priest who performed the marriage ceremony for her and the Duke.
 17

sings delusionally in the first scene about her perfume as the source of her immortality (“my

glorious smell, my scent...which outlasts fashion and outlasts time, and lasts forever...Everything

will be the same forever now; Will last forever; from now there is no future. From now there is

nothing...there is nothing left except me...And the Duke, my Duke, my better angel.”)27 She

mentions the Duke, from whom she had been separated for over 30 years at that point. In the

final scene, and in the midst of a mixture of self-reflection and fragmentary thoughts and

memories, the Duchess’s horrible fit is triggered by her realization that her treasured perfume

bottle is empty. Upset, she angrily smashes the bottle by throwing it against the wall as she sings

“Broken. It’s broken. Gone. It’s the last thing I had. And there is nothing left of me.”28 Her

obsessions and delusions show her mental instability, which is matched by the inability of the

musical fabric to maintain a stable source in one style, one method, or one composer’s mind.

A third evocation, that of nostalgia—a longing to recover a past era of innocence,

coupled perhaps with quixotic endeavors to do so—has served on occasion as the impulse behind

the borrowing practice of Charles Ives, George Crumb, and other composers of the 20th-

century.29 Nostalgia has a sure place in Powder Her Face as well. In Scene 2, which takes place

in 1934, the Duchess comments to her confidante on the tune playing from the gramophone:

“They wrote that song for me, you know. They wrote so many songs for me…Sometimes I

wonder whether anyone will ever write songs for me, or love me ever again.”30 She repeats the

line, 56 years later in the final scene. It is a line that the electrician uses in his mocking

impersonation of the Duchess in Scene 1, suggesting that the Duchess expresses the sentiment

frequently. While most of the other allusions and quotations in the opera are fleeting and veiled,

27
Ibid. 8-9.
28
Ibid. 41.
29
See Hicks, “The New Quotation,” 38-41, and Metzer, “Childhood and Nostalgia in the Works of Charles Ives,” in
Quotation and Cultural Meaning.
30
Hensher, Powder Her Face, 13-4.
 18

Adès’s mimicry of a crooner’s tune is a notable exception. The only time Adès employs a key

signature in the score is for the 135 measures of the song in Scene 2. The clear, extended focus

on a relatively undistorted musical borrowing preserves the sense of temporal distance between

the sound world of the borrowed material and that of the host work.31 This musical device allows

the composer to evoke a sense of nostalgia which Adès does in tandem with the Duchess’s

wistful longing for the bygone era when her happiness and charms were at their zenith.

One last connection between Adès’s borrowing practice and that of composers of the

1950s and 1960s finds a rather unusual expression in the score of Powder Her Face.

Mechanically reproducible music—whether via broadcast or recorded media—indelibly altered

public perception of time and of music. On this point, Michael Hicks identifies four primary

ways in which this distortion of perception occurs. First, juxtaposition and superimposition of

sounds once disparate become commonplace (think of standing at an intersection and hearing

simultaneously or in quick succession music from a car radio, from outdoor speakers on the patio

of a restaurant, and from a pedestrian’s blaring headphones). Second, it distorts the perception of

the flow of musical time (think of pausing a recording, having it interrupted by an online

streaming service for an advertisement, or flipping a gramophone disc midway through a

movement). This fragments the way in which pieces of music were experienced or learned

aurally. Third, material imperfections in the media add additional distortion to the aural

experience (think of static on a radio or scratches on a CD). Last, recorded sound makes “high

art” music banal, allowing its passage into public consciousness in a similar manner to that of

folk tunes in times past.32 Thus the mass proliferation of sound recording technology underpins

the aesthetic premises of post-WWII musical borrowing praxis. It provides the necessary

31
On this point, see Hicks, “The New Quotation,” 38-41.
32
See Hicks, “Quotation in the Ecology of Modern Music,” in “The New Quotation,” 86-108.
 19

environment for borrowing to flourish without bewildering its listeners, but composers do not

generally make a conscious evocation of the sound recording technology itself in their musical

works. Exceptional as it is, doing so is actually a part of Thomas Adès’s musical thinking. He

states that

in Asyla, I wrote the score so that it would contain that sound that we live with all
the time now: that electrical hum or hiss, that sheen on the texture of life,
especially in a city, where it is inescapable but takes on so many different,
iridescent colours. I wrote that sound into the score, so that it would have this
electronic sheen. And in Powder Her Face, I wrote the sounds of the eras into
each scene—so that the pre-war scene would have a Palm Court acoustic, the
sound of teatime at the Waldorf, say, with the noise of spoons quietly hitting a
hundred teacups; and the Fifties scene the acoustic of a Paul Anka pop record, in a
diner, with those pizzicati and congas and the pop of the needle on the ‘45’ in a
jukebox; and the Seventies scene would have a transistor-radio noise, a tinny,
psychedelic iridescence.33

In this way, the flashback scenes of Powder Her Face are not just imperfect memories, but ones

that are filtered through the media of the audio technology of their respective eras. Adès

mentions the pizzicati and congas which characterize much of the accompaniment in Scene 4

which imitate “the pop of the needle on the ‘45.’” He suggests that the low accordion chords

which characterize much of the accompaniment in Scene 7 imitate “transistor-radio noise.” Other

examples abound including the fishing reels, the pencil scraping over the piano keys, and the

microphones rubbed across the snare drum membrane at the end of Scene 8, imitating the

“hideous white noise of [a] needle going round the rubber turntable.”34 Thus, mechanically

reproduced sound not only create the culture conducive to the extensive practice of borrowing

evident in Powder Her Face, but its characteristics also infiltrate the very orchestration of the

opera.

33
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 114.
34
Adès, Powder Her Face, full score, 533.
 20

Librettist Philip Hensher threads themes of dreaming, madness, and nostalgia throughout

the opera, and these themes, in tandem with the longtime ubiquity of recorded sound, create a

space uniquely conducive to musical borrowing for the composer. Not only does this creative

space mark similar territory between Adès and other musical borrowers of the 20th-century, but

the functional role that Adès’s borrowings play often falls into similar categories as those of

earlier practices as well.

Borrowing in Powder Her Face

Burkholder offers a useful typology35 for the analyst confronted with the task of

accounting for borrowing in a musical work or body of works. His classifications of analytical

questions for such situations fall roughly into three categories: what did the composer borrow?

why did the composer borrow? and how did the composer borrow? To satisfy much of the first

category of inquiry, Table 1 lists sources of borrowed material alongside their respective

locations in Powder Her Face in the order in which they appear. Michael Hicks rightly critiqued

early analysts of the celebrated third movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia for failing to address

anything beyond this first type of question.36 If the border between description and analysis is

fuzzy, one can hardly dispute that mere labelling of source material falls squarely on the side of

the former.

It merits noticing at the outset that most of the sources in Table 1 come from the late

nineteenth or early twentieth centuries and include texts, including two operas. Not only does

this undoubtedly reflect Adès’s personal tastes, it also suggests that in most cases, the text and

35
J. Peter Burkholder, “Borrowing,” in The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians ed. Stanley Sadie, 2nd
ed. Vol. 4 (New York: Macmillan, 2001), 5-41. See also Burkholder “The Uses of Existing Music” and J. Peter
Burkholder, All Made of Tunes: Charles Ives and the Uses of Musical Borrowing (New Haven, CT: Yale University
Press, 1995).
36
Michael Hicks, “Text, Music, and Meaning in the Third Movement of Luciano Berio’s Sinfonia,” Perspectives of
New Music 20 no. 1/2 (Autumn 1981-Summer 1982): 199-224.
 21

drama of the source are key in interpreting the meaning of the borrowed material in Powder Her

Face. Considering all of the sources together, it is also worth noting Adès’s eclecticism in

drawing at length from popular genres and styles in addition to the relatively recent additions to

the Western canon. Borrowings of the latter type tend to be passing quotations, while those of the

former are usually longer and are compounded by the suggestiveness of the accompanying

instrumental force (a group of fifteen players which includes four saxophones and an accordion,

occasionally called upon to imitate a bandoneon).37

As Burkholder points out in his typology, the function of borrowed material in a new

work can be examined in both purely musical terms and in extra-musical terms.38 The former is

characterized by a more technical concern for how the composer integrated the borrowed

material into the new musical work and will be dealt with in detail in the next chapter. The

latter—and the present concern—attempts to answer why the composer borrowed. Hicks’s

taxonomy39 is more detailed than Burkholder’s, but both outline how the associated text,

program, or character of the borrowed work sheds light on the same of the new, host work. This

type of musical borrowing—borrowing as symbolism—is common practice in the relevant

repertoire of the mid to late 20th-century and several of the quotations used by Adès fulfill a

similar function in Powder Her Face.

The most obvious instances of this are the allusions to Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress

in Scene 6 of Powder Her Face—most obvious if only because the stage directions for the

Duchess included in the score just after rehearsal FF state “Baba the Turk showing herself to her

audience”40 (see figure 1.1); other borrowings are not so explicitly cited. Here, on one level,

37
See, for instance, m. 14 of the overture.
38
Burkholder, “Borrowing,” 7.
39
Hicks, “The New Quotation as Symbolism,” in “The New Quotation,” 46-64.
40
Adès, Powder Her Face, full score, 399.
 22

Table 1.

Sources of borrowed material Location in Powder Her Face

Carlos Gardel, Cuesta abajo (tango), 1934, Overture, mm. 7-11; scene 1 mm. 114-134;
closing bars scene 5, “paper chase,” mm. 466-80

Stylistic allusion to Jack Buchanan/Cole Scene 2, mm. 167-303

Porter song

Liszt, Mephisto Polka, S. 217, closing Scene 4, mm. 291-303

measures

Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress, Act II, Scene 6, mm. 363-372, 462-470
scene 2, R. 146: Baba the Turk’s unveiling

Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress, Act III, Scene 6, mm. 17-100

scene 1, R. 52: Auction scene

Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress, Act III, Scene 6/Interlude 6, mm. 470-476
scene 1, R.157: End of auction

R. Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier, Act II, R. 25: Scene 7, mm. 127-9, 251-3
The presentation of the silver rose

Schubert, Der Tod und das Mädchen, D. 531, Scene 8, mm. 23-30
opening measures

Mussorgsky, Lullaby from Songs and Dances Scene 8, mm. 39-40, 52-3, 69-70
of Death, mm. 36-7; see also mm. 41-2, 46-7,
and 52-4

Adès uses the material borrowed from Stravinsky as a facile dramatic pun: the Duchess unveils

herself in the courtroom just as Baba the Turk unveiled herself on the steps of Tom Rakewell’s

London home—hence Adès’s use of the music which accompanied Baba’s unveiling. But the

connection between the two characters suggested by the Stravinsky allusion runs deeper. Both

women are famous for their looks. Of Baba, Tom Rakewell reveals: “they say
 23

Figure 1.1a. Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress, Act 2.ii, R. 146: Baba the Turk’s unveiling

Figure 1.1b. Baba the Turk’s music in Powder Her Face, Scene 6, mm. 362-372
 24

Figure 1.1b. (cont’d).

that brave warriors who never flinched at the sound of musketry have swooned after a mere

glimpse of her.” The crowd at the end of Act 2.iii pleads with her “Show thyself once, O grant us

our desire.” In the Duchess’s case, the journalist interviewing her in Scene 7 begins by telling

her: “You are known as a great reminder of a glorious society—…You are beautiful now as you

ever were.”41

The whole courtroom scene in Powder Her Face is framed by music from the auction

scene in The Rake’s Progress. The repeated sixteenth-notes in the brass which gradually rise in

pitch, the triple meter, and the vocal rhythms which occasionally cross the meter with duple

41
Hensher, 34.
 25

rhythms in Scene 6 of Powder Her Face refer to the same figure accompanying the auctioneer

Sellem’s arioso episodes in Stravinsky’s work (see figure 1.2). This borrowed material suggests

parallels between Baba’s marriage to Tom and that of the Duchess to the Duke. In the former

case, Tom married Baba at Nick’s encouragement in order to prove his freedom, and yet the

union proved a colossal mistake, jeopardizing his relationship with Anne Trulove. As such, Baba

ends up as an object of Tom’s scorn to be sold at an auction. So too, the Duchess and the Duke

presumably pursued their union in order to maintain wealth, class, and social standing.

Ultimately though, the marriage proved a horrible decision for the Duke as the proceedings of

the divorce case confirm, and, like Tom Rakewell, the Duke separates himself from his spouse.

A pair of rubberneckers in the courtroom quote both the words (“we’ve never been through…”)

and music from the ending of Stravinsky’s auction scene (see figure 1.3). To the crowd at the

auction in London, it is unprecedentedly bizarre and unsettling to have a man’s wife emerge

from the items for sale at such a gathering. Similarly for the rubberneckers in the courtroom, it is

astounding to witness such an extensive litany of scandalous charges raised against one in court

only to be met with unmoved indifference. To round off the referential parallel, at the end of her

monologue, the Duchess orders “summon my car” just as Baba had issued the command

“summon my carriage.”

Rather than drawing a connection between two specific operatic characters, a second use

of quotation as symbolism in Powder Her Face (and one used by other 20th-century composers)

connects a character with a more general archetype. The hotel manager’s aria in the final scene

begins while the clarinets, trumpet, and viola intone the opening of Schubert’s Der Tod und das

Mädchen (see figure 1.4). As these chords in their original context also introduce the

personification of death at the end of Schubert’s song, their meaning in Adès’s work is clear:
 26

Figure 1.2a. A rising trumpet line in triple meter embellished as repeated 16th-notes; Stravinsky, The Rake’s

Progress, Act 3.i, R. 53 to 54 (see also the whole of R. 52-62 and R. 69-79).

Figure 1.2b. The same figure in Powder Her Face, Scene 6, mm. 17-21 (see also mm. 17-35, 41-78, and 88-100).

Figure 1.3a. End of the auction scene; Stravinsky, The Rake’s Progress, Act 3.i, R. 157.
 27

Figure 1.3b. End of auction from The Rake’s Progress in Powder Her Face, Scene 6/Interlude 6, mm. 469-75.

the hotel manager symbolizes the doom of the tragicomic heroine. Her impending eviction for

failing to pay her hotel bill for months symbolizes her death. Like the bulk of the borrowed

material from The Rake’s Progress, the Schubert quotation is only present in the instrumental

accompaniment. The instruments in this way comment from the pit on the characters and the

drama on the stage. Death, while suggested by the orchestra, joins the action on the stage as the

hotel manager sings the ends of his phrases (“The time to vacate always comes. And now it has

come for you,” “And now you must go,” “And now it is here for you”42) to the tune of the refrain

42
Adès, Powder Her Face, vocal score, 220-24; while Adès resists comparisons with Benjamin Britten, the parallel
here between the Hotel Manager in Powder Her Face and the same character in Death in Venice is almost
 28

from the Lullaby of Modest Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death (see figure 1.5). In

Mussorgsky’s song, the singer, as in the Schubert song, plays the role of death when singing the

refrain, and thus the hotel manager’s metaphorical identity in Adès’s work becomes all the more

clear.

Figure 1.4b. Schubert, Der Tod und das Mädchen, D. 531, opening bars.

Figure 1.4b. Der Tod und das Mädchen in Powder Her Face, scene 8, mm. 23-6.

Figure 1.5a. Mussorgsky, Lullaby from Songs and Dances of Death, mm. 36-7 (see also mm. 41-2, 46-7, 52-4).

irresistible. The singer for both Hotel Managers play multiple roles in their respective operas, and at the end of
Death in Venice, the manager similarly informs the protagonist, Gustav von Aschenbach, that the time to depart
from the hotel has arrived.
 29

Figure 1.5b. Mussorgsky’s Lullaby in Powder Her Face, Scene 8, mm. 39-40, 52-3, and 68-70.
 30

For other borrowings functioning as symbols, either the borrowed material itself or its

meaning is not as easily recognizable. As Hélène Cao points out,43 in Scene 4, Adès borrows the

concluding harmonies from Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Polka: a half-diminished chord on F-sharp

followed after a grand pause by an F-natural an octave lower (see figure 1.6). The half-

diminished sonority, homophonous with Wagner’s famous symbol of passionate desire, also

accompanies the word “love” in the song from scene 2 (m. 295). In Adès’s work, one beholds

sexual desire decoupled from love and affection. For Adès, this situation called for a musical

backdrop of a different, if somewhat perverse, order. Liszt’s concluding F-natural breaks the

silence of the grand pause but neither resolves harmonic tension nor clarifies function. This bold

harmonic succession came in 1883, the year of Wagner’s death, and, as far as Adès is concerned,

is more audacious than anything Tristan’s author ever dreamed of. For these reasons, Adès

clearly indulges here in what he would later call an “anti-homage”44 to Wagner.

The material borrowed from the Mephisto Polka is probably less likely to be recognized

as such by an opera-going audience when compared with the material borrowed from Strauss’s

Der Rosenkavalier in Scene 7. Liszt’s piece is more obscure. Not only that, but Adès’s intention

in including the material is so opaque that it is unlikely to be appreciated were it not for Cao’s

interview with the composer. Yet if Strauss’s music is more recognizable, the intended meaning

of the quotation is similarly not abundantly clear. In Scene 7, a package deliverer interrupts a

journalist’s interview with the Duchess three times to deliver hat boxes and a fourth time to

deliver a letter on a silver tray. For both the delivery of the last package and that of the letter, the

orchestra accompanies the action with the presentation of the silver rose theme from Strauss’s

Der Rosenkavalier (see figure 1.7). While the Duchess simply tells the deliverer to set the first

43
Cao, Le Voyageur, 82; other observations summarized in this paragraph come from this source as well.
44
Tom Service, “Thomas Adès: Breaking the Silence,” BBC Music Magazine, July 2001, 29.
 31

Figure 1.6a. Liszt, Mephisto Polka, S. 217, closing bars.

Figure 1.6b. Liszt’s Mephisto Polka in Powder Her Face, scene 4, mm. 296-304.

two boxes down, she instructs him to bring her the third one, whereupon “she opens it and

produces an enormous little-girl Easter bonnet, piled high with chicks and daffodils and perhaps

even a stuffed rabbit. She puts it on, ties a ribbon under her chin.”45 When the Duchess opens the

envelope at the end of the scene, she begins reading aloud a running sum of what is presumably

her accrued hotel expenses. In Der Rosenkavalier, the chromatic and distantly related triads

impinge upon the stately and serene musical texture which otherwise characterizes the

presentation of the silver rose scene. They serve in part as an indication that love’s invisible,

45
Philip Hensher, Powder Her Face, (London: 1995), 36.
 32

Dionysian impulse has sparked a flame between Octavian and Sophie in the visible midst of the

Apollonian and rigid formality of the betrothal ritual. Yet in Powder Her Face, there is no love,

no formal ceremony, and no silver rose:46 it’s a mundane package delivery of a ridiculous hat. Is

it meant to be ironic? In Powder Her Face, the Duchess clearly confuses love with its physical

accompaniments, bereft of any emotional or spiritual bonds. Does the Strauss reference indicate

her lust for the delivery boy? Or vice versa? Or both? After all, Adès’s quotation of the music is

not exact—it is a perversion, just as the Duchess apparently only knows a perversion of true

love. Or perhaps the reference to Der Rosenkavalier is more general in its aim. Perhaps it refers

not to the presentation of the silver rose specifically, but to a broader theme from Strauss’s opera.

Several commentators have noted the parallel between the Marschallin and the Duchess—an

aging, former beauty having to come to grips with her waning physical charms.47 If the

Marschallin does so gracefully, the Duchess hardly does so at all, as her rhetoric in Scene 7, and

her advances on the hotel manager in the Scene 8 display.

Figure 1.7a. Strauss, Der Rosenkavalier, Presentation of the Silver Rose, Act II, R. 25

46
While it is not called for in the libretto and stage directions, Carlos Wagner’s production of Powder Her Face at
the Royal Opera House, Linbury Studio in 2008 and 2010 actually did include a silver rose on stage at this moment.
47
Strauss and Hofmannsthal maintained that the Marschallin was in her thirties. While in the 18th-c. setting of the
opera this would have been considered old, modern productions of Der Rosenkavalier still often exaggerate the age
gap between the Marschallin and 17-year old Octavian. See, for instance, Daniel Jacobsen, “Lotte Lehmann on Der
Rosenkavalier: Perspectives from Her Spoken and Painted Interpretations,” The Opera Quarterly, 8 no. 2 (1 July
1991): 48.
 33

Figure 1.7b. The Presentation of the Silver Rose theme in Powder Her Face, scene 7, mm. 124-31.

Certain other of Adès’s borrowings add another dimension to the composer’s professed

intention to write “the sounds of the eras into each scene.”48 Realizing this intention included in

some cases an evocation of the popular musical style of the decade in which the scene takes

place—an evocation achieved on occasion through musical borrowing. Recall the imitation Jack

Buchanan song from Scene 2 (see p. 15). Here, Adès does not borrow pitches and rhythms from

already existent music but merely the generic elements which combine to create the style of a

popular tune of the 1930s. 49 In doing so, he is obviously not referencing another specific work,

48
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 114.
49
To achieve a similar effect, Adès could have quoted an actual song. One version of Cole Porter’s 1934 song
“You’re the Top” makes reference to Margaret Sweeney (“You’re Mussolini / You’re Mrs. Sweeney”), and thus is
the actual basis for the song written about the Duchess to be in this scene.
 34

but instead using a style as a symbol in order to import some of its meaning from its original

context into the new opera. He does so simply to convince the listener that what is being sung on

the stage emanates from the gramophone record, just as the stage directions indicate. As such,

the composer admitted being “very pleased when [his] grandmother…said, ‘It was exactly like

the kind of music we used to have in those days at the Waldorf.’”50

Alternatively, Adès can also borrow for the same reason by actually quoting a specific

work rather than merely mimicking its style. The very opening bars of the overture quote a

portion of the refrain of Carlos Gardel’s 1934 tango Cuesta Abajo (see figure 1.8). For much of

the rest of the overture, the tune is dropped but the tango rhythm remains. While it is unlikely

that most opera-goers recognize the tune as such, they can hardly miss that the composer has in

this instance written the sound of the Duchess’s golden era into the score and cast an

appropriately sultry aura over the opening of the opera, presaging the events of the Duchess’s life

soon to be portrayed. On the other hand, quoting a specific albeit obscure piece, while effectively

suggesting the era for a staged event, can also have an unintended effect on those who,

unforeseen by the composer, do recognize the tune. In an interview with Tom Service, the

conversation turned toward Adès’s use of Gardel’s tango in Powder Her Face:

[TS:] So that tango is a quotation?

[TA:] It’s not just a quotation. Quotation is the wrong word. It’s robbery.
[TS:] Of a particular tune?
[TA:] Yes. It’s a Carlos Gardel tango. It’s a very famous tune in Argentina. My
Argentinian friend who came to the first performance of Powder Her Face said he
nearly fell off his chair when he heard it. It’s the most famous tune in Argentina. I
didn’t know. I only used the first few bars of it then it goes on to something else.51

50
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 153-4.
51
Ibid. 152-3, interlocutors’ initials added.
 35

Figure 1.8a. Descending interval motive in Cuesta Abajo

Figure 1.8b. Gardel’s tango in Powder Her Face, overture, mm. 7-13.
 36

Scholars of musical borrowing are typically interested in the meaning of the borrowed music in a

new work and its effect on listeners. Some have a similar interest in identifying, to the extent

possible, the composer’s intentionality in borrowing. In such a view, intentionality is a necessary

condition for an instance of allusion, quotation, or some other form of borrowing. The overture

of Powder Her Face presents an interesting instance where there is clear documentary evidence

of the composer consciously borrowing (or “robbing” as Adès insists) without any of the

common concomitant motivations for doing so. The composer apparently did not anticipate that

listeners would know the lyrics of the Gardel song, much less recognize the tune. Adès did not

therefore mean to refer to the text of the song, nor to the character portrayed by the singer, as

was the case with his use of the Schubert and Mussorgsky songs. For most listeners, the

borrowed material from Gardel’s tango at best points to nothing more than the general character

of tango music and its connotations. But Adès clearly could have achieved this same effect by

writing his own tango, much as he wrote his own Jack Buchanan song in Scene 2. Thus, Adès

not only borrowed from a wide range of sources, but he did so for a range of reasons to achieve a

range of musical ends.

The score is, as demonstrated, littered with musical borrowings of various stripes. This

tends to put the listener on alert, and perhaps overly anxious to search for and identify the source

of Adès’s multiple borrowings. The overture has led more than one commentator to declare

Astor Piazzola as one of the victims of pilfery in Powder Her Face. But that is not the case.

When in his conversations with Tom Service, the composer was pressed to identify musical

quotations and their locations in the score to Powder Her Face, he conceded that there are

“superficial things everywhere. Gewgaws…But a lot of the time they are fake quotations, red
 37

herrings, pour tromper l’ennemi.”52 If one ought to be wary, comme un ennemi, of

overzealousness in identifying borrowed material and articulating its function in the opera, one

cannot help but be overwhelmed by the breadth and scope in multiple dimensions of Adès’s use

of borrowed material.53 As the composer himself stated, there are “things everywhere” in the

score. As noted earlier, the sources run variously from popular genres to operatic staples. Some

borrowings are momentary and fleeting in Powder Her Face, others are extensive. Some are

genuine quotations, others are forgeries. In composing the opera, the composer’s promiscuity

with others’ music parallels that of the work’s principal characters.

This chapter concludes with a sidelong glance at answers to questions which fall under

the last category in Burkholder’s typology—those which are concerned with how the composer

integrates borrowed material into the fabric of the new work. For analyzing musical works which

quote other works, Hicks suggests the use of terminology to describe how faithfully a new work

replicates the older one. Per his proposal, quotations vary in their definition—high or low—

depending on how accurately and completely they copy their source.54 Higher definition

quotations alter very little, if anything, from their source in terms of harmony, counterpoint,

texture, rhythm, instrumentation, etc. Lower definition quotations replicate their originals less

faithfully (and thus at some point are prone to cross the boundary between quotation and a looser

form of borrowing such as reference, allusion, etc.) The definitions of Adès’s borrowings span a

range of qualities. The most faithful replications are those of the Liszt Mephisto Polka and the

52
Ibid. 153.
53
There is documentary evidence that suggests the presence of other quotations that I have not identified in the
present discussion. For instance, in summarizing his interview with the composer, Richard Morrison reports that
Adès mentioned Verdi’s La Traviata among the list of sources of borrowings in Powder Her Face (see Morrison,
“Prodigy.”) Emma Gallon even identifies bars 115-19 of Scene 4 as the location of the La Traviata borrowing (see
Gallon, “Narrativities,” 232.) The composer also remarked to Tom Service that the allusion to The Rake’s Progress
“continues into the next interlude, the graveyard scene, and then becomes Eugene Onegin” (Adès and Service, Full
of Noises, 153). If genuine borrowings from these sources are in the score to Powder Her Face, the present author at
least finds them too heavily veiled to merit the same attention as the other borrowings discussed herein.
54
Hicks, “The New Quotation,” 76-83.
 38

Gardel tango. The only essential alteration that Adès made to the Liszt fragment was that of

transcribing the original piano solo for accordion, strings, and harp. The high register is retained

from the original to the copy; the pitches, shorn of Liszt’s decorative grace notes, are otherwise

identical; and the rhythm is not so greatly altered as to render the excerpt unrecognizable. For the

Gardel tango, the homophonic texture of the original dominates the whole of the ensemble in

Powder Her Face. The distinctive harmony (iiø6/5 - I6) is retained, as are the melodic intervals

from the head of the tune. Adès repeats this descending interval, extending the sequence that its

first two iterations suggested and eliding with his own material in the rest of the overture.

Borrowings from other pieces are not made with such high definition. For instance, in the

second instance of the material in Scene 6, Adès uses Baba the Turk’s unveiling theme from The

Rake’s Progress, much like his use of the excerpt from Cuesta Abajo, as a motive that he extends

and elides with his own material. In this case however, the composer scrupulously adheres to

much less of Stravinsky’s original. To Stravinsky’s strings, Adès adds the full complement of

clarinets, piano, harp, and brass instruments. While he maintains the contour of the original

throughout, and the rhythm of the original in the first instance of the theme (m. 363), Adès

replaces the first two longer note values of Stravinsky’s sarabande with repeated notes in the

second instance (m. 462). Completely gone too are Stravinsky’s harmony and the diatonic

melodic intervals in the topmost voice. But the composer’s inexactitude in some of his

borrowings was by design. Regarding Baba the Turk’s theme, Adès relates: “When I used that

music from The Rake’s Progress I hadn't really looked at how it was constructed physically. I

just knew the music and loved it. So the construction in my opera is my own. But that often

happens. You love something for years and you don't really look at it scientifically.”55

55
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 76.
 39

Other borrowings have similar degrees of alteration in Powder Her Face. In Adès’s use

of them, Strauss’s ethereal chords from Der Rosenkavalier are similarly orchestrated, and

maintain a similar contour, but they are altogether different chords in Adès’s opera. The

composer retains the contour of the vocal line of Mussorgsky’s song, its descending pattern is

recognizable, but the harmony is completely gone, and the melodic intervals are different in

Adès’s construction of them. When accounting for why the composer made the changes he did,

one can do better than wave them all off as the result of the composer’s failing to “look at [them]

scientifically.” But fleshing out these answers in greater detail requires some knowledge of

Adès’s wider musical language, a subject which is the primary concern of the following chapter.
 40

Chapter Two: Fetishes

It’s an analytical thing that I don’t find reflected in

written analysis enough, and it’s something that I
really feel is important. It’s the idea of a fetish note
in a piece: that certain specific pitches become
fetish objects, which are returned to and rubbed by
the composer all the time. It doesn’t matter what
key we’re in, or what’s happening around it in
terms of the context of the music—that note on that
instrument…Often it will be a note that has become
an obsession, around which the whole piece
hinges.1

Powder Her Face is actually very strictly patterned.

There’s a lot of control. There’s also a huge plunge
into pillaging from all sorts of places, and the two
apparently contradictory things are jammed
together.2

While Thomas Adès had in mind specific pitches (and even specific pitches played by a

specific instrument) when he used the term “fetish,” it is equally clear that he has other

compositional fetishes as well. Hélène Cao and others have identified a small number Adèsian

compositional signatures—devices and techniques that the composer uses extensively and

consistently throughout many of his works.3 Powder Her Face is no exception. The composer’s

pervasive use of these techniques in the opera constitutes the strict patterning to which he refers

in this chapter’s epigraph and his control over the musical materials. It is this control which

allows him to integrate the spoils of his “pillaging” so seamlessly into his new musical fabric.

Two compositional devices are of primary concern here: the first is what Cao calls Adès’s

“signature scale,” and the second is his varied uses of superimposed interval cycles.

1
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 48.
2
Ibid. 152.
3
See Cao, “Devenir Compositeur,” in Le Voyageur, 37-68.
 41

The “Signature Scale”

The “signature scale” and superimposed interval cycles are both variations on the same

theme. From the earliest stages of Adès’s career, commentators on his music noticed that the

composer had “discovered his own personal and highly versatile musical language consisting of

little patterns of expanding intervals.”4 John Roeder has described such patterns as a type of

continuity, or an “association between two percepts, formed when the second realises a mental

projection that was made as part of the first.”5 In the case of one such pattern, continuity arises

“from regularly changing pitch transformations…[i.e.] the magnitude of the pitch intervals

involved grows by a semitone with each successive onset.”6 To illustrate, Roeder points to bars

4-6 of the Overture from Powder Her Face, the wind and brass parts of which are reproduced in

reduction in figure 2.1. As can be seen, the soprano saxophone descends through its register in

successive steps, first by a single semitone, then by two, then three, and so on. Reappearing as it

does in mm. 110-114 of the overture and again in mm. 537-540 of scene 5, this gesture of

expanding intervals is used as a framing device for both the overture and the entire first act.

Hélène Cao refers to this intervallic series (which, by Adès’s account he “discovered” rather than

“invented”) as Adès’s “signature scale” since it appears in some form in most of the composer’s

works from the 1990s.7 A moment’s reflection confirms that this series comprises an octatonic

collection and, as Cao points out, contains most members of the harmonic minor, acoustic, and

blues scales. The composer claims to have no interest in this characteristic of the series, but

rather in the fact that the interval class pattern is cyclical at the tritone.8 Be that as it may, the

4
Hilary Finch, “Thomas Adès,” The Times, 19 March 1994.
5
Roeder, “Co-operating Continuities,” 122.
6
Ibid. 125; Edward Venn refers to this as an “expanding intervallic series.” See Venn, Asyla, 16.
7
Cao, Le Voyageur, 38.
8
Ibid. 38-9.
 42

scale does bear a close affinity to certain tonal materials which allows for its easy integration into

tonal contexts, a point to be discussed shortly.

Figure 2.1 Powder Her Face, overture, mm. 3-6. The “signature scale,” an expanding interval series, in winds and

brass.

Aligned Cycles

A second manifestation of an expanding interval pattern in Adès’s music measures the

expansion not between successive melodic intervals in a single voice, but rather successive

harmonic intervals between two voices. Adès most frequently utilizes this type of expanding

interval pattern by superimposing two or more interval cycles. David Headlam defines an

interval cycle as a “repeated gradation of the same interval,”9 and dubs two or more such cycles

superimposed upon one another in first-species rhythmic unison “aligned cycles.”10 While in

theory any number of cycles of intervals of any size can be arranged in such a manner, Adès

most frequently aligns an interval-11 cycle with an interval-10 cycle. A clear example of this

from Powder Her Face can be seen in the Rubberneckers’ slow duet interludes in Scene 6.

Figure 2.2 shows measures 37-41. As illustrated, the Maid as Rubbernecker sings a line

constructed from an interval-11 cycle: two fragments of a descending chromatic scale.

Meanwhile, her male counterpart sings a line constructed from an interval-10 cycle: two

descending fragments of the odd whole tone scale (i.e. the one that includes C#). Since the two

9
Dave Headlam, “Tonality and Twelve-Tone Tonality: The Recent Music of George Perle,” International Journal
of Musicology 4 (1995): 306.
10
Dave Headlam, The Music of Alban Berg (New Haven, CT: Yale University Press, 1996), 77–79.
 43

lines cycle through intervals which are a semitone apart, each successive instance of their

alignment into vertical, harmonic intervals grows a semitone larger than the previous one.

Figure 2.2 Scene 6, mm. 37-41. Aligned cycles in Rubbernecker duet.

Integration of Borrowed Material

These two Adèsian compositional signatures—an expanding interval series, expressed

either as the “signature scale” or as aligned cycles—constitute the most extensive means of pitch

generation in the composer’s work of the 1990s. Adherence to these patterns gives rise to pitch

structures which are homophonous with tonal materials, allowing for the integration of borrowed

material from tonal works into the new musical fabric. The composer, in conversation with Tom

Service, even goes so far as to say that these compositional patterns all but imposed the

borrowed material upon the score. Service asks:

[TS:] Was [extensive borrowing] partly a reaction against the pervasiveness of

…the insistence on self-referential coherence that was the orthodoxy in some
parts of British contemporary music?
[TA:] I sensed that these elements might cause consternation here or there, yes.
But I had no choice. I knew there were things in the music that would make
people say, ‘Oh, but you’ve borrowed that from x, y, or z’—but in fact, they just
came in by accident. Often a pattern I was already working with would suddenly
throw up a suggestion so powerfully, like a face you see in wallpaper which once
seen can never be unseen, that I would put it in.11

11
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 27.
 44

Such was the case with much of the borrowed material examined in the previous chapter.

Visiting several of these cases again in turn will now pay additional analytical dividends.

The reader will recall that Adès borrowed from Carlos Gardel’s tango, Cuesta Abajo, in

the Overture and Scenes 1 and 5 of the opera. While describing how a particular compositional

pattern might forcefully and “suddenly throw up a suggestion” of an outside musical source, the

composer relates:

I’d been playing around with a region of expanding harmonies and I heard a
narrow sequence of two of them in a tango I was listening to, and the opening of
that had one in it, so I took it…Its harmony informs much of the opera in a way
that has absolutely nothing to do with that tune. The expanding harmony that I
saw in the tango, I identified the inherent tendency in it; I took that as a cell and I
put it in my own Petri dish and it ramified in all sorts of ways, which have
absolutely nothing to do with that tango, those two chords. You take the two
chords and you put them under a microscope and then you say, ‘Actually, the
cell’s going this way,’ and it goes in another direction.12

As shown in figure 2.3, the overture’s opening gesture comprises three voices played in the brass

and saxophones, the highest of which plays a repeating descending minor third, B-G#, with the

outermost forming a perfect fourth. From the opening bars of the opera, Adès’s fascination with

the perfect fourth is on full display. The composer cites Asyla, Living Toys, and The Tempest,

along with Powder Her Face, as works that begin with a perfect fourth in some guise. It is an

interval that he says he can cause to “quiver and spring to life”13 by gradually expanding its

borders by a semitone on one side or the other. Thus in the subsequent 2 bars, the F-sharp

descends by semitone, forming a tritone and perfect fifth respectively with the constant B above

it. The expanding interval concept is at play as well within the upper voice itself. In the third bar,

the G# descends to G-natural, thus expanding the initial descending minor third to a major third.

The material borrowed from Gardel’s Cuesta Abajo begins in bar 7 with a melodic descent of a

12
Ibid. 153-4.
13
Ibid. 33.
 45

major third, dovetailing in this way with Adès’s original material in the opening bars (recall

figure 1.8). As Gardel’s tune continues, it continues the pattern that Adès had established,

descending by an additional semitone—a perfect fourth—in bar 9. Adès then segues out of

Cuesta Abajo by adding one additional extension to the intervallic pattern, expanding the

descending melodic interval a semitone further to a diminished fifth in bar 11. Given the musical

language built around patterns of expanding intervals, the material appropriated from Cuesta

Abajo thus integrates smoothly into the fabric of Powder Her Face.

Figure 2.3 Overture, mm. 1-3. Pitch intervals expanding horizontally and vertically.

The imitation Jack Buchanan song is the most expansive instance of musical borrowing

in Powder Her Face. The electrician sings a sardonic parody of the song in Scene 1, and the

whole “original” occupies much of Scene 2. Adès describes the tune as “a dream Jack Buchanan

song, in which the intervals and the harmony behave according to my rules, so they’re slightly

off.”14 One can observe the composer’s rules imposing order on passages of the song in bars

285-303, as demonstrated in figure 2.4. The melody in bars 285-9, for instance, is constructed

out of an ascending expanding interval series eliding with a descending expanding interval series

14
Ibid. 153.
 46

(the “signature scale”) into bar 289. In bars 291-9, the melody is constructed out of two

interlocking interval-10/11 cycles. After 3 onsets from each cycle, the melody concludes by

eliding with another descending expanding interval series.

Figure 2.4 Expanding intervals in scene 2: a) bars 285-9; b) bars 291-6; c) bars 297-303.

In the harmonic context of three aligned cycles, Adès seamlessly integrates the quotation

from Franz Liszt’s Mephisto Polka in Scene 4. The upward glissandos in the strings at bar 288

land on an E-major triad in bar 289. Adès interprets this vertical structure as the superimposition

of an interval-0 cycle (a pedal tone) on E, two transpositions of an interval-11 cycle beginning on

B and G-sharp respectively, and an interval-10 cycle beginning on E. Figure 2.5 presents an

analytical summary underneath a reduced score of bars 289-306. As can be seen, as the cycles

unfold, two half-diminished sonorities succeed the E-major triad, the latter of which is identical

in its pitch class content to the one found in the closing bars of Liszt’s polka. As can also be

seen, the F-natural which follows the grand pause—attractively jarring to Adès in Liszt’s piece—
 47

is, in the score to Powder Her Face, simply the next pitch in one of the streams of an interval-11

cycle.

As discussed in the previous chapter, Adès significantly alters the borrowed material

from Baba the Turk’s unveiling scene in Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in order to fit it into

the already highly structured tapestry of Powder Her Face’s score. As noted then, the composer

admits that when he “used that music from The Rake’s Progress [he] hadn't really looked at how

it was constructed physically…So the construction in [Powder Her Face] is [his] own.”15 In

conversation with Tom Service, he confirms that in this particular instance, Baba the Turk

emerged, like the face that cannot be unseen in a wallpaper pattern, out of both the dramatic and

musical material in Scene 6:

[TA:] Following Stravinsky’s principle that ‘A good composer doesn’t borrow, he

steals,’ I took the melody from the sarabande in the final act of The Rake’s
Progress.
[TS:] Where is it?
[TA:] It’s at the moment at the end of the courtroom scene in Powder Her Face,
the trial, Scene 6, when the Duchess leaves the courtroom and the crowd says,
‘There she is, old trollop.’ It’s as if she becomes the bearded lady, Baba the Turk
from The Rake’s Progress, at that point. So this rather obvious parallel in the
music emerged. It came out of what my music was already doing — it was like a
skin on the milk that formed and I just didn’t skim it off.16

Defining the notion of what Adès’s “music was already doing” in the strictly technical manner

traced thus far, Baba the Turk’s emergence might not be satisfactorily explained in so facile a

manner. Insofar as one is concerned with accounting for pitch material, one must concede that

the inclusion of Stravinsky’s material was not inevitable. However, as will be shown, the

borrowed material, refracted through Adès’s memory of it, does integrate seamlessly into an

established set of pitch generative patterns which are established in the score well before Baba

the Turk’s unveiling theme and continue well after its commencement.

15
Ibid. 76.
16
Ibid. 75-6.
 48

The passage in question begins in bar 343 of Scene 6, immediately following the Judge’s

aria. Figure 2.6 shows the piano reduction of the orchestra from bar 343 to 370, from which the

singers’ pitches are drawn, with an analytical summary underneath. Muted brass and violins

Figure 2.5. Aligned cycles in Powder Her Face, Scene 4, mm. 289-303.
 49

Figure 2.5. (cont’d)

 50

begin a pair of aligned interval-11/10 cycles on C#5 and E5. Both cycles descend through their

first three pitches at which point each cycle swaps the voice with which it has hitherto been

associated—a characteristic feature of the aligned cycles in this passage. Into the downbeat of

bar 361, the accordion plays a rapidly rising interval-1 cycle, aligned with an interval-2 cycle

below, adding a third and fourth voice to the texture already controlled by the other pair of

aligned cycles. At this point the cycles swap between the voices and the intervals invert, leaving

two interval-10 cycles and two interval-11 cycles. The four cycles continue along their respective

patterns into bar 362 where the Duchess enters and Adès incorporates the borrowed music from

Stravinsky. At this moment, one pair of aligned interval-10/11 cycles constitutes the bass in this

musical texture, while the other has landed on a perfect fourth B-flat/E-flat dyad. To this dyad,

another voice is added, beginning on F-flat, moving up and down by semitones in parallel

motion with the dyad below it, with all three voices imitating the contour of Stravinsky’s

sarabande. Thus, in musically alluding to Baba the Turk, Thomas Adès cleanly integrates

Stravinsky’s recognizable rhythm and melodic contour into the pitch generative patterns that he

had already set in motion in Scene 6. The material borrowed from The Rake’s Progress neither

starkly juxtaposes with nor interrupts the strict patterning at work in Powder Her Face when it

enters, and the unfolding patterns continue after Stravinsky’s sarabande ends.

Adès refracts the other pilfered bits of The Rake’s Progress in similar ways. The repeated

sixteenth notes on brass instruments played in a lilting meter are transformed from Stravinsky’s

diatonic original to a rising interval-1 cycle (see figure 1.2b). He also similarly integrates the

final quotation—the excerpt from Mussorgsky’s Songs and Dances of Death—into his harmonic

world governed by patterns of expanding intervals. Hélène Cao has observed that Death’s
 51

Figure 2.6. Aligned cycles integrating Baba the Turk’s unveiling theme from Stravinsky’s The Rake’s Progress in

Powder Her Face, Scene 6, mm. 343-370.

 52

Figure 2.6. (cont’d)

 53

Figure 2.6. (cont’d)

 54

Figure 2.6. (cont’d)

melody in Mussorgsky’s Lullaby includes increasing melodic interval sizes.17 Figure 2.7 shows a

comparison of Mussorgsky’s original with Adès’s appropriation. Much like its relationship to

Gardel’s tango, Adès’s methods of generating pitch material paralleled the melodic construction

in Mussorgsky’s song. Death returns repeatedly to the same pitch in the Russian song while the

lower voice of her compound melodic line descends mostly chromatically. Adès reworks the first

two descending intervals, such that his compound melodic line forms a strictly aligned interval-0

cycle and interval-11 cycle, concluding with its third and final onset with a descent of a major

6th as in Mussorgsky’s original song. Adès repeats this three times (in contrast to Death’s

fourfold pronouncement in Mussorgsky’s Lullaby), transposed each time, and dramatizing the

final melodic descent by adding an additional octave. Meanwhile, the orchestra’s

accompaniment is governed by an interval-10 cycle aligned with 2 interval-11 cycles a minor

sixth apart. Passing through three onsets of its pattern, this aligned cycle configuration lands at

17
Cao, Le Voyageur, 83.
 55

the quotation’s end on a c-minor triad, just like Mussorgsky’s original. The accompaniment’s

parallels with Mussorgsky’s chromatically descending inner voices are thus striking, and

demonstrate the easy integration of the Russian song into the musical fabric of Powder Her

Face.

Figure 2.7a. Mussorgsky, Lullaby from Songs and Dances of Death, mm. 36-7 (see also mm. 41-2, 46-7, 52-4).

Figure 2.7b. Aligned cycles in Adès’s use of Mussorgsky’s Lullaby in Powder Her Face, Scene 8, mm. 39-40
 56

Further Uses of the “Signature Scale”

These two Adèsian compositional signatures—the “signature scale” and aligned interval

cycles—constitute much of the pitch dimension of Thomas Adès’s musical language from the

first decade of his career. Thus, much of the score to Powder Her Face comprises some variation

of one or both of these techniques even when the composer is not integrating borrowed musical

material. A number of scholars have discussed these technical aspects of Adès’s language, but

their discussions have often failed to appreciate the variety of ways that the composer employs

them or modifies them in his compositional praxis. While the following catalog of such

variations is not exhaustive, it does suggest the breadth and richness of musical possibilities that

Adès derives from such a limited number of theoretical constructs within the score of Powder

Her Face.

While Adès uses his “signature scale” throughout the score, most instances of it are in

Scenes 4 and 5, in which the audience catches the Duchess and the Duke in their respective

extra-marital liaisons. The Duchess, for instance, intones the first six notes of the series at the

end of Scene 4 as she asks the hotel waiter if they have previously met (figure 2.8a). Besides

constructing a single melodic succession of pitches, Adès utilizes this series of expanding

intervals in a variety of ways. The reader will recall that the series frames the first act, appearing

as it does at the beginning of the overture (see figure 2.1) and at the end of Scene 5. In this latter

instance, Adès pulls five pitches from the series (including doublings) to create the ominous

chord which concludes the first act (figure 2.8b).

Considering this descending version as the normative, prime form of the expanding

interval series facilitates identifying and labelling the three other basic forms of the series with
 57

Figure 2.8. Permutations of the “signature scale” in Powder Her Face. a) Scene 4, mm. 323-4 (prime form); b)

Scene 5: Paper Chase, mm. 537-541 (sustained pitches from prime form); c) Scene 4, mm. 198-202, 208-211

(inversion); d) Scene 5, mm. 265-270 (inversion);

 58

Figure 2.8. (cont’d). Permutations of the “signature scale” in Powder Her Face. e) Scene 5, mm. 93-5 (retrograde

inversion); f) Scene 5, mm. 134-57 (retrograde, prime, inversion, retrograde inversion);

 59

Figure 2.8f. (cont’d).

 60

Figure 2.8. (cont’d). Permutations of the “signature scale” in Powder Her Face. g) Scene 4, mm. 204-5, (inversion,

as static collection and with octave displacements).

terminology borrowed from twelve-tone theory.18 An inverted form of the series concludes

Scene 4, from which Adès pulls the final four pitches to form the opening b-minor chord of

Interlude 4. The whole prestissimo flourish for clarinet duo with which this inverted form of the

series concludes quickly summarizes much of the motivic content of Scene 4. Earlier, as the

Duchess began her seductive attempts on the hotel waiter, the inverted series begins to constitute

more and more of the pitch material of her vocal line (figure 2.8c). In Scene 5, the Duke, upon

realizing that his mistress is suggesting the Duchess’s infidelity, sings a long, inverted form of

the expanding interval series from the depths to the heights of his bass register (figure 2.8d).

In various instances of these two scenes, Adès employs fragments of the retrograde and

retrograde inversion forms of the series as well. In Scene 5, the Duke’s intoxicated state is

18
Nicolas Slonimsky includes ascending and descending intervallic series of increasing and diminishing intervals in
his extensive catalog. See Nicolas Slonimsky, Thesaurus of Scales and Melodic Patterns, 186.
 61

reflected in these various “upside-down” and “backwards” versions of the “signature scale”

strewn around and throughout his part. As his conversation with his mistress begins to turn

toward the Duchess, the Duke sings along a segment of a retrograde inversion of the “signature

scale” (see figure 2.8e). Shortly thereafter, the bassline undergirding the pair’s conversation is

constructed from a segment of a retrograde version of the “signature scale” elided with an

inverted version of the same (see figure 2.8f). Meanwhile, the Duke sings “I’ve a trick worth two

of that, my dear” (mm. 142-5) along a prime form of the signature scale, upon the completion of

which, a second inverted form, played by two clarinets with increasingly widening trills ascends

from A#3. This series is extended, with the help of the accordion, all the way up to G7,

sustaining pitches from the end of the series to create a vertical harmony. The rapid ascent of the

series mimics the champagne bubbles rising from the bottle that the Duke opens and from which

he immediately swigs. As he re-engages in conversation with his mistress, offering her a drink

(and, presumably, the champagne’s bubbles have settled), the piano repeats the “champagne”

chord, removing the top-most pitch with each successive onset, outlining an additional retrograde

inversion of the signature scale.

Sustaining pitches from the “signature scale,” as in the passage just cited, subtly blurs the

fact that it is an ordered series. On occasion, Adès masks the fact entirely by octave displacing

subsequent members of the series or by explicitly treating the constituent elements of the series

as an unordered collection. Just as the Duke released pressure from the champagne bottle, so too,

as the Duchess begins to increase the intensity of her lustful advances on the hotel waiter in

Scene 4, the waiter deflates the rising tension by mentioning the coronation, a sore spot for the

Duchess. Adès harmonically underpins both passages with his “signature scale,” overtly masking

in the latter instance its serial nature in the manner just described (figure 2.8g). Though the horn,
 62

trumpet, and trombone intone a muted, pianissimo, inversion of the expanding interval, the

piano, harp, and strings assume the more prominent musical material, descending as they do out

of a stratospheric register. The pitches they play though, are precisely those of the inverted

“signature scale” played by the brass, and for the most part, in the same order, but without

concern for maintaining the same octave for each subsequent member of the series, thus masking

the sense of increasingly expanding intervals. Meanwhile, Adès derived the pitches in the

Duchess’s own falling vocal line from the resultant pitches of the inverted signature scale

(indicated by asterisks above the relevant notes in the analysis of figure 2.8g). They are drawn

freely though, as though this fragment of the series were a static, unordered pitch collection.

These passages exemplify but a glimpse of the variety of other ways in which Adès uses this

compositional device.

Further Uses of Aligned Cycles

Just as he uses the “signature scale” in multiple ways, so too Adès uses aligned cycles in

a number of ways as well. As mentioned, by far the most common arrangement in Powder Her

Face is that of pairing two cycles: specifically, a descending semitone, interval-11 cycle, with a

descending whole tone, interval-10 cycle, as in passages already discussed (see for instance

figure 2.2 and 2.4b).

On occasion, however, a third cycle is aligned with this basic pair, as in the passage

preceding the quotation of Liszt’s Mephisto Polka in Scene 4 (see figure 2.5). Another, more rare

arrangement is the construction of a compound melodic line superimposing the “signature scale”

with an interval cycle, as in the Electrician’s derisive song in Scene 1. As indicated in figure 2.9,

the upper register portion of the electrician’s melody unfolds the opening of the “signature scale”

while the lower portion unfolds a descending interval-9 cycle.

 63

Figure 2.9. “Signature scale” plus interval-9 cycle in compound melody, scene 1, mm. 194-9; see also mm. 345-

349, scene 6, mm. 397-400, and scene 8 mm. 251-3.

Inversion of the basic aligned pair of interval-10/11 cycles is again another simple, if

uncommon deviation from the normative pattern, turning the descending dyad into an ascending

one: an interval-1 cycle aligned with an interval-2 cycle. A short example of such an

arrangement can be found at the head of a recurring motive in Scene 2, one that Adès

undoubtedly had in mind when he mentioned his inclusion in the score of “fake quotations, red

herrings, pour tromper l’ennemi.”19 A lilting tune characterizes the attempts of the young

Duchess’s companions to calm her anxious anticipation of the Duke’s arrival. It begins its ascent

with three onsets of an aligned pair of interval-1/2 cycles (see figure 2.10a). The Duchess, in her

later anxious anticipation of sexual climax, sings a portion of her scandalous aria in Scene 4

along seven onsets of the same aligned cycle configuration with the two voices of the compound

melody swapping cycles midway through their ascent (see figure 2.10b). In Scene 6, it is the

anxious anticipation of all in attendance for the judge’s pronouncement which accompanies the

aligned interval-1/2 cycles in bars 174-9. Though octave displacements abound, all pitches in

this passage—the rapidly repeated, muted brass chords in m. 174, the muted strings chords in

19
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 153.
 64

mm. 176-9, and the Judge’s melody throughout—are governed by the six onsets of the aligned

cycles.

The most common variation on the basic pair of aligned interval-10/11 cycles though is

adding a third interval cycle which is a strict transposition of one of the other two. In cataloguing

these situations in Powder Her Face, every interval class is accounted for as a transposition

operator except interval class 1. Adès does not, however, use all operators with equal frequency,

and many passages which exhibit such a configuration of aligned cycles are relatively brief.

Examples already considered have exhibited glimpses of this. Recall figure 2.5, at the climactic

moment in Scene 4 wherein the two interval-11 cycles are related to each other by T3. Various

Figure 2.10. Interval-1/2 aligned cycles in Powder Her Face a) Scene 2 mm. 53-5 (see also mm. 155-6); b) Scene 4,

mm. 271-7.
 65

Figure 2.10. (cont'd) Interval-1/2 aligned cycles in Powder Her Face, c) Scene 6, mm. 174-9.

other transposition operators are concentrated in Scene 4 as well. Figure 2.11 presents an

analytical summary of the low brass and low string chords in bars 140-5 of the same scene. Here

two interval cycles in T2 relation to each other characterize the moment when the Duchess

invites the waiter into her hotel room, initiating the dramatic build to the climax. Figure 2.12

shows an excerpt of two interval-11 cycles related by T6 aligned with an interval-10 cycle in the

brass and saxophone chords in bars 233-4 of Scene 4. This comes on the heels of the pantomime

section which suggests the waiter’s abandonment of protestations to the Duchess’s advances.

Thus three different transpositional operators relate aligned cycles together in the music at the

beginning, the middle, and end of the adulterous act in Scene 4.

 66

Figure 2.11. Scene 4 mm. 140-5: Interval-1 cycle aligned with two interval-2 cycles related by T2.

Figure 2.12. Scene 4 mm. 233-4: Interval-10 cycle aligned with two interval-11 cycles related by T6.

Figures 2.7 and 2.10c demonstrate alignments of interval-11 and interval-10 cycles

respectively with their transpositional equivalents 4 semitones above in pitch-class space. Far

and away though, T5 is the most common transposition operator in these types of aligned cycle

configurations in Powder Her Face. The symbolic entrance of Baba the Turk’s theme in Scene 6

featured a semitone cycle aligned with two whole-tone cycles related by T5 (recall figure 2.6). In

fact, much of the harmony throughout Scene 6 is governed by three aligned interval-11/10

cycles, two of which are related by T5. The harmonic successions generated by this

configuration of aligned cycles are extensively employed in Scene 6 in connection with the

Duchess, accompanying as they do her words and actions. Figure 2.13a-d illustrates four such

examples. The first of these opens the scene, beginning with harp and strings sustaining E5 over
 67

the first 2 bars (see figure 2.13a). The pitches for the subsequent three chords stem from the first

three onsets of an interval-11 cycle and two interval-10 cycles related by T5, beginning on the D-

sharp and A-sharp below the top-voice E. This progression is repeated across bars 4-9, ensuring

its recognizability when it returns twice later: when the Duchess silently makes her entrance into

the courtroom in bars 101-12, and as she makes her quasi-triumphant exit in bars 456-61.

Another such succession of chords, whose threefold descent is played by high strings,

accompanies the final portion of the Judge’s tirade against the Duchess (see figure 2.13b). The

Duchess’s first words in the courtroom scene are accompanied by a ghostly trio of strings

playing sul tasto along the succession of chords shown in figure 2.13c. The aligned cycles are

clearly identifiable enough in the score to warrant including only an analytical reduction of the

same. Unlike the previous examples, here the interval-11 cycle is doubled by its T5 equivalent

rather than the interval-10 cycle.

Figure 2.13. Aligned interval-10/11 cycles with an additional T5 equivalent in Powder Her Face, Scene 6. a) bars

1-3 (see also 4-9, 101-12, and 456-61);

 68

Figure 2.13. (cont’d). Aligned interval-10/11 cycles with an additional T5 equivalent in Powder Her Face, Scene 6.

b) bars 289-95; c) reduction of bars bars 373-85; d) reduction of bars 400-11;

Finally, as the Duchess’s response to the Judge’s condemnation shifts to a more prickly,

defensive tone, a new group of three aligned interval-10/11 cycles with two transpositionally

equivalent by T5 begins in bar 400 with the clarinets as illustrated in figure 2.13d. As
 69

demonstrated, this succession is replete with multiple swappings of cycles between voices as it

unfolds through bar 411. It is joined in bar 404 by a motive from the Duchess’s seduction scene

harmonized as three interval-1/2 cycles, one of which is a T5 equivalent of another which

unfolds in a similarly flexible manner, with cycles swapping between voices at three points over

the course of the eight chord succession.

Thus, the doubling of one interval cycle from an aligned interval-10/11 pair at T5 plays a

key role in delineating the harmonic space in the courtroom scene. This configuration of aligned

cycles not only sets the stage harmonically in the opening bars of Scene 6, but it also generates

the succession of chords which characterizes the music bookending the Duchess’s entrance and

exit from the courtroom. It not only facilitates the integration of Baba the Turk’s music from

The Rake’s Progress as it illustrates the dramatic parallel between the two operatic characters,

but it also accompanies the breaking off of the Judge’s tirade, as enumerating the Duchess’s

transgressions proves emotionally overpowering. Finally, the Duchess’s response—the only part

of the scene in which she sings—is saturated by two sizeable unfoldings of this specific

configuration of aligned cycles.

Carrying this variation of aligned cycle technique one step further, Adès very frequently

includes a transposed version of not just one but both members of a pair of aligned cycles. In

cataloguing the uses of this technique—an interval-11 cycle aligned with an interval-10 cycle,

each one paired with a transposition of the same—one finds that every interval class except 5 is

used as a transposition operator at some point in the score. Recall, for instance, that the two pairs

of aligned cycle pairs in bar 361 of figure 2.6 were related to each other by T3. Figure 2.14

illustrates two other infrequently used transposition operators in relating pairs of aligned interval-

10/11 cycles. In bars 57-61 of Scene 2, the Duchess and her male socialite counterpart express
 70

their incredulity at the confidante’s suggestion that the Duke’s appeal would quickly fade,

singing along two pairs of aligned interval-10/11 cycles related by T6 (see figure 2.14a). Scene

3, a waitress’s “behind-the-scenes” aria taking place during the Duke and Duchess’s pantomimed

wedding, is characterized by the harmonic succession illustrated in figure 2.14b. Here, Adès

aligns two interval-11 cycles related by T2 with two interval-10 cycles related by T1. The initial

succession of two chords is repeated throughout much of the scene as a vamp, with a lead-in,

comprised of another pair of aligned interval-10/11 cycles, eliding with its repetition.

Figure 2.14a. T6 relating two pairs of aligned interval-10/11 cycles in Powder Her Face, Scene 2, mm. 57-61

Figure 2.14. T2 relating two pairs of aligned interval-10/11 cycles in Powder Her Face, Scene 3, mm. 1-4.
 71

By far the most common pair of transposition operators applied to a pair of aligned

interval-10/11 cycles is 3 and 4. As shown in figure 2.15, Adès employs this configuration

throughout the opera. For instance, in bar 367 of Scene 1, as the Duchess’s soliloquy becomes

more detached from reality, the strings initiate two interval-10 cycles related by T3 aligned with

two interval-11 cycles related by T4 underneath the harp’s arpeggiation of the same (see figure

2.15a). After vacillating over bars 367-9 between the first two chords generated by these cycles,

the two aligned pairs continue their descent through five more onsets of their respective patterns.

The waitress in Scene 3 concludes her own soliloquy with precisely the same pair of

aligned cycle pairs in bar 107 (see figure 2.15b). In place of the harpist’s arpeggiation of the

chords generated by the unfolding cycles, the soprano acrobatically leaps between members of

each chord. The integrity of the original cycles falls apart as the low brass chug away at the start

of Interlude 3, with cycles swapping between voices throughout the remainder of the same. In

this way, one harmonic pattern dissolves as it were to make space for the new one which

characterizes Scene 4.

Much of the harmony in Scene 5 is governed in its own way by precisely the same pair of

aligned cycle pairs as well. The first five bars unfold three onsets of the four aligned cycles.

Beginning in bar 6 (see figure 2.15c), this succession of chords is repeated adding the fourth

sonority from the unfolding cycles. Bars 11-16 repeat the process again, this time adding a fifth

onset from each of the four aligned cycles, and so on, throughout much of the fifth scene.

The opening of the final scene of the opera is characterized as well in part by two

interval-10 cycles related by T3 aligned with two interval-11 cycles related by T4. In this

instance, the unfolding cycles do not produce chords with the same pitch-class content as the

previous three examples. As a further point of contrast, Adès follows the patterns in this scene
 72

Figure 2.15. T3/4 relations between pairs of aligned interval-10/11 cycles. a) Scene 1, bars 367-372.
 73

Figure 2.15. (cont’d). b) Scene 3/Interlude 3, bars 107-115

 74

Figure 2.15. (cont’d). c) Scene 5, bars 6-16.

 75

Figure 2.15. (cont’d).

 76

Figure 2.15. (cont’d). d) Scene 8, bars 7-19.

 77

Figure 2.15. (cont’d).

 78

Figure 2.15. (cont’d).

more assiduously as well. The labyrinthine contrapuntal web spun by the accordion and clarinets

beginning in bar 11 strictly follows the pitch class content generated by the four aligned cycles.

As the rate of change from one onset to the next is rapid—often four onsets per bar—the

orchestral accompaniment does not always include all four pitch classes from all four interval

cycles. The harmony-governing cycles continue uninterrupted through three complete cycles and

begin a fourth one, building a sense of inertia which parallels the inexorable approach of fate,

overtly symbolized by the borrowed material from Schubert’s lied Der Tod und das Mädchen

which follows in bar 20.

 79

Cyclical Intervallic Patterns

One final technique is a logical extension of ones already discussed. While Headlam’s

traditional definition of interval cycles describes a linear repetition of the same interval, Adès

occasionally extends this idea by constructing a cyclically repeating pattern of different intervals.

One clear example of this characterizes Interlude 3. Between clarinets, accordion, piano, and

muted violins, Adès aligns a pair of voices in rhythmic unison, each one following a repeating

cycle of 3, 4, 2, and 1 semitone (see figure 2.16a).20 Because the two voices’ intervallic patterns

are offset from one another, the ascending flourishes feature a repeating pattern of four different

vertical intervals as well.

Figure 2.16a. Cyclical intervallic patterns in Interlude 3, mm. 113-121.

20
Since this intervallic pattern does not repeat at the octave, it would be right at home among the three-note
interpolations of the quinquetone progression in Slonimsky’s thesaurus of scales and melodic patterns. Curiously,
the specific pattern shown in figures 2.16a and b is not among Slonimsky’s examples. See Slonimsky, Thesaurus,
107-8.
 80

Figure 2.16b. Cyclical intervallic patterns in Scene 6, mm. 273-8.

Low brass and strings play two-voice figures in rhythmic unison in Scene 6 along the

same intervallic pattern (see figure 2.16b). It is no happy accident that the repeating pattern of

vertical intervals in these passages includes traditional consonances: a major third, a perfect fifth,

and their inversions. Not only does this compositional technique illustrate just one more manner

in which Adès patterns and controls the pitch material in Powder Her Face, but it also

demonstrates another way in which the composer adopts an open stance toward tonal musical

materials and thinking. The final chapter undertakes a more in depth consideration of this aspect

of the musical world of Powder Her Face.

 81

Chapter Three: Irrational Functionality

I suppose I wanted to create an irrationally

functional harmony, in which the function is not
only on the surface, but at a structural level. And try
to make something that was not merely ironic or
alienated, but also truthful. It could still be skeptical
music, in Wallace Stevens’s phrase, but it would be
real. To try to bring it back to real life in some way,
back to the world.1

The influence of a secular worldview on Adès’s aesthetics has a number of noteworthy

manifestations. Musical subject matter shorn of a mystical, metaphysical well-spring tends to

resonate more with the British composer’s tastes. He has, for instance, a distinct predilection for

French Baroque music over its German counterpart, evident not only in his repertoire as a

pianist, but also in his own compositions such as Les baricades mistérieuses, Sonata da Caccia,

and Three Studies from Couperin. When pressed on why this might be the case, the composer

replies:

I find that perhaps the subject matter is more, what I would call, adult. There is
not quite so much joy in the face of Jesus and this kind of issue, and there is much
more about human existence. It’s rather like French painting at that time as well.
There is a lot of concentration on just people doing things—existing in a park or
whatever they’re doing…and playing, too…and dressing up in Pierrot costumes.
Somehow you look at it and you are just seeing people dressing up, but in another
way somehow it seems to have this fullness of a statement about the human
condition and all that sort of grand business without really laying down the law in
a Germanic way. It touches on these things. There’s an evanescence which I find
very deeply touching.2

In this way, Adés’s aesthetic parallels that of Wallace Stevens. The world of Wallace Stevens’s

poetry, as one commentator has phrased it, is one in which “the elemental, the supernatural, and

the mythical have been drained, and in which the deeper instincts of the human race are

1
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 141.
2
Thomas Adès, interview by Andrew Ford, The Music Show, ABC Radio National, 9 October 2010.
 82

consequently starving.”3 Adès’s allusion to Stevens’s humanistic world in this chapter’s epigraph

comes from the poet’s “Sad Strains of a Gay Waltz:”

The truth is that there comes a time

When we can mourn no more over music
That is so much motionless sound.

There comes a time when the waltz

Is no longer a mode of desire, a mode
Of revealing desire and is empty of shadows.

Too many waltzes have ended. And then

There’s that mountain-minded Hoon,
For whom desire was never that of the waltz,

Who found all form and order in solitude,

For whom the shapes were never the figures of men.
Now, for him, his forms have vanished.

There is order in neither sea nor sun.

The shapes have lost their glistening.
There are these sudden mobs of men,

These sudden clouds of faces and arms,

An immense suppression, freed,
These voices crying without knowing for what,

Except to be happy, without knowing how,

Imposing forms they cannot describe,
Requiring order beyond their speech.

Too many waltzes have ended. Yet the shapes

For which the voices cry, these, too, may be
Modes of desire, modes of revealing desire.

Too many waltzes–The epic of disbelief

Blares oftener and soon, will soon be constant.
Some harmonious skeptic soon in a skeptical music

Will unite these figures of men and their shapes

Will glisten again with motion, the music
Will be motion and full of shadows.4

3
Louis L. Martz, The Poem of the Mind: Essays on Poetry, English and American (New York: Oxford University
Press, 1966), 183.
 83

In Stevens’s poetic world, there is no ultimate reality—a fact which, when realized, can be

crushing. Hence, the mourning over music’s deflation into motionless sound, the vanishing of

order and form, the loss of shapes’ glistening, and the nameless crowd of voices pining for an

elusive if artificial happiness. Order, meaning, and value must be created by the imagination.

This is the task of the harmonious skeptic, the anticipated completion of which is the source of

hope in the poem’s conclusion. The imaginative creator sees reality past former illusions but is

not bitter from disillusionment.

As a student, Adès sensed bitter disillusionment in the avant-garde’s reaction against

tradition, functional tonality, and its putative ultimate musical reality. The music of Boulez and

Stockhausen, for instance, remains for Adès mostly cold, dry, and lifeless, with “almost a

conscious and deliberate lack of warmth.”5 The music of Kurtág on the other hand had an

immediate impact on the young British composer, striking him from his earliest exposure as

having “a real emotional life,” suffused with “real human gestures [with] the power and energy

of an actual fist coming down or a hand stroking.”6 By resurrecting triadic harmony and diatonic

materials, Kurtág, and more especially his compatriot Ligeti, provoked the young Adès. But if

Ligeti and Kurtág provoked the fledgling British composer by their re-appropriation of diatonic

materials, they also perplexed him. In response to the apparent frivolity of Ligeti’s 1982 Horn

Trio, Adès asks, “Why are we here, dealing with this, if it’s all just a black joke?…Now we’re

dealing with these intervals, why don’t we look at dealing with them more functionally, on their

4
Wallace Stevens, The Collected Poems of Wallace Stevens: The Corrected Edition, ed. Chris Beyer and John Serio
(New York: Vintage Books, 2015), 129-30.
5
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 137.
6
Ibid.
 84

own terms, rather than so much as a provocative joke?”7 The quest for answers to these sorts of

questions constitutes Adès’s efforts to create an “irrationally functional harmony.” He does not

seek to negate diatonic materials, in the alienating manner of so many of the avant-garde, nor to

use them in Ligeti’s ironic manner. And yet, Adès’s development of a personal harmonic palette

could hardly be characterized as nostalgic or some sort of ars antiqua. He has no illusions, like

those in Stevens’s poem, that triads and other traditional harmonic objects somehow guarantee

order. Thus, as a harmonious skeptic, Adès treats the triad as neither Schenker’s “chord of

nature” nor Lippius’s contemplation of the Holy Trinity. Nonetheless, he has striven for a

personal, if idiosyncratic means of dealing with such material—an irrationally functional

harmony, one that is truthful to the reality of the human condition, full of shadows and shapes

glistening with motion.

Adès cites Berlioz, Chopin, Liszt, Tchaikovsky, Grieg, and Schumann as composers

whose music functions harmonically in an irrational sort of way.8 Irrationally functional

harmony “wasn’t recognized,” he maintains, “as a usable stepping-stone further across the

river…until all the other paths [had] been tried, [forcing one] to go back and start from another

path.”9 He admires Gerald Barry, an Irish composer 20 years his senior, for retracing the

stepping stone path and adopting anew, in Adès’s estimation, an irrationally functional harmony.

“I think he really made a huge breakthrough,” he asserts, “and it has to do with his objective

approach to material…[His music] functions, again, irrationally, but powerfully, to build tension

and to create structure. It wasn’t just repetitive. It builds. And the virtuosity, the display of it, that

7
Ibid. 140-1; the Horn Trio of course represented a new stylistic exploration for Ligeti as well. A personal,
idiosyncratic use of diatonic material characterized his work of the final two decades of his life—a radical break
with his mid-career style.
8
Ibid. 144-5; Adès’s fascination with the music of Leoś Janáček seems to be based on a similar criterion. See
Thomas Adès, “‘Nothing but Pranks and Puns’: Janáček’s Solo Piano Music,” in Janáček Studies, ed. Paul
Wingfield (Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999), 18-35.
9
Ibid. 146.
 85

combination of things seemed, to me, to be new, and a major way forward.”10 From his earliest

opus, that has been Adès’s musical path, and in Powder Her Face, the composer’s musical

materials frequently intersect with those of functional tonality, if in an irrational way. The

remainder of this chapter considers five such intersections.

Perfect Intervals

Given the ubiquity of perfect intervals in functionally tonal music (e.g. as essential

components of triads, as root motion from dominant to tonic, etc.), it is thus not insignificant in a

discussion of Adès’s intersections with tonality to point out the composer’s penchant for the

interval of a perfect fifth, or its inversion, a perfect fourth, whether expressed melodically or

harmonically.11 Speaking of his compositional approach generally, the composer has explained

his peculiar fascination with the interval of a perfect fourth almost as a historical revision project

given how theorists have unjustly viewed and neglected the interval over time. He says:

The fourth is the most interesting interval, if you look at its history. Obviously it
was considered a consonance in musical prehistory—pre-Monteverdi, let’s say!
At that time, before the seventeenth century, it was thought to be a stable interval.
And over time something happened in people’s ears, and suddenly the fourth was
considered unstable. But for everyone from Pérotin to Palestrina, the fourth is a
consonance.
And then it becomes a dissonance. It’s mysterious, but it’s something that
happens in the cultural ear. In the textbooks, the fourth is supposed to resolve
down to the third, so C and F should become C and E. But I absolutely don't want
that. If you want to argue for the natural pre-eminence of ‘tonality,’ you’re
supposed to believe that the fourth wants to resolve to a third. But it doesn't, to
me. To me the stronger note is the top one. I hear a fourth as an inverted fifth; the
top note is the bass. I don’t know whether that is an evolution of the ‘cultural
ear’—perhaps it’s just me, but I feel it as a fact.12

The composer’s penchant for perfect fifths, and particularly their inversion, perfect fourths, is

evident in Powder Her Face in at least three ways. First, the interval is used in parallel, scalar

10
Ibid. 147.
11
See earlier discussion on p. 43-4. Dominic Wells also observes that the composer frequently adds to this interval a
descending semitone. See Wells, “Plural Styles,” 2012.
12
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 32-3.
 86

fashion along a trochaic rhythmic pattern, often accompanying the beginning of a list of the

Duchess’s demands. Figure 3.1 shows a reduction of bars 249-255 from Scene 1. Here, strings

and clarinets play a number of overlapping scalar fragments—sometimes an ascending interval-2

cycle, sometimes a descending interval-10 cycle—paired with its transpositional equivalent

either a perfect fourth or a perfect fifth away. The passage begins immediately as the Duchess

begins her inquisition of the mocking electrician by demanding that he remove her coat. Figure

3.2 shows a similar passage from Scene 4, with the same parallel fifths along whole-tone cycles

in the strings and piano accompanying the moment the Duchess gets through to room service and

commands the waiter to bring her wine and sandwiches.

A second manifestation of Adès’s predilection for perfect intervals can be seen in the

composer’s use of a fourth as a bass pedal. Scene 2 features two instances of this, both times

when the young and anxious Duchess-to-be mistakenly believes that she hears the Duke

approaching. Figure 3.3 shows the first of these, wherein the cello sustains an E2-A2 perfect

fourth while the clarinets and brass play A-major triads above. Passages governed by open fifth

harmonies are also not uncommon. Figure 3.4 shows an excerpt from such a passage in Scene 4,

wherein the harpist’s open fifths, built above a perfect fourth, accompany the Duchess’s slowly

intensifying advances on the waiter. As the Duchess’s defensive response in Scene 6 draws to a

close, the accompanying harmony thins to a bare perfect fifth in low strings and brass (see figure

3.5). Figure 3.6 shows one last example from the beginning of the final scene of the opera. Here

the Duchess and the hotel manager begin their dialogue above a very low perfect fourth pedal in

the piano and double bass.

 87

Figure 3.1. Parallel perfect intervals, trochaic rhythm in Scene 1, mm. 249-255.

Figure 3.2. Parallel perfect intervals, trochaic rhythm in Scene 4, mm. 94-7.
 88

Figure 3.3. A-major triads above perfect fourth bass, Scene 2, bar 55-6.

Figure 3.4. Open perfect interval harmonies built above perfect fourths, Scene 4, mm. 198-201.

Figure 3.5. Open fifth harmony in Scene 6, mm. 450-5.

Figure 3.6. Perfect fourth as pedal in Scene 8, opening bars.

 89

This last example also serves as a good segue into an exploration of one final

manifestation of Adès’s penchant for perfect intervals in Powder Her Face. Adès frequently uses

these intervals to fulfill a sort of boundary function for a given unit of music. A perfect interval

thus often serves as either an initiation of a phrase or section, or as a culminating endpoint of the

unit. The melody which pervades much of the overture offers a clear, concise example of this.

Figure 3.7 shows one phrase from the melody alongside an aligned cycle analysis of the same.

Starting from the opening perfect fourth, Adès aligns five onsets of an interval-11 cycle with

those of an interval-10 cycle. The composer swaps the cycles between the two voices of the

clarinet duet at bar 23, allowing the resultant dyad to close the phrase with the same perfect

fourth interval which began it. In similar fashion, Adès opens the first section of Scene 8 with the

perfect fourth bass pedal shown in figure 3.6. The entire opening dialogue between the Duchess

and the Hotel Manager culminates in bar 78 on a perfect fourth pedal in the low bass register.

The interval simultaneously begins a new section—an interlude to the Duchess’s soliloquizing

aria—whose harmony is governed by an (i-10, T5(i-10), i-11) aligned cycle configuration (see

figure 3.8). True to his professed fascination with perfect fourths, Adès maintains the interval in

the lowest registral position throughout the passage. Adès musically punctuates the formal

sections of Scene 3 in similar fashion. Comprised of the Waitress’s “fancy aria,” Scene 3 divides

into sections marked by references to the Duchess (“Fancy being her,” “She doesn’t look happy,”

“Just like her. Just fancy being her.”) Figure 3.9 shows an excerpt and analysis of the end of the

penultimate section—a bare perfect interval with the fourth in the lowest register—which elides

with the beginning of the final section of the aria, characterized by another (i-10, T5(i-10), i-11)

aligned cycle configuration. As a side note, the reader will recall from the previous chapter that

these two aligned cycle passages are no isolated examples. T5 is, after all, the most common
 90

transposition operator used in doubling the interval cycles which saturate the score of Powder

Her Face—further attestation to Adès’s predilection for perfect intervals.

Figure 3.7. Perfect fourth as initial and terminal phrase boundary, Overture, mm. 20-5.

Figure 3.8. “Elided cadence:” Perfect fourth concluding one section, beginning the next in scene 8, mm. 76-83.
 91

Figure 3.9. Open fifth as concluding/initiating sonority in scene 3, mm. 83-8.

Perfect intervals seem like a natural choice for an initiating or culminating sonority in a

music which parallels tonality in some respects because they offer a close analogue to the

stability of triads and tonic harmony. Adès however is an avowed disbeliever in stability, musical

or otherwise. Reflecting on his most fundamental musical concerns he has stated:

I’m finding more and more that the most interesting issue is stability. That’s what
animates everything in music—stability and instability. I’ve been asking myself:
is there such a thing as absolute stability in music, or in anything? I came to the
conclusion that the answer is no: where there is life, there is no stability.
However, a lot of musical material—maybe all—tends to desire stability or
resolution of some kind…
That's the way I understand everything in history, in musical history. The music
we listen to is the residue of an endless search for stability. I think you can make a
sort of illusion of stability in a piece; you can fix it in a certain way…
You could argue that a given interval is stable, like a perfect fifth or something.
But it’s not, to me. The piece can be trying to resolve a tension between two
ideas, to resolve them ideally into one thing. But in my case, I can hear a single
note and feel all the directions it wants to move in. It might be something in the
room that makes it want to move, something in the nature of the way it is played,
or a quality inside me at that moment; but essentially, the note is alive and
therefore unstable. If I put a note under the microscope I feel I can see millions,
trillions of things.13

The inescapable reality of instability is apparent in passages throughout Powder Her Face such

as those shown in figures 3.8 and 3.9. The perfect intervals with which they begin are not some
13
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 1-2.
 92

hierarchically superior sonority. They are not centers of harmonic gravity, so to speak, in these

passages and others like them. They are simply one onset of a particular configuration of aligned

cycles which will be succeeded by another, which will in turn be succeeded by another, and so

on. No point in the aligned cycle configuration is any more or less stable than the next as they all

give way to their successors and the cyclical pattern can theoretically repeat ad infinitum. But

even in the face of knowing that perfect intervals, especially as points in an aligned cycle

configuration, are not inherently stable, the fact remains that Adès uses them as though they were

by treating them as boundary points in phrases and sections like those already illustrated. In this

way, Adès “mourn[s] no more over music / That is so much motionless sound…and is empty of

shadows;” he is a “harmonious skeptic” whose “skeptical music…glisten[s] again with motion”

and is “full of shadows.”14

Fetish Notes

In discussing his concept of “fetish notes” with Tom Service, Adès reveals that he still

thinks musically in terms of keys—an additional intersection with tonality. Chapter Two’s

epigraph appropriated Adès’s colorful term “fetish” as a springboard into a description of the

composer’s core pitch-generating techniques. The reader will recall that Adès’s intended

meaning of the term was that “specific pitches become fetish objects, which are returned to and

rubbed by the composer all the time[, filling] a crucial function across whole structures…It

doesn’t matter what key we’re in, or what's happening around it in terms of the context of the

music—that note on that instrument.”15 Such treatment of a specific pitch is evident throughout

the opera in Adès’s special emphasis on B-flat.

14
Stevens, Collected Poems, 129-30.
15
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 48, italics added.
 93

Figure 2.13a demonstrated how Adès generates the three chord succession which opens

Scene 6 from an (i-10, T5(i-10), i-11) configuration of aligned cycles. The composer repeats

these initial harmonies across the first 9 bars over a low B-flat pedal tone played by double bass

and piano muted with Blu-Tac (see figure 3.10). This passage punctuates Scene 6, returning

when the Duchess enters the courtroom in bars 100-112, and again when she vehemently

announces her dramatic exit in bars 456-461. But the presence of a low, sustained B-flat in the

courtroom scene goes beyond these three instances. A B-flat pedal tone also accompanies the

entrance of the Judge in bars 113-119 (see figure 3.11), his biting indictment of the Duchess in

bars 306-11 (see figure 3.12), and the opening and closing sections of his aria in bars 112-129

and 322-4 respectively (figure 3.13 shows an excerpt from the latter). By creating a virtual

omnipresence of B-flat throughout the condemnatory judgment scene, Adès accrues to the pitch

special significance. B-flat becomes a symbol of the Duchess’s impending doom.

Figure 3.10. B-flat (A-sharp) as pedal tone in Scene 6, mm. 1-9.

 94

Figure 3.11. B-flat pedal for entrance of Judge, Scene 6, bars 113-119.

Figure 3.12. B-flat pedal below the Duchess’s indictment in Scene 6, bars 306-11.
 95

Figure 3.13. B-flat pedal under close of Judge’s aria in Scene 6, bars 322-4.

The composer emphasizes B-flat in other ways as well, often pairing it with, and at times

pitting it against D. For instance, as shown previously in figure 2.1, the opening “signature scale”

which runs at length across bars 3-6 of the overture begins its descent from D6 and includes at its

tail end a full B-flat major triad. The opening two notes of the Carlos Gardel quotation, shown in

figure 1.8b, are, significantly, D and B-flat. The first two triads accompanying the ensuing tango

in bars 14-5 of the overture are D minor and B-flat minor. The closing bars of the first act, the

beginning of which were shown in figure 2.8b, sustains notes from a “signature scale” which

spell out a B-flat minor triad while simultaneously sustaining the dissonant D from the scale as

well as the E just above it (which ultimately descends via glissando to the D, played ethereally

by a cello harmonic). If Adès makes B-flat a symbol of doom, pairing it so often with D raises

the question of what the latter pitch, triad, or key symbolizes. The composer writes the most

plausible answer in Scene 2 in another extensive intersection with tonal musical thinking, this

time, specifically with another unique usage of his “signature scale.”

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Intersection with the “Signature Scale”

The answer comes in the imitation Jack Buchanan song in Scene 2. The passage features

an extensive section in which an inverted form of the signature scale intersects with functional

tonal materials. Beginning in bar 215, the accompaniment supporting the Lounge Lizard’s solo is

reduced to clarinet, strings, and piano. The ensemble proceeds as before along a functional

harmonic progression, in a steady harmonic rhythm, with a clearly identifiable Roman numeral

analysis (shown below the orchestral reduction staff in figure 3.14). The chords are all colored

by the inverted signature scale played by the pianist beginning in the bass on B1, strictly

followed without any octave transpositions (shown on the lowest staff in figure 3.14.) Each onset

of the expanding, ascending interval series follows the previous at the same rate as the harmonic

rhythm—one per bar. Adès’s strict adherence to the interval pattern necessitates a number of

altered chord tones in the chord progression. For instance, the C-natural, D, and F-natural as

second, third, and fourth members of the series strip the leading tone from the dominant chord

leading to the tonic of m. 219 in the first two instances, and raise its chordal 5th a semitone in the

last. The F-natural at the end of the series in m. 226 similarly colors the structural dominant

while the G-sharp in m. 221 adds a sixth above the root of the secondary dominant to the

supertonic, and the F-sharp in m. 225 adds a chordal 9th to the tonicized predominant. These

altered tones are wholly accountable to Adès’s infiltration of a functionally tonal progression

with his inverted signature scale. In brushing up against tonal materials, the composer’s personal

compositional technique yields an idiosyncratic synthesis—irrational, yet functional.

The song is in D major, underscored by the presence of the corresponding key signature

in the score. It is a love song praising the beauty of the young Duchess-to-be. The song serves as

the basis of the electrician’s parody in Scene 1 (bars 147-236), and the Duchess herself sings
 97

Figure 3.14. Inverted signature scale in functionally tonal passage from Scene 2, mm. 215-227
 98

excerpts of it in Scene 8 (in bars 177-182, when she is lost in reverie, and in bars 285-318 in her

attempted seduction of the hotel manager.) In this way, Adès seems to associate D with the

Duchess’s nostalgia, her longing for her glory days, and her living in a fantasy world where she

believes her glory and powers of beauty still exist. D then is a symbol for the lie the Duchess

wants to believe and B-flat is the symbol of cold reality and her imminent doom.

Intersections with Aligned Cycles

Triads

The alignment of an interval-10 cycle and its T3 transpositional equivalent with an

interval-11 cycle and its T4 transpositional equivalent, described in the previous chapter, appears

in every scene of Powder Her Face. From a theoretical standpoint, in limiting oneself to just

those four elements—an interval-10 cycle, an interval-11 cycle, a T4 operation, and a T3

operation—there are 4 possible arrangements (see figure 3.15). Of these four arrangements, there

are twelve different permutations—one for each possible starting pitch-class of the aligned

interval-11 cycles, yielding a total of 48 possible configurations. Figure 3.16a shows a concise

illustration of one such possibility.16 The outermost circles read clockwise contain the interval-10

cycle and its T3 equivalent. The innermost circles contain the interval-11 cycle and its T4

equivalent. Each position on the clock face, so to speak, represents the resultant vertical

sonorities with prime forms labelled on the perimeter of the circle. One can alter the pitch

content of the harmonies generated by these aligned cycles by changing the pitch class on which

the interval-11 cycles begin. In figure 3.16, this is illustrated by rotating the innermost circles,

16
In the following discussion, I borrow the term “aligned cycle space” as well as its elegant presentation method
from Philip Stoecker. For more on aligned cycle spaces and their use in other of Adès’s works, see Philip Stoecker,
“Aligned Cycles in Thomas Adès’s Piano Quintet,” Music Analysis 33, no. 1 (2014): 32-64; Philip Stoecker,
“Harmony, Voice Leading, and Cyclic Structures in Thomas Adès’s ‘Chori,’” Music Theory and Analysis 2, no. 2
(October 2015): 204-18, and, in particular, Philip Stoecker, “Aligned Cycle Spaces,” Journal of Music Theory 60,
no. 2 (October 2016): 181-212.
 99

while holding the interval-10 cycles on the outermost circles stationary. Figures 3.16b and c

demonstrate two such possibilities. It is significant that while the pitch content of the aligned

cycle harmonic space changes under such a transformation, the family of set classes does not

change but is identical for all 48 possible configurations. Each of these aligned cycle

configurations thus contains among its resultant sonorities one major triad, one minor triad, one

half diminished seventh, and one major-minor seventh sonority. Adès exploits this intersection

with the materials of functional tonality to dramatic effect.

Figure 3.15. The four possible i-10, i-11, T3, T4 aligned cycle arrangements: a) “Even” whole-tone scale with T3

equivalent - (i-11, T4(i-11), i-10, T3(i-10)); b) “Odd” whole-tone scale with T3 equivalent- (i-11, T4(i-11), i-10,

T3(i-10)); c) “Odd” whole-tone scale with T4 equivalent - (i-11, T3(i-11), i-10, T4(i-10)); d) “Even” whole-tone

scale with T4 equivalent - (i-11, T3(i-11), i-10, T4(i-10))

It is significant that of the 48 possible configurations of the (x, T3(x), y, T4(y)) aligned

cycle space, Adès only uses four of them, and two of these to a much more limited extent than
 100

Figure 3.16a. Aligned cycle space: i-10 cycle and its T3 equivalent on the outer two circles; i-11 cycle and its T4

equivalent on the inner two circles; prime forms of the pitch-class sets from the resultant sonorities on the outside.

Figure 3.16b. I-11 cycles from figure 3.2a rotated 4 positions counterclockwise.
 101

Figure 3.16c. I-11 cycles from figure 3.2b rotated 1 additional position counterclockwise.

the other two. In all cases, the interval-10 cycle is always subjected to the T3 operation, while the

interval-11 cycle is always subjected to the T4 operation. In three of the four cases, including the

most extensive ones, the interval-10 cycle comprises the “even” whole tone scale. From the first

scene through the first half of the fifth scene, all instances of this aligned cycle configuration as

governing harmonic space utilize the one shown in figure 3.16a. The space is characterized by

the inclusion of a B-flat minor triad, an A-flat major triad, an E half-diminished seventh, and a B

major-minor seventh (occupying the 7 o’clock, 12 o’clock, 10 o’clock, and 9 o’clock positions

on the clock face of figure 3.16a respectively). Dramatically, this harmonic space is frequently

associated with the Duchess’s delusions putting her out of touch with reality.

Recall the passage from Scene 1 shown in figure 2.15a which begins with a vacillation

between the E half-diminished and the D minor-major seventh (10 o’clock and 11 o’clock on the

clock face of figure 3.16a) before proceeding in bar 370 to the A-flat major sonority at the 12
 102

o’clock position, the (0236) at 1 o’clock, the (0135) at 2 o’clock, and the (014)s at 3 and 4

o’clock. All told, Adès moves the harmony through seven positions on the clock face: 10 o’clock

through 4 o’clock. Meanwhile, the aged Duchess, fresh from demanding the Maid and

Electrician for a clean fur coat and her perfume, sings: “When they come for me, when they see

me, won’t they be silenced, won’t they be struck dumb and long to be folded to the expense and

money of my cladded breast?”17 By this point in her life, perhaps unbeknownst to her, her beauty

and her wealth have faded, yet she delusionally continues to find comfort and confidence in

them. These lines in part undergird Adès’s assessment of the Duchess’s narrative. Of her, the

composer says she has

become a recluse, because her life has closed one door after another and the
Duchess has trapped herself in every department, so she retreats into a world of
perfume and fantasy and memory. The instability in [Powder Her Face] comes
from the gap between what she wants to remember and what actually happened,
because she sees it all as this glorious pageant, but that’s not true…But then I was
hoping there would be a sense that one was fleetingly returning her glory to her
life, just through the extravagance of the music in some places, through harmony
itself. Then that is stripped away.18

This family of harmonies is thus associated with and reflects the unstable incongruity of the

Duchess’s deluded perception of the reality of her situation. Sonorities in this harmonic space—

triads or otherwise—are not points of stability with a greater or lesser harmonic-gravitational

force. They are merely positions on a cyclical clock face whose pattern was devised a priori.

They succeed one after another but do not progress to or from one another in functional terms.

Nonetheless, the sonorities themselves are homophonous with chords which, in other musical

contexts, do progress or exhibit harmonic functionality. Thus, in Powder Her Face, Adès retains

a harmonic veneer on the surface of the music suggesting a memory of the Duchess’s former

glory.

17
Hensher, Powder Her Face, 8.
18
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 60-1.
 103

Adès harmonically connects the end of the “fancy aria” and the third interlude with the

same traversal of this harmonic space. Figure 2.15b showed the relevant analytical reduction: the

Maid sings her final phrase along disjunct arpeggiations of an E half-diminished chord (10

o’clock position of figure 3.16a), then a D minor-major seventh (11 o’clock), and the orchestra

continues successively through the same seven positions of the aligned cycle configuration as the

passage just discussed from the first scene. This concluding section of the Scene 3 summarizes

the Maid’s cynicism toward wealth and its corruption of the Duchess’s happiness and humanity.

Thus, the harmonic space is further associated with the status which breeds the Duchess’s

contempt of the middle classes (which she articulates in Scenes 6 and 7)—the status and power

which she will continue to delusionally believe in years after it has faded.

The second large musical section in Scene 2 features the same aligned cycle harmonic

space and a similar dramatic situation. Set 54 years prior to scene one, the Duchess begins to

build what would become her isolating fantasy world of wealth, status, beauty, and luxury.

Figure 3.17a shows bars 99-105 and an analytical reduction of the same. Here, the harmonic

succession completes a full revolution around the cycle multiple times. The clarinets and horn

unfold a two-voice contrapuntal texture, all pitches of which come from the aligned cycle

configuration (though Adès occasionally omits pitches from some sonorities). This space is again

associated with the Duchess’s detachment from reality, a point emphasized in the libretto as

Adès and Hensher insist that this passage “is an aria for the Duchess and a simultaneous duet

between Electrician as Lounge Lizard and Maid as Confidante. Not a terzetto.”19 The Duchess

inhabits her own world while her two companions inhabit one closer to reality. While the

Duchess sings of her anxiousness to woo the Duke and enumerates his qualities, her companions

discuss the Duke’s darker side and his laughter at the death of one “Poppy,” a former lover. This
19
Hensher, Powder Her Face, 6.
 104

ominous portent of the Duchess’s own future with the Duke is underscored by the brass

instruments accenting with double eighth notes the B-flat minor triad portion of the aligned

cycles with every repetition (see third beat of bar 99, first beat of bar 103, third and fourth beats

of bar 105, etc.) Thus, not only is this aligned cycle space further associated with the Duchess’s

delusions, but the B-flat minor triad found within it begins to accrue its associative meaning of

doom in the second scene.

Adès makes use of the same harmonic space in Scene 4, when the Duchess is at the

height of her glory, at the moment when the waiter enters the Duchess’s room. Figure 3.17b

shows a reduction of the accompanying strings parts. Adès uses six sonorities from the space,

albeit out of their usual order. If the first four scenes are an exposition of the aligned cycle

configuration shown in figure 3.16a, things start to change in Scene 5. Much of the beginning of

the scene can be understood as a chaconne on the five sonorities from the 9 o’clock to the 1

o’clock positions on figure 3.16a (recall figure 2.15c). Life continues as normal for the Duchess,

at least as far as the Duke is concerned as he becomes involved with his own extra-marital

mistress. By rehearsal W however, the Duke has caught on to his mistress’s insinuations that the

Duchess is unfaithful. This discovery marks the beginning of an acceleration toward the

Duchess’s downfall. Mirroring this shift, Adès abandons the aligned cycle configuration of

figure 3.16a which has dominated passages controlled by such a harmonic scheme through the

first half of Scene 5. At bar 370, with the mistress’s words “Very well. If you want to know the

truth. If you want to know what’s going on,”20 Adès adopts the (i-10, T3(i-10), i-11, T4(i-11))

aligned cycle configuration in figure 3.16b. Figure 3.18 shows relevant bars with an aligned

cycle analysis on the lower staff showing the slow harmonic shifting between the three sonorities

represented by the 1 o’clock through 3 o’clock positions of figure 3.16b.

20
Ibid. 27.
 105

Figure 3.17a. (i-10, T3(i-10), i-11, T4(i-11)) aligned cycle configuration in scene 2, mm. 99-105.
 106

Figure 3.17b. (i-10, T3(i-10), i-11, T4(i-11)) aligned cycle configuration in Scene 4, mm. 154-160; lines between

staves show the displacement of the sonorities from their “usual” order.

Figure 3.18. (i-10, T3(i-10), i-11, T4(i-11)) aligned cycle configuration in Scene 5, bars 376-390; harmonic space

shown in figure 3.16b, i-11 cycles rotated 4 positions counterclockwise from figure 3.16a.
 107

Figure 3.18. cont’d.

 108

The second act presents the Duchess’s condemnation in the courtroom scene, her

lamenting 15 years later the demise of the haute-culture she once knew, and finally her expulsion

from the posh hotel suite in which she lived for so long. Just as Scene 5 contains the shift in the

Duchess’s fortunes, accompanied by a shift in the harmonic landscape, the second act settles into

the Duchess’s headlong descent to her fate and the characteristic aligned cycle space in the final

three scenes settles into the one shown in figure 3.16c. Figure 3.19 shows a reduction of the

string accompaniment to the entrance of the Judge in bars 113-119 of Scene 6. The passage

makes a twofold, embellished traversal of six sonorities—the 12 o’clock to 5 o’clock positions of

figure 3.16c. The voice leading works sometimes through a fourth species rather than first

species alignment of the cycles concerned, the (0148) sonority is omitted initially in bar 116, and

two sonorities are out of their expected position in bar 117, but the aligned cycle space under

consideration clearly still governs the harmony in this passage. Significantly, the score indicates

that it is the “Hotel Manager as Duke” who enters, dons a wig, and then becomes a new

character, “Hotel Manager as Judge.” The boundaries between plaintiff, arbiter, and

executor of justice are thus dissolved and the roles are amalgamated into one person. The aligned

cycle configuration in figure 3.16c characterizes much of the Judge’s tirade aria which follows

his entrance, associating the harmonic space with the Duchess’s antagonists and her rapidly

impending fate.

In Scene 7, the same aligned cycle configuration makes intermittent appearances in the

Duchess’s long complaint about the fall of the culture which made her glory days in beauty and

aristocratic luxury possible. Figure 3.20 shows a rapid traversal by clarinets and viola through

seven positions on the clockface of figure 3.16c (9 o’clock through 3 o’clock). Finally, in Scene

8, the passage accompanying the entrance of the hotel manager (recall figure 2.15d) is
 109

Figure 3.19. (i-10, T3(i-10), i-11, T4(i-11)) aligned cycle configuration in scene 6, bars 113-119; harmonic space

shown in figure 3.16c, i-11 cycles rotated 1 position counterclockwise from figure 3.16b.

harmonically generated from three and a half full circumnavigations of the aligned cycle

configuration shown in figure 3.16c. The B-flat major sonority accented in bars 10, 14, 17, and

19 and the contrapuntal texture of layered, disjunct lines clearly hearkens back to the twin

passage in Scene 2 (see figure 3.17a). The Duchess’s doom in the final scene is no longer a

looming spectre but is embodied in the Hotel Manager and this transformation is reflected in the

shift of the harmonic space generated by this aligned cycle configuration from one

accommodating a B-flat minor sonority (figure 3.16a) to one which includes a B-flat major

sonority (figure 3.16c).

Alternate Routes

If the inclusion of sonorities homophonous with triads and seventh chords in Adès’s (i-

10, T3(i-10), i-11, T4(i-11)) aligned cycle configurations failed to make the intersection with

tonal materials evident enough, the composer makes the intersection impossible to miss in Scene
 110

Figure 3.20. Harmonic space from figure 3.16c in scene 7, bar 150.

5 by occasionally reinterpreting the (0258) sonority at the 9 o’clock position of figure 3.16a as a

functional dominant seventh chord by resolving it accordingly. In the ensuing functional

harmonic progression, the dominant seventh is again reinterpreted as a pivot back into the

aligned cycle configuration from whence it originally came. One relevant passage and its

analysis are shown in figure 3.21. Bars 18-20 are derived from the succession from the 9 o’clock

to the 11 o’clock positions of the harmonic space shown in figure 3.16a, followed by a similar

threefold succession of sonorities from 10 o’clock to 12 o’clock, with the arrival of the A-flat

triad made all the more emphatic by the addition of an additional pair of aligned cycles played by

the accordion descending from a higher register joining that of the piano into the downbeat of bar

25. After proceeding one final position around the clock face, Adès backs the harmonic

succession up once again to the (0258) at the 9 o’clock position, but this time reinterprets the

sonority as a B dominant seventh, resolving it to its tonic at bar 30 and beginning a brief phrase

fragment which progresses through bar 38. When the suspended fourth over the B dominant

chord resolves to the third of the chord at bar 37, the chord is reinterpreted not as a dominant
 111

Figure 3.21. Functional reinterpretation/resolution of aligned cycle sonorities in Scene 5, bars 18-42.

seventh but as the 9 o’clock position of the harmonic space shown in figure 3.16a, and the

sonorities generated by this aligned cycle configuration succeed one after the next as before. In

this way, the sonorities reminiscent of tonal materials generated by Adès’s aligned cycles not
 112

Figure 3.21. cont’d.

only mark a point of intersection between the two musical worlds, but they occasionally act as a

bridge between them across which Adès travels with ease.

 113

Figure 3.21. cont’d.

Motivic Coherence

One final intersection between Adès’s musical thinking and that of the past is not strictly,

so to speak, on tonality’s private property. Adès imbued the score to Powder Her Face with a

great degree of motivic coherence and economy. Many of the opera’s motives only appear within

a single scene. A small number of them though connect moments across the entire work and thus
 114

Figure 3.21. cont’d.

acquire meaning in a way similar to the composer’s musical borrowings, fetish notes, and his

preferred aligned cycle configurations. These connections help constitute what Adès calls the

“inner music” of a piece, which is essential in holding up the weight of a lengthy work like

Powder Her Face. For Adès, such “inner music” might be found in “a note that recurs, or
 115

anything that connects,” and, he claims, is often a serendipitous byproduct of the compositional

process:

More and more, I keep finding connections, especially in longer pieces, that I’d
never noticed during the composition. For example, there are words that are set to
exactly the same notes at the beginning and end of Powder Her Face: the words
‘Hold me’ in the gramophone tune in Scene 2, and ‘Hold me’ at the end of Scene
8, are set to the same notes, in an unrelated context, and I wasn’t aware of it when
I was composing it.21

Figure 3.22a. “Hold me” set to falling fifth, B-E, Scene 2, mm. 291-2.

Figure 3.22b. “Hold me” set to falling fifth, B-E, Scene 8, mm. 287-8.

In the former instance, the words “hold me” are sung as flirtatious affection, in the latter, as a

desperate attempt at loveless seduction. Subtle as this example is, it is clear both that Adès values

such connections in his music and that such motivic connections can help to underscore the

opera’s central themes. As other motives function similarly throughout the score, they merit

attention at this point in the analysis.

Adès associates a repeated descending semitone—a sigh—with the Duchess’s erotic

behavior. He prepends and appends the “erotic sigh” motive with embellishment when it appears

in Scene 4, including the instrumental introduction to the scene (see figure 3.23b). This version

of the motive saturates the scene, as the central action is the explicit display of the Duchess’s

sexual act. Figure 3.23c shows just the first appearance of the motive in the singers’ parts in

Scene 4. Adès uses the motive again in Scene 5 to highlight the bitter irony of the Duke’s trust in

21
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 130-2.
 116

the Duchess’s faithfulness as he engages in his own extra-marital liaison—perhaps simultaneous

with the Duchess’s actions in Scene 4 (see figure 3.23d). The trumpet, accordion, and violins

punctuate the judge’s tirade in Scene 6 with the “erotic sigh” motive as the judge recounts the

Duchess’s promiscuous sexual acts which ultimately led her to the courtroom (see figure 3.23e,

lower staff). But the first instance of the motive in the opera associates the sigh not with

eroticism but with the Maid’s derisive laughter in Scene 1 (see figure 3.23a). Just as the

Duchess’s erotic acts are devoid of love and commitment, so too is Adès’s portrayal of his

protagonist’s downfall devoid of empathy.

Figure 3.23a. “Erotic sigh” motive in Scene 1, mm. 128-132.

Figure 3.23b. “Erotic sigh” motive, with prepended and appended embellishment, in Scene 4, mm. 12-16

Figure 3.23c. First instance of the “erotic sigh” in vocal parts, Scene 4, mm. 235-239.

Figure 3.23d. “Erotic sigh” motive in Scene 5, mm. 105-113.

 117

Figure 3.23e. “Erotic sigh” motive in Scene 6, mm. 272-7.

Adès associates another short motive which begins like a sigh—a descending semitone

followed by a descending minor sixth—with servants bringing drinks. In the first scene, the

Duchess sings it in complaining about the Maid’s error in failing to bring milk with her tea (see

figure 3.24a). In Scene 4, the Duchess again sings the motive in ordering wine from room service
 118

(see figure 3.24b). The Duke takes up the motive in the following scene in requesting more wine

from his mistress (see figure 3.24c). On the one hand, the motive helps to delineate the higher

class from the lower. On the other, Adès uses the motive as a musical pun when drinks are

mentioned.

Figure 3.24a. “Beverage” motive, Scene 1, mm. 274-8.

Figure 3.24b. “Beverage” motive, Scene 4, mm. 92-3.

Figure 3.24c. “Beverage” motive, Scene 5, mm. 135-8.

Adès initially associates another short motive with the pitch B at the beginning of the

opera. Comprised of two repeated, heavily accented eighth notes in a low register, the “fate

motive,”22 as Hélène Cao calls it, first appears on B1 in the bass saxophone part throughout the

first interlude (see figure 3.25a). This interlude elides the conclusion of the opening scene with a

segue into the series of flashbacks that chronicle the rise and the fall of the Duchess. In the

22
Cao, Le Voyageur, 72.
 119

earlier instance, perhaps at the sound of approaching footsteps, the Maid, Electrician, and

Duchess all anticipate someone’s imminent arrival. The two hotel workers correctly believe this

to be the Hotel Manager coming to announce the Duchess’s eviction, while the old courtesan

imagines the Duke is coming back to restore her to her former glory. Thus, Adès seems to begin

associating the “fate motive” not simply with the entrance of the Duchess’s symbolic death, but

with the whole history of events that led her to that doom.

Adès’s further uses of the motive seem to corroborate this. Figure 3.17a showed the “fate

motive” in Scene 2, with the characteristic heavy accents underscoring the B-flat minor portion

of the aligned cycle configuration. This same union of the “fate motive” with B-flat occurs at the

end of the scene when the Duke enters (see figure 3.25b), and continues into the interlude (see

figure 3.25c), foreshadowing the troublesome marriage that will ultimately ruin the Duchess.

Adès uses the “fate motive” again in the fourth interlude, following the example of the Duchess’s

sexual behavior which spoils her relationship with the Duke. Low brass, accordion, and double

bass play a version of it on G and F at bars 342 and 344. The double bass is joined by piano,

harp, and accordion at bars 350 and 351 on A and G before the full ensemble plays the most

emphatic version of the “fate motive” on a B-flat minor triad at bar 356 (see figure 3.25d).

Echoes of it can be heard in a higher register in the accordion and clarinets in bars 361-4.

Figure 3.25a. Scene 1/Interlude 1, mm. 403-407. “Fate” motive in bass saxophone.
 120

Figure 3.25b. “Fate” motive in piano, winds, and harp, end of scene 2, mm. 320-4.
 121

Figure 3.25c. “Fate” motive in piano, harp, and accordion in Interlude 2, rehearsal AA.

Figure 3.25d. “Fate” motive in interlude 4, bar 356.

 122

Figure 3.25e. “Fate” motive, scene 8, bar 321.

The final instances of the “fate motive” accompany the hotel manager in Scene 8. Figure

2.15d showed the motive accompanying the entrance of the hotel manager—a twin passage to

the anticipated entrance of the Duke in Scene 2 shown in figure 3.17a. In the opening of Scene 8,

the Duchess pleads with the hotel manager, but he is cold and firm. At bar 73, as he leaves the

Duchess alone in the room, the “fate motive” comes back on a B dominant 7. When he returns to

inform her that her car is here, in bar 321, it appears one final time, on a B-flat major triad

(played by clarinets, piano, double bass; see figure 3.25e). Thus the “fate motive” both

punctuates key events leading up to her end and underscores the arrival of that end’s

personification.

One final motive is a melodic outgrowth of the tango music which dominated the

overture. Characterized by sequential falling sixths and its double neighbor tone melodic

cadence, the “Duchess theme”23 appears twice as part of the electrician’s mocking impersonation

in the opening scene (see figures 3.26a and b). In using the theme twice again as part of the

Duchess’s own reverie toward the end of the first scene (see figures 3.26c and d), Adès thus

firmly associates the Duchess theme not only with the title character generally, but also

23
I borrow the apt label for this motive from Gallon, “Narrativities,” 222.
 123

specifically with her delusions of the permanence of her status, wealth, and sexual power. This

association contributes to understanding the passage in the final scene when the Duchess theme

next returns (see figure 3.26e). Here, the Duchess apparently believes that her advances on the

Hotel Manager will be efficacious in preventing her eviction from the hotel. As all instances of

the Duchess theme up to this point suggest B minor, Adès uses the theme to associate this key

area—in addition to its relative major, D, as discussed earlier—with the Duchess’s delusional

self-perception. The Duchess’s failed dissuasion marks the end of clear references to B minor in

the score. This is significant as Adès has said: “A piece can have more than one ending. My first

opera, Powder Her Face, has three or four endings; different surfaces, different keys in it that

end at different points. And that comes from the nature of the subject.”24 With the end of B

minor coinciding with the failed seduction, Adès musically suggests the dissolution of the

Duchess’s fantasies regarding her power.

Figure 3.26a. “Duchess” theme, Scene 1, mm. 156-165.

Figure 3.26b. “Duchess” theme, Scene 1, mm. 171-178.

Figure 3.26c. “Duchess” theme, Scene 1, mm. 354-361.

24
Adès and Service, Full of Noises, 5.
 124

Figure 3.26d. “Duchess” theme, Scene 1, mm. 375-381.

Figure 3.26e. “Duchess” theme, Scene 8, mm. 308-311.

Figure 3.26f. Tail end of “Duchess” theme, Scene 8 (“Ghost Epilogue”), mm. 396-8.

The tail end of the “Duchess theme” makes one final appearance in the “Ghost epilogue”

following Scene 8 (see figure 3.26f). The Maid and Electrician sing lines borrowed from a

proverb in Blake’s “The Marriage of Heaven and Hell.” This time, rather than suggesting B

minor, the fragmented “Duchess theme” suggests D—the other key area associated with the

Duchess’s glory days and her delusions that they persist in the present. Significantly, although

Adès strongly emphasizes D as a key area in the closing bars,25 D does not persist in this central

position through the opera’s end. Much in the same way that B gives way to C at the end of

Strauss’s Also Sprach Zarathustra, D ultimately gives way to B-flat in the final bars of Powder

Her Face. As the accordion’s high D expires, in the opposite register the low bass clarinets are

25
Note the circle of fifths harmonic progressions which characterize measures 376-398 leading up to the
Electrician’s cadence on D shown in figure 3.26f.
 125

joined by piano and low brass for three final B-flat minor chords. As the composer describes it:

“There are a lot of false bottoms in the harmony and I go through them all in the last pages: that

was the only way I could finish it. Once all of those are closed, there’s a kind of further harmonic

door that’s closed, of the whole opera, and it’s a kind of ad absurdum ending of the piece.”26

Adès set up this ending in the close of the first act which reversed the position of the two keys.

The more emphatic B-flat minor ended, leaving a lone sustained D harmonic on the cello to

conclude the act (recall figure 2.8b). In the end, the Duchess’s living lie crumbles and cold,

unfeeling reality wins.

Compounding the coldness is the fact that the Duchess’s dramatic fall from glory

occurred under the double standards of a staunchly patriarchal society. The Duchess comes to

ruin for her sexual misdeeds while the Duke incurs no punishment for his own infidelity.

Furthermore, the Maid and Electrician paint an unsympathetic tone which bookend the work.

Confronted with this criticism, Adès responded:

It was suggested to me by someone moralistic that I should have ended [Powder

Her Face] with a sort of Triumph of [the Duchess], because it would be more
feminist…But that’s a banal way to deal with the story. It would be untrue and
therefore to me uninteresting. And in any case that lighter finale wasn’t available
to me with the material that I had in Powder Her Face. It had to be a black full
stop, that ending. It’s as if every bit of the scenery on stage is folded up and
packed away, and at the end the hotel room is empty. You know how there is
nothing more final than a room that someone’s lived in after people have been in
and cleared everything out: it’s an image of death.27

John Roeder offers a slightly more favorable interpretation in identifying the “central irony of the

opera: that despite the incorrigible hedonism which portends her tragic downfall, the Duchess of

Argyll is made to seem strangely heroic in the face of the transience, duplicity and ridicule that

26
Adès and Service, Full of Noise, 62.
27
Ibid. 61-2.
 126

swirl around her.”28 Ever the harmonious skeptic, Adès paralleled his pitch-generative methods

in adopting a theme in Powder Her Face that is true to the reality of the human condition, full of

shadows and shapes glistening with motion, however lamentable or ugly they might be.

28
Roeder, “Co-operating Continuities,” 135.
 127

Conclusion

When people start talking about atonal or tonal

or postmodern, or whatever—I’m not being
weird, but I really don’t know what they are
talking about.1

No one has the final word…No one exhausts the

possibilities…Nabokov, in The Gift, pictures
someone who claims there are no mountains left
to climb—only to look up and see a tweedy
Englishman waving cheerfully from a higher
peak.2

Powder Her Face has maintained a continuing appeal since its premiere. At the time of

writing, four different productions are planned for the 2018 calendar year. Adès has also

arranged a set of Dances from Powder Her Face for orchestra (2007), a Lisztian Concert

Paraphrase on Powder Her Face (of which there are two versions, one for piano solo from 2009

and one for two pianos from 2015), and the Powder Her Face Suite for orchestra (2017), all of

which will receive multiple performances across the globe in the coming months.

The foregoing analysis presents ways to hear this music better, to borrow again David

Lewin’s phrase, whether those ways are utilized for theoretical, historical, compositional, or

performative ends. They have application in Adès’s subsequent works as well. For instance, in

The Exterminating Angel Adès includes borrowed material from Bach’s “Sheep May Safely

Graze,” in a similarly veiled, tongue-in-cheek manner as some of the borrowings in Powder Her

Face. While he makes use of certain aligned cycle configurations in his early work, other

variations on the expanding interval theme can be found in Asyla, the Piano Quintet, America: A

Prophecy, and others. This raises questions as to what other means of varying the technique

1
Peter Culshaw, “Don’t Call Me a Messiah: Thomas Adès Talks to Peter Culshaw,” Daily Telegraph, 1 March
2007.
2
Ross, “Roll Over Beethoven.”
 128

Adès has employed and whether or not one can discern an evolution of the technique in Adès’s

works over time. In an interview between acts of the Metropolitan Opera production of The

Exterminating Angel, Adès confessed his continued contentedness with the ubiquity of

instability. By his account, he is “more comfortable on boats”3 than on dry ground. He continues

to reflect this fascination with instability in the harmonic architecture of his compositions, just as

his music betrays his persistent ambivalence toward restrictive musical labels.

Since the techniques and aspects of Adès’s style discussed above find their first extensive

exercise in Powder Her Face—and since they continue and evolve in Adès’s later work—ways

of hearing Powder Her Face better can thus aid in analyzing and hearing Adès’s other music too.

Given the depth and complexity of his music, it remains to be seen what new insights future

analysts will present, just as it remains to be seen how Adès’s style and techniques will continue

to change, how he will continue to be a shaping force in contemporary classical music cultures,

and how his music will influence future generations of musicians. One thing is certain however:

there will always be more to hear and discover. Stevens’s harmonious skeptic is also Nabokov’s

tweedy Englishman.

3
Thomas Adès, interview by Susan Graham, The Exterminating Angel, The Metropolitan Opera Live in HD, 18
November 2017.
 129

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