This chapter is an examination of Britten’s engagement with progressive musical and aesthetic thought. As a successful and popular composer, Britten is rarely identified as an ‘avant-garde’ artist, yet his career took note of progressive developments from 1930s neoclassicism to 1970s minimalism. For mid-century critics, Britten was a cosmpolitan figure; more recently, his commitment to tonality argues a ‘reactive modernism’, in dialogue with tradition. Britten’s relations to avant-garde thought involve successive historical contexts. In the 1930s, he sought to study with Berg, wrote experimental film soundtracks, and explored neoclassical parody, without abandoning key tonality. In the 1940s, Britten’s music developed greater metric complexity. Britten’s 1950s catalogue increasingly explores a personal twelve-tone thematic idiom, along with non-European percussion sonorities inspired by renewed encounters with Balinese gamelan. Criticising avant-garde ‘complication’ in the 1960s, Britten tempered public scepticism with personal support for British avant-gardists.

The chapter explores two of Adès’s early works – Living Toys for fourteen players (1993) and America: A Prophecy, for soprano solo and orchestra with optional chorus (1999) – from the perspective of gesture as an 'energetic shaping' of sound (after Robert Hatten). Analyses synthesise small-scale events to wider emergent dramatic and expressive networks. The 'volatile' gestural sequence in Living Toys is a function of the score’s overtly programmatic scheme of seven dream-like scenarios, with a returning 'Hero’s' theme centre-stage in a score rich in agent-like instrumental solos. In America, gesture communicates a historical-mythic sequence, evoking the impending catastrophe of the sixteenth-century military conquest of Mayan civilisation by Spanish conquistadors. History runs its awful course in a sequence recounted verbally by the solo soprano as priestess. A gestural perspective elucidates Adès’s large-scale drama of complex images. Fracturings of musical tempo create an image of Mayan calendrical movement: triadic brass music evokes the moment of encounter, a 'battle' scene.

In his Spring Symphony of 1949 Britten approached the conventional theme of seasonal rebirth in a score juxtaposing three solo singers, chorus, boys’ choir and orchestra in an extended form of hybrid genre affiliation. Soon after the success of Peter Grimes, the thirty-two-year-old composer had, in March 1946, accepted from Serge Koussevitzky a commission for a symphony for orchestra with contralto obbligato. The project was overshadowed initially by many pressing deadlines, including the premieres of The Rape of Lucretia and Albert Herring, and a bout of illness. Plans for the piece evolved away from Koussevitzky's initial template towards an essentially choral work with soprano, alto and tenor soloists. Britten at first contemplated a selection of medieval Latin poems but ultimately turned to English poets, inspired, he reported, by the beauty of the spring in his own native Suffolk, ‘the Suffolk of Constable and Gainsborough’. Some idea of the composer's struggle with the Spring Symphony is clear in his comment to Ralph Hawkes soon after completing the sketches in March 1949: ‘I have gone through considerable agony of body and spirit through it’. That he was pleased with the variegated sequence of choral and orchestral textures that finally emerged might be guessed from a remark to his composer friend Grace Williams, that he had been ‘indulging … properly in every kind of extravagance!’. It is possible the quip reflected his excitement at returning to large-scale forces after the relative austerity of the two chamber operas, or that he was thinking about his inclusion of such exotic colours as vibraphone, temple blocks and a cow horn within the large orchestra. The comment, equally, says something about the diverse nature of the work's forty-five-minute scheme, a sequence of twelve separate sections for shifting and distinctive vocal and instrumental groupings, with the full weight of the choral and orchestral tutti heard only in the framing Introduction and Finale.

Britten himself publicly remarked on Mahler's music as an influence on the Spring Symphony (as well as on the War Requiem) in a 1963 interview, flagging Mahler's ‘“ear” for sound’ and ‘sense of form’ as specific promptings.

The communicative power of Britten's music rests in part on an aspect of his style rarely discussed in any depth: the rhythms. Britten was no radical, rhythmically. He did not – as his colleague Michael Tippett did – accommodate post-Stravinskian metric fragmentation to the “sprung” metric irregularities of the Elizabethan madrigal; nor did he – as his nearcontemporary Olivier Messiaen did – organize durations by numerical series, treating rhythm as a musical parameter to be structured separately from the pitch dimension. Britten's music, like Shostakovich's, arguably shows a more pronounced concern with the regular and symmetrical, though such affinities were not always stressed by early press critics: William Glock, in a 1943 Observer column, remarked on the Russian's “vigorous and pointed rhythms expressing the spirit of industrialism,” then turned to his countryman: “By comparison, Britten's world is accidental. His invention is poured into his melody, his long lines, his orchestral colour: the harmonies, which safeguard the first two, can be rather spidery and uncomforting.” The silence regarding Britten's rhythms is representative of a critical line already in place. Only when commentary alights upon one much-mentioned case – that of Purcell's music – does the topic of rhythm arise with any specificity, often amid claims of stylistic “influence.” Britten's operatic characters in Peter Grimes (1945), as Arved Ashby has recently observed, sing “tuneful airs” with lilting dance motions that define personality, bearing, and being: with Grimes himself, “sociopathology is manifest […] as ametricality, as removal from the communal dance,” while the laudanum-addled gossip Mrs. Sedley is all simple and obsessive repetitions.

Boldly stated rhythmic repetitions – for all the critical reticence – are an easily recognized aspect of Britten's rhetorically forthright musical style. The meanings of those repetitions, though, are not simple. In the Chacony of String Quartet No. 2 (completed in 1945 soon after Grimes), the influence of Purcell is again palpably a rhythmic affair. The theme's tensile kicking motions – notated as dotted rhythms – bind the first seven variations into a coherent paragraph, even as the textural interplay of parts shifts rapidly. One finds comparable rhythmic concentration in the scenic realm of Britten's operas, invariably linked to the physical reality of onstage action, or hinting at underlying enigma.

THERE IS NO TYPICAL Simon Holt piece, but it is characteristic of his artistic temperament that each work should address itself to listeners in an uncompromisingly direct way. The audience is often approached forcefully, even vehemently, but also with an undeniable intimacy. As a listener, one detects an urgency of voice; the tone may be confessional or expressionistic, quietly meditative or extrovertly theatrical. Holt's titles have a way of drawing one in immediately to musical worlds that are fantastical yet strikingly precise in referents. Holt's taste for shadowy and nocturnal realms is pronounced, from the early Goethe setting Lunas Zauberschein (1979: H 1) all the way through to an icicle of moon, for orchestra (2014). His attraction to the macabre or grotesque is no less palpable: Era madrugada (1984), for chamber ensemble, takes its Spanish title phrase (‘it was between night and day’) from a Lorca poem whose central image is of a dead man lying in the street with a knife in his chest. The title of the early piano piece Tauromaquia (‘Bullfighting’) denotes ritualised combat, and more specifically alludes to the series of etchings by Goya.

To observe Holt's interest in building pieces around a central image is to speak in fairly literal rather than metaphorical terms. The music somehow communicates, translates or embodies, in its own sounding language, specific images from other arts – poetry, painting, sculpture or film. When translating verbal or pictorial images (or plastic forms) into sound, though, the composer (and his critics, too) will face the obvious separation between the physicality of visual surfaces and objects and the temporality of musical forms. ‘Images’ in sound, my central concern in the present chapter, will remain translations from another artistic sphere, because paintings are confined (in Lessing's formulation) to ‘a single moment of ever-changing nature, and … a single point of view’. The absent spatial or temporal dimensions of musical or visual media do not preclude our recognising the precision with which images might be defined for their respective audiences of listeners and viewers. Approaching the images in Holt's scores, I shall focus first on their time-bound nature, i.e., their definition as figures of rhythm and tempo. The other dimensions of the sounding image to be explored here involve ‘colour’ – a category that in music engages questions of both harmony and of timbre (‘tone colour’) or instrumentation.