Introduction
The chapter introduces the general perspective from which I consider the music of Thomas Adès from the beginning of his career up until The Exterminating Angel. Broadly speaking, I frame a consideration of his work as a dialectic, but also synthesis, of a variety of different themes in music of the late twentieth and early twenty-first century. In particular, I orient the reader by briefly considering Adorno’s notion of a Musique Informelle, alongside a theory of cultural production for the twenty-first century known as “metamodernism.” While neither one of these frames of reference totally captures the dynamics of the music that I seek to explore in the chapters that follow, they provide a useful point of departure for considering why Adès’s music has attracted the attention that it has.