Mason Bates / Masonic

"Be it mixing trip-hop and funk at a club or writing a symphonic or chamber work, composer Mason Bates is getting noticed for his straddling of classical music and electronica. ... Young, Juilliard-trained and already celebrated, he's become a fixture not only in concert halls but in the world of electronica as well. ... At a time when symphony orchestras nationwide are trolling for audience magnets - the type of new material that can lure members of generations X and Y along with older subscribers - Bates just might have that bait. "

-Concerto for Two Universes, Donna Perlmutter

"Mason Bates, 30 years old...knows how to command an orchestra just as well as he does his touchpad. Bates's Liquid Interface, a National Symphony commission that received its world premiere last night, surpassed in sheer sonic beauty even the works by Mendelssohn and Tchaikovsky that rounded out the program." -From NSO, Electronic Beauty, Andrew Lindemann

Rehearsing at Cabrillo under Marin Alsop (Photo: Ron Jones)

"Take Mason Bates's Digital Loom for organ and electronics, a centennial commission. Definitely a voice from the younger generation, Bates reimagines the king of instruments as a surreal creature inventing its own space, the illuminated stops flashing like an enormous pinball machine and presided over by the organist as D.J. who programs wild sequences of hip-hop, funk, and ambient electronica" -Peter Davis

"Mason Bates's Digital Loom, for organ and electronics...transformed the hall into something between a decaying cathedral and an East Berlin club." -Alex Ross

With Maestra Marin Alsop at Cabrillo (Photo: Ron Jones)

"Contemporary composers can integrate high-definition recordings of sounds they want to evoke, as Mason Bates does in his cleverly constructed Liquid Interface. The first movement, "Glaciers Calving," begins with an ominous recording of glaciers crashing into the Antarctic Ocean, soon followed by dense, haunting swirls from the strings and electronic beats that accelerate to lively drum and bass rhythms. Mr. Bates's colorful four-movement tone poem, which uses a vast orchestra and electronics to evoke water in both soothing and menacing forms, received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall ... Mr. Bates, who is also a D.J. (working under the name Masonic), has written other works blending classical and electronica. ... For the listener it was like wandering down a road with a string quartet playing on one side and a D.J. spinning on the other.-Vivian Schweitzer

"And never has a Beethoven's Ninth Symphony been so colored by the music that preceded it on the program. Mason Bates' Ode, commissioned by the Phoenix Symphony, takes the argument of the Beethoven and turns it backward ... So that when the Beethoven begins, and plays the music in the proper order, we have a different take on it."

Mason Bates & Robert Moody at the premiere of Rusty Air in Carolina by The Winston-Salem Symphony

"If Mason Bates' Rusty Air in Carolina is any indication, this 30-year-old composer (who is based in the East Bay and has a parallel career as a DJ) also has a voice...A Virginia native who summered as a teenager in South Carolina, his new work recalls sticky Southern nights, filled with the chatter and buzz of katydids and cicadas. ...You could feel the humidity, while luxuriating in Bates' exquisite, almost Impressionistic, atmospherics." -Richard Scheinin

Awarded both a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome and an American Academy in Berlin Prize, Mason Bates composes for a wide variety of media, with a portfolio of orchestral, chamber, theatrical, and electronic works. Busy with both commissions and performance engagements - he has performed his concerto for synthesizer with The Atlanta Symphony and The Phoenix Symphony - he is a member of the acclaimed New York-based Young Concert Artists.

Spanning the classical concert hall to the clubs and lounges where he DJs electronica, his music was hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "lovely to hear and ingeniously constructed."

Just last month, he made his Carnegie Hall debut performing live electronica in the percussion section of The National Symphony in Liquid Interface, a work for large orchestra and electronica premiered last season at The Kennedy Center under the baton of Leonard Slatkin. A 'water symphony' that approaches the topic of climate change, Liquid Interface begins with the sounds of glaciers calving and explores the beautiful, capricious, and destructive power of water. Recently named California Symphony's composer in residence, he will begin a three-year association with the orchestra and its music director, Barry Jekowsky, that will begin with the May premiere of Music From Underground Spaces. His deep association with the musical life of the Bay Area will continue next season, when the San Francisco Symphony under Michael Tilson Thomas premieres The B-Sides and Chanticleer, the famed choral group, premieres Fishermen of Souls. A variety of in-depth articles about his recent work can be found here.

SUMMER FESTIVALS. Mason Bates finished a busy summer bringing his music to no fewer than four music festivals. His Rusty Air in Carolina, for orchestra & electronica, a work commissioned by The Winston-Salem Symphony that marries orchestral sonorities and the white-noise of Southern insects, continues to be programmed by a variety of orchestras around the country, and it was heard this summer under the baton of Marin Alsop at Cabrillo Music Festival and at Eastern Music Festival conducted by Robert Moody. Tanglewood Music Festival invited Bates to create a new work for their Festival of Contemporary Music, leading to the premiere of White Lies for Lomax, and the Greenwich Music Festival premiered Red River, an immersive work for chamber ensemble and electronics on the subject of the Colorado River. The work, premiered by Antares, will be heard this season at the Ravinia Festival.

SPECIAL PROJECTS. This month, Mason Bates launched an important new project bringing classical music to a club audience in a major San Francisco venue. The famed club Mezzanine, host to electroinca and rock artists ranging from De La Soul to Luke Vibert, presented Mercury Soul: An Electro-Acoustic Evening, a collaboration between visual installation artist Anne Patterson and Maestro Benjamin Shwartz of the San Francisco Symphony. Embedding sets of new concert music in an evening of ambient electronica and beautiful, surreal visuals by Patterson, this sold-out event attracted 1,400 people and was the subject of an enormous amount ofpress. (Click here for press & photos.) The project is a major expansion of an event Bates created at Berlin's Roter Salon, one of the cities oldest clubs, which featured live electronica performed by the composer and chamber music performed by The Berlin Philharmonic's Scharoun Ensemble. Having performed in a variety of spaces as a DJ in the San Francisco and Berlin scenes, he has often appeared at venues such as 111 Minna, Varnish, Sip, Fuse, and Temple. In Rome, his sets of trip-hop and funk have been heard at Scarabocchio and Metaverso in Testaccio, a thriving electronica scene tunneled inside an ancient pottery dump. He has performed his live electronica with upright bassist David Arend at the SFMOMA (San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art), the San Jose Jazz Festival, the Doug Fir club in Portland, and many others.

ACOUSTIC WORKS. A variety of purely acoustic works complement his diverse portfolio, including an orchestral prelude to Beethoven's 9th Symphony and a string quartet commissioned by The Naumburg Foundation (click here for a list of works). A great deal of his chamber music has been performed by the musicians of Young Concert Artists, the renown New York organization that launched Emmanuel Ax and Dawn Upshaw, and he maintains an active role in the world of vocal and theatrical music. His California Fictions - an opera set in the heyday of San Francisco's dot-com boom - was recently read as part of New York City Opera's VOX Showcase and will be workshopped this summer at Aspen Music Festival. Raised in Virginia where he studied piano with Hope Armstrong Erb and composition with Dika Newlin, Mason Bates enrolled in the Columbia-Juilliard program in New York City. Earning degrees in music composition and English literature, he studied primarily with John Corigliano, and he also worked under David Del Tredici and Samuel Adler (in addition to playwriting studies under Arnold Weinstein and Kenneth Koch). Now working with Edmund Campion at the University of California, Berkeley, he has found Berkeley's Center For New Music and Audio Technologies (CNMAT) an important influence on his approach to electro-acoustic composition. Awards include a Charles Ives scholarship and fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Jacob Druckman Memorial Prize from Aspen Music Festival, ASCAP and BMI awards, and a Fellowship from Tanglewood. He lives in the San Francisco Bay Area.

Masonic performs live electronica as Benjamin Shwartz conducts at Mercury Soul in San Francisco

August 2, 2008 : Liquid Interface, for orchestra & electronica, is performed by Marin Alsop at the Cabrillo Festival
July 27, 2008 : The National Repertory Orchestra performs Rusty Air in Carolina in Breckenridge, CO
July 24, 2008 : Excerpts from the opera California Fictions are performed at Aspen Music Festivlal
May 23, 2008 : The Claremont Trio performs String Band at Westport Arts Center
May 22, 2008 : Antares gives the NY premiere of Red River at the Chelsea Art Museum
May 20, 2008 : Pianist Eric Huebner gives the NY premiere of White Lies for Lomax at the Tenri Gallery
May 16, 17, 19 2008 : Rusty Air in Carolina, for orchestra & electronica, is performed by the Richmond Symphony, with Mason Bates performing live electronica on drumpad/laptop
May 4&6, 2008 : The California Symphony premieres a new work under the baton of Barry Jekowski
February 10, 2008 : Antares performs Red River, for chamber ensemble & electronica, at the University of Arkansas
February 8, 2008 : Antares performs Red River, for chamber ensemble & electronica, at the Ravinia Festival
February 7, 2008 : Under the baton of Leonard Slatkin, The National Symphony gives the New York premiere of Liquid Interface at Carnegie Hall
February 2, 2007 : BAM Cafe (Brooklyn Academy of Music, NY), post-concert party
February 1, 2008 : San Francisco's famed club Mezzanine presents Mercury Soul, an electro-acoustic evening, featuring live electronica and new concert music in a club environment
January 25, 2008 : The Seattle Chamber Players premiere The Life of Birds on Seattle's On the Boards Festival
November 1, 2007 : Set of live electronica, with MarsBassMan, opening the Festival of New American Music in Sacramento, CA
October 14, 2007 : Tenor William Ferguson performs Songs From the Plays at Wilson Center Concert Hall at Washington & Lee University, VA
October 7, 2007 : Tenor William Ferguson performs Songs From the Plays on the Marilyn Horne Foundation's Wings of Song series at the Santa Barbara Museum of Art
Appearing on the cover of the UK's MUSO Magazine

August 12, 2007 : Flutist Mimi Stillman performs Elements at the National Flute Association Convention in Albuquerque, NM
August 11, 2007 : Rusty Air in Carolina, for orchestra & electronica, is performed by the Cabrillo Festival Orchestra under the baton of Marin Alsop, with Mason Bates performing live electronica on drumpad/laptop
July 31, 2007 : White Lies for Lomax, for piano solo, is premiered by Jacob Rhodebeck on Tanglewood's Festival of Contemporary Music
July 19, 2007 : Maestro Robert Moody conducts Rusty Air in Carolina at Eastern Music Festival
June 3, 2007 : Antares premieres a major new chamber work by Mason Bates at the Greenwich Music Festival, CT
May 6, 2007 : Chicago Chamber Musicians perform several works of Mason Bates at Gottlieb Hall
March 26, 2007 : Tenor William Ferguson performs Songs From the Plays at University of Richmond's Modlin Center for the Arts
March 24, 2007 : Conductor James Gaffigan leads the New York Philharmonic in Rusty Air in Carolina, for orchestra & electronica
March 24, 2007 : With conductors Stuart Sims and Dustin Soiseth and musicians from CSU Stanislaus, Mason Bates curates an evening of his concert music and electronica at the State Theater in Modesto, California on a concert that includes Omnivorous Furniture, for sinfonietta & electronica.

February 22-24, 2007 : The National Symphony premieres Liquid Interface, for orchestra & electronica, under the baton of Leonard Slatkin

Mason Bates performing on drumpad/laptop in the percussion section of The Winston-Salem Symphony

February 13, 2007 :Composers Inc. performs From Amber Frozen, for string quartet, at the Green Room in San Francisco

February 4, 2007 : Dinosaur Annex performs String Band, for prepared piano trio, in Boston

November 17, 2006 : The Claremont Trio performs String Band on the Wisconsin Lutheran College's Classics Series in Milwaukee, WI

November 10-11, 17-19 2006 : Zeitgeist presents Rodeopteryx at Studio Z in St. Paul, MN

November 11-12, 2006 : The Mobile Symphony premieres Overture to California Fictions at the Saenger Theater (two performances)

October 8, 2006 : Mason Bates joins Alex Ross of The New Yorker for a panel discussion & demonstration on the 2006 New Yorker Festival

May 20-23, 2006 : The Winston-Salem Symphony premieres Rusty Air in Carolina, for orchestra & electronica, under the baton of Robert Moody.

May 7, 2006, 2pm : Three scenes from the opera California Fictions are performed n the New York City Opera VOX Showcase at NYU's Skirball Center
March 31, 2006 : The Seymour Group performs String Band at the Sydney Conservatorium in Sydney, Australia

March 24, 2006 : The Oakland Symphony performs Omnivorous Furniture, for sinfonietta & electronica
March 18, 2006 : American Composers Orchestra performs Omnivorous Furniture at Penn State
March 17, 2006 : American Composers Orchestra gives the New York premiere of Omnivorous Furniture at Carnegie Hall's Zenkel Hall
January 24, 2006 : The Berlin Philharmonic's Scharoun Ensemble performs From Amber Frozen at Weill Recital Hall in Carnegie Hall

members of The Berlin Philharmonic's Scharoun Ensemble performing String Band at Berlin's Roter Salon

Mason Bates / Masonic

Mason Bates / Masonic : electronica and classical composer in San Francisco, Mason Bates is a member of Young Concert Artists. Official site of Mason Bates / Masonic (DJ and electronica / techno artist). ©2003 by Mason Bates / Masonic.