Title: Alternative Energy for Orchestra and Electronica
Duration: Approximately 27 minutes
Composer: Mason Bates (Born in Philadelphia, Pennsylvania on January 23, 1977)
Work composed: 2011
World premiere: The premiere took place on February 2, 2012, in Chicago with conductor Ricardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, from whom the piece was commissioned while Bates was serving as Composer-in-Residence there
Instrumentation: Electronica (synthesized sounds by “a laptop - played by a percussionist or assistant conductor (unless composer is present)”) and Orchestra: 3 flutes (including alto flute, and piccolo), 3 oboes (including English horn), 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons (including contrabassoon), 4 French horns, 3 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, 3 percussionists, harp, piano, strings
Alternative Energy for orchestra and electronica
1. Ford’s Farm, 1896 (an amateur fiddler invents a car)
2. Chicago, 2012 (including the FermiLab particle accelerator)
3. Xinjiang Province, 2112 (twilight on an industrial wasteland)
4. Reykjavik, 2222 (an Icelandic Rain Forest)
Award-winning American composer Mason Bates is one of the most performed modern composers in America. He studied composition with some of the great American music teachers in the later part of the 20th Century – Samuel Adler, John Corigliano, David Del Tredici. He is distinguished as being named the Composer of the Year in 2018, as well as the first ever Composer-in-Residence with the National Symphony in Washington, D.C. (2018 – present). Previously, he served as the Composer-in-Residence with the Chicago Symphony (2010 to 2015). While there, he was commissioned to write Alternative Energy, which premiered in Chicago in 2012 and was later nominated in 2017 as Best Contemporary Classical Composition of the year.
Unique to Bates’ interests is his avid pursuit of being a techno DJ – something he began around 2008. As a classical musician and techno-artist, Bates founded a coalition of various artists and DJs to create “Mercury Soul” that brought classical music and DJ techno sets together at clubs and other venues. This blending of genres comes naturally to Bates. He’s composed several techno-acoustic works – pieces for orchestra with “electronica” – which are typically orchestrated for large orchestral forces and enhanced with synthesized and electronic sounds and samples (digital recordings). The results are spectacular, incorporating a huge array of different types of sonics, from the wide-ranging acoustical tones and timbres from orchestral instruments to the surreal and magically manipulated sounds of modern synthesizers. But doing so successfully requires Bates’ particular genius, which is continually evident in Alternative Energy. He treats this techno-acoustical cross genre as a way of reviving the “narrative symphonies of the 19th Century using 21st Century sounds” where literary-narrative ideas can be enhanced with the sounds of electronics. By “narrative symphonies,” Bates means the Romantic works of composers like Berlioz (Symphonie fantastique), and to a certain extent, Beethoven’s “Pastoral” Symphony, and the like.
Indeed, Alternative Energy has a narrative to tell, and a lot of fantastical sounds to hear. It’s a tale of warning relevant to today’s energy and climate concerns – how energy creation for billions of people on the planet has created hazards that, if unchecked, could lead to catastrophe. As Bates himself describes his work:
Alternative Energy is an ‘energy symphony’ spanning four movements and hundreds of years. Beginning in a rustic Midwestern junkyard in the late 19th Century, the piece travels through ever greater and more powerful forces of energy — a present-day particle collider, a futuristic Chinese nuclear plant — until it reaches a future Icelandic rainforest, where humanity’s last inhabitants seek a return to a simpler way of life.
The idée fixe that links these disparate worlds appears early in “Ford’s Farm, 1896.” This melody is heard on the fiddle — conjuring a figure like Henry Ford — and is accompanied by junkyard percussion and a ‘phantom orchestra’ that trails the fiddler like ghosts. The accelerando cranking of a car motor becomes a special motif in the piece, a kind of rhythmic embodiment of ever-more-powerful energy. Indeed, this crank motif explodes in the electronics in the second movement’s present-day Chicago, where we encounter actual recordings from the FermiLab particle collider. Hip-hop beats, jazzy brass interjections, and joyous voltage surges bring the movement to a clangorous finish.
Zoom a hundred years into the dark future of the “Xinjiang Province, 2112” where a great deal of the Chinese energy industry is based. On an eerie wasteland, a lone flute sings a tragically distorted version of the fiddle tune, dreaming of a forgotten natural world. But a powerful industrial energy simmers to the surface, and over the ensuing hardcore techno, wild orchestral splashes drive us to a catastrophic meltdown. As the smoke clears, we find ourselves even further into the future: a Icelandic rainforest on a hotter planet. Gentle, out-of-tune pizzicato accompany our fiddler, who returns over a woody percussion ensemble to make a quiet plea for simpler times.
In the first movement, “Ford’s Farm,” the orchestra itself, without electronica, is filled with wonderful color and effects – the fun and lyrical fiddle tune and its jangly syncopation, over lots of percussive noises (very much the sound of scraps in the junk heap being used as the instruments) is a delightful moment. That metamorphosizing motive of Ford’s fiddle tune, as it passes through several enthralling soundscapes, is effectively transportive as a musical link throughout the work. The crank is played by a large ratchet. The middle movement, “Chicago 2012,” opens with actual recordings of the Fermilab’s (the particle physics and accelerator laboratory close to Chicago) particle accelerator in action – it’s creepy, mind-blowing, and surreally beautiful. A nice twist is the return of the cranking ratchet, as if the scientist’s couldn’t just plug the FermiLab behemoth into an electrical outlet, but had to crank it up to get it working. The third movement, “Xinjiang Province, 2112 (twilight on an industrial wasteland),” begins with electronic sounds, Chinese flute, and pentatonic scales (a scale typically associated with traditional Chinese music), all awash in cosmic noises, beautiful and strange, sometimes frightening. At almost four minutes into the movement, the energy gradually begins to pick up – at first almost soothing, but then growing with intensity – it’s absolutely exhilarating to hear what Bates does with these manipulated soundscapes, sometimes almost lifting the listener out their seat… until the ultimate calamity, and then the ultimate powering down at the end. The fourth movement, “Reykjavik, 2222,” opens in the mists, with samples of bird song and woodpeckers and forest murmurs – it’s a wonderfully evocative world of sound. The piece then cycles back to the feel of Ford’s Farm and the fiddle tune, but Bates masterfully makes this new world soundscape different from 200 years earlier in the first movement – no less tuneful, but interrupted and fragile. This time, the world is still resounding with electronic sounds, but in the background, as though they were the reverberations from the “meltdown” from the previous movement. The fiddle tune ends this enchanting musical narrative in a pensive, cautionary way.