World Premiere: February 22, 2007
Most Recent HSO Performance: April 9, 2017

Instrumentation: 3 flutes all doubling on piccolo, 3 oboes with third oboe doubling on English horn, 3 clarinets with third clarinet doubling on E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet, 3 bassoons with third bassoon doubling on contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, electronica, bass drum, sizzle cymbal, hi-hat, snare drum, drum set, triangle, tamtam, glockenspiel, xylophone, marimba, vibraphone, chimes, crotales, bongos, castanets, wind machine, suspended cymbal, ride cymbal, splash cymbal, 2 harmonics, guitar, musical glasses, washboard, harp, piano, and strings: violin I, violin II, viola, cello, and bass

Duration: 24'

Mason Bates brings not only his own fresh talent to the concert hall but also the musical sensibilities of a new generation — he is equally at home composing “for Lincoln Center,” according to his web site (www.masonbates.com), as being the “electronica artist Masonic® who moved to the San Francisco Bay Area from New York City, where he was a lounge DJ at such venues as The Frying Pan — the floating rave ship docked off the pier near West 22nd Street.” 

Bates was born in Philadelphia in 1977 and started studying piano with Hope Armstrong Erb at his childhood home in Richmond, Virginia. He earned degrees in both English literature and music composition in the joint program of Columbia University and the Juilliard School, where his composition teachers included John Corigliano, David Del Tredici and Samuel Adler, and received his doctorate in composition from the University of California, Berkeley in 2008 as a student of Edmund Campion and Jorge Lidermann. Bates was Resident Composer with the California Symphony from 2008 to 2011, Project San Francisco Artist-in-Residence with the San Francisco Symphony in 2011-2012, and Composer of the Year with the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra in 2012-2013; he held a residency with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra from 2010 to 2015, and was the first-ever Composer-in-Residence at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. from 2015 to 2020. He also teaches in the Technology and Applied Composition Program of the San Francisco Conservatory of Music.

Bates’ rapidly accumulating portfolio of orchestral, chamber, vocal, theatrical, film (notably Gus Van Sant’s 2014 The Sea of Trees starring Matthew McConaughey and Naomi Watts) and electronic compositions includes commissions and performances by the major orchestras of London, Lisbon, New York, Washington, Atlanta, Toronto, Phoenix, San Francisco, Oakland, Annapolis, Los Angeles, Miami and Detroit, the Tanglewood, Aspen, Cabrillo and Spoleto USA festivals, Biava Quartet, Chanticleer and New Juilliard Ensemble. In 2010, Bates was commissioned to write Mothership for the second concert of the YouTube Symphony Orchestra, an ensemble composed of musicians from around the world who were selected through on-line auditions by Michael Tilson Thomas, the project’s director and conductor, and assembled in Sydney, Australia for rehearsals and a live concert on March 20, 2011 streamed on the internet; the first YouTube Symphony Orchestra concert had been held in New York in 2009. Bates’ The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, premiered by Santa Fe Opera in July 2017, received the 2019 Grammy Award for Best Opera, and is scheduled for productions in Atlanta, Austin and Kansas City; Bates is currently at work on The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay for the Metropolitan Opera with librettist Gene Scheer. Another recent project is Philharmonia Fantastique, which uses a hybrid of animation and live-action filming to look at — and in — orchestral instruments as they are being played. Philharmonia Fantastique, developed with director and sound designer Gary Rydstrom and animator Jim Capobianco, was commissioned by the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra, Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Dallas Symphony Orchestra, National Symphony Orchestra, San Francisco Symphony and American Youth Symphony, and is scheduled for upcoming live performances as well as theatrical release.

In addition to being recognized as the most-performed American composer of his generation and named “2018 Composer of the Year” by Musical America, Bates has received a Charles Ives Scholarship and Fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, Guggenheim Fellowship, Jacob Druckman Memorial Prize from the Aspen Music Festival, ASCAP and BMI awards, a Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center, Rome Prize, Berlin Prize, a two-year Composer Residency with Young Concert Artists, and the 2012 Heinz Award in Arts and Humanities.

Mason Bates is also an ardent and effective advocate for bringing new music to new spaces, “whether,” he explained, “through institutional partnerships such as the residency with the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW series, or through the project Mercury Soul, which has transformed spaces ranging from commercial clubs to Frank Gehry-designed concert halls into exciting, hybrid musical events drawing over a thousand people. Mercury Soul, a collaboration with director Anne Patterson and conductor Benjamin Schwartz, embeds sets of classical music into an evening of DJing and beautiful, surreal visuals.”

Bates wrote of Liquid Interface, composed in 2006-2007 on a commission from the National Symphony Orchestra and premiered on February 22, 2007 at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C. conducted by Leonard Slatkin, “Water has influenced countless musical endeavors — Debussy’s La Mer and Wagner’s Siegfried’s Rhine Journey quickly come to mind — but it was only after living on Berlin’s enormous Lake Wannsee that I became consumed with a new take on the idea. Over the course of barely two months, I watched this huge body of water transform from an ice sheet thick enough to support sausage venders to a refreshing swimming destination heavy with humidity. If the play of the waves inspired Debussy, then what about water in its variety of forms?

“Liquid Interface moves through all of them, inhabiting an increasingly hotter world in each progressive movement. Glaciers Calving opens with huge blocks of sound drifting slowly upwards through the orchestra, finally cracking off in the upper register. (Snippets of actual recordings of glaciers breaking into the Antarctic, supplied by the adventurous radio journalist Daniel Grossman, appear at the opening.) As the thaw continues, these sonic blocks melt into aqueous, blurry figuration. The beats of the electronics evolve from slow trip-hop into energetic drum ’n’ bass, and at the movement’s climax the orchestra blazes in turbulent figuration. The ensuing Scherzo Liquido explores water on a micro-level: droplets splash from the speakers in the form of a variety of nimble electronica beats, with the orchestra swirling around them.

“The temperature continues to rise as we move into Crescent City, which examines the destructive force as water grows from the small-scale to the enormous. This is illustrated in a theme-and-variations form in which the opening melody, at first quiet and lyrical, gradually accumulates a trail of echoing figuration behind it. In a nod to New Orleans, which knows the power of water all too well, the instruments trail the melody in a re-imagination of Dixieland swing. As the improvisatory sound of a dozen soloists begins to lose control, verging into big-band territory, the electronics — silent in this movement until now — enter in the form of a distant storm. At the peak of the movement, with an enormous wake of figuration swirling behind the soaring melody, the orchestra is buried in an electronic hurricane of processed storm sounds. We are swept into the muffled depths of the ocean. This water-covered world, which relaxes into a kind of balmy, greenhouse paradise, is where the symphony ends with On the Wannsee. A simple, lazy tune bends in the strings above ambient sounds recorded at a dock on Lake Wannsee. Gentle beats echo quietly in the moist heat. At near-pianissimo throughout, the melody floats lazily upwards through the humidity and, at the work’s end, finally evaporates.”

©2022 Dr. Richard E. Rodda