Mason Bates was born January 23, 1977, in Richmond, Va. He lives near San Francisco, Calif.

Still in his mid-40s, Mason Bates has established himself as one of America’s most performed and sought after composers. He has written major works for full orchestra – often incorporating electronics – concertos, film scores, and chamber and vocal works. His first opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, was premiered at the Santa Fe Festival in 2017 and was so popular, the festival had to add performances. New York’s Metropolitan Opera in 2018 commissioned his second opera, to be based on the Pulitzer Prize winning novel The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay.

Bates studied both composition and piano as he grew up in Richmond, Va., and he garnered his first commission at 16. He went on to earn bachelor and master’s degrees through a Columbia-Juilliard School joint program, where his composition teachers included John Corigliano, David Del Tredici, and Samuel Adler. He moved to the west coast in 2001 and earned his doctorate from the University of California, Berkeley.

While in school in California, Bates worked as a DJ in San Francisco clubs and lounges. That experience led him to advocate bringing new music to non-tradition spaces. To that end, he founded Mercury Soul, which transforms commercial clubs into hybrid musical events. The organization organizes performances of classical music alongside DJ sets. He’s also served as composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., the Chicago Symphony, and the California Symphony. 

It was as a result of his residency at the Kennedy Center that the National Symphony in 2018 commissioned Bates to write a major work for orchestra. The result, Art of War, was another unique amalgam of the traditional orchestra with 21st-century technology. Its acoustic instrumentation is fairly standard – triple woodwinds, four horns and trumpets, a large percussion section, keyboard, harp, and strings – but includes electronic sounds, including sampled sounds of weapons and printing presses. (It’s undoubtedly the first classical music piece to include thanks to the U.S. Marines for access to a mortar and artillery range.)

While its immediate touchstone is contemporary, specifically U.S. military operations in Iraq, Art of War’s title calls across the centuries to Sun Tzu’s revered multifaceted analysis of what it takes to wage war successfully – not just the soldiers, tactics, and materiel, but war’s psychological components, too. Bates was deeply interested on the effect of war on people; his brother served in the Marines during the invasion of Iraq.

Bates provided the following note for the December, 2018, premiere:

Art of War is a symphony exploring the drama of human conflict from the perspective of soldiers, weaponry, and human loss. Animating a three-movement symphonic structure are original field recordings of weapons tests; elements of American and Iraqi folks music; and the printing presses of the U.S Treasury.

If the sound of money being created seems a surprising place to open a martial symphony, consider that “Money as a Weapons System” is an actual U.S. military handbook describing the use of money to achieve military goals. Special access granted by the U.S. Treasury’s Bureau of Engraving and Printing took me before giant, strange machines clattering endless sheets of money into being. Lurching rhythms created from these sounds integrate with quicksilver, caffeinated musical textures that glitter like coins from a slot machine – only to spin wildly out of control over the course of the movement. Weaponized money becomes both powerful and unpredictable, and this can be heard in the way the opening’s glistening minimalism whizzes into highly complex webs shattered by quick cuts.

“Two Worlds” explores the perspectives of two soldiers through the folk music of their cultures. Over an ambient reimagination of American blues, a fiddle sings a melancholic tune; thousands of miles away, a bent melody floats over a drone, informed by the modes of Arabic maqam. These worlds seem so distant, yet over the course of the movement, the two merge, connected by the soulful “blue notes” that inform both folk traditions – a musical tribute to the hope that diverse cultures can be “stronger together.”

This coming together is interrupted, however, by a distant march that takes us onto the battlefield, building to a propulsive fanfare punctuated by the sounds of mortar fire and cannons (recorded at Camp Pendleton, where my brother served in the 1st Marines Expeditionary Force as the captain of a mortar platoon). The musical materials of the piece shatter in a cacophony explosions. Emerging from the clearing smoke in the final minutes of the symphony, the sounds of the Arab adhan (call to prayer) mix with those of a U.S. military funeral. Drifting into this poignant soundscape, the two folk melodies weave together one final time.

Watch: Mason Bates talks about Art of War in a Kennedy Center video made for the work’s 2018 premiere. 

Read: Bates offers thoughts about Art of War, its artistic genesis and his personal connections to its themes in a blog post on his website: HERE