First published in Gramophone, May 2016
Mason Bates
Works for Orchestra. San Francisco Symphony/Michael Tilson Thomas (SFS Media)
Mothership. Boston Modern Orchestra Project/ Gil Rose (BMOP Sound)
A jet engine revs at the start of Mothership by Mason Bates, something like a spacecraft taking off. (At least, I assume from the movies that’s what a spaceship taking off sounds like.) Soon a cheerful groove cuts in and violins and flutes are darting about in nimble loops. We’re off. “I look to the digital world as an important 21st century expansion of the orchestral sound world,” says Bates, a 39-year-old California-based DJ and composer who in recent years has become one of the most frequently performed living composers in US orchestral music. He doesn’t exactly set out to ‘reinvent’ classical music — that dubious onus has been landed on him by various promoters, grasping at a new fix to old issues around image and audience demographics — but neither is the jet engine accidental. He wants to launch orchestral music for the digital age, and sees an incorporation of electronic sounds, samples, field recordings and techno-inspired drum beats as a natural evolution, “like valves in brass instruments once were.”
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