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The music of MASON BATES moves fluidly between the worlds of concert music and electronica, fusing innovative orchestral writing, the rhythms of electronica and techno, and cutting edge sound design. Spanning the classical concert hall to the clubs and lounges where he DJs electronica, his music has been described by the San Francisco Chronicle as "lovely to hear and ingeniously constructed."
A composer of symphonic music who often includes live electronica in his orchestral music, he has become known as an artist who moves fluidly between those two worlds — performing on electronic drumpad and laptop, for example, with the National Symphony Orchesta in his Liquid Interface at Carnegie Hall, or creating an evening of concert music and electronica with members of The Berlin Philharmonic in the former East Side. Recent commissions have explored everything from the marriage of orchestral sonorities and earthquake recordings (Music From Underground Spaces, commissioned by the California Symphony), to the fusion of techno beats and the ancient sounds of a pipe organ (Digital Loom, commissioned for Juilliard’s 100th anniversary).
Repeat performances of his works appear throughout the country, from the Oakland Symphony to the New York Philharmonic, and he is a frequent guest at summer music festivals such as Tanglewood, Cabrillo, and Aspen. This season brings the premieres of The-B-Sides, for orchestra & electronica, which will be premiered by the San Francisco Symphony in May; and Sirens, for the reknown male chorus Chanticleer.
Active as a performer, he has played his concerto for synthesizer with the Atlanta and Phoenix Symphonies, and he also stays busy as a DJ of trip-hop and electronica in San Francisco's many clubs, lounges, and artspaces. With Maestro Benjamin Shwartz of the San Francisco Symphony and set designer Anne Patterson, he launched Mercury Soul: An Electro-Acoustic Evening, which brought over a thousand people to the San Francisco club Mezzanine to hear contemporary classical music interspersed with DJs and live electronica.
Studying English literature and music composition in the Columbia-Juilliard program, he worked primarily with John Corigliano, and has also studied with David Del Tredici and Samuel Adler. Now living in the Bay Area, where he worked with Edmund Campion at UC Berkeley, he is currently a Guggenheim Fellow and the composer in residence for the California Symphony. For more info, go to www.MasonicElectronica.com.
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