What do you mean, you haven’t heard about Mason Bates (yet)? He is one of the hottest names on the North-American music scene. Born in 1977, Bates is a symphonic and lyrical composer as well as an electro DJ (under the alias DJ Masonic) – two completely opposing genres which he takes great delight in mixing. Around half of his symphonic and lyrical work consists, in one way or another, of electronic sounds. The majority of these sounds are “every day sounds”, which are prerecorded and later put into a score. On the release date of his brilliant opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, Qobuz interviewed this extraordinary person.
The 70’s and 80’s Avant-garde led by people such as Boulez, Stockhausen or Cage tried to impose an all-serialist musical style, but you seem to blatantly ignore and bypass them, even though your own idiom has its very own genre of modernity. Have you ever been tempted by their influence?
I've certainly been influenced by the early serialists – my piece The B-Sides, for example, is subtitled Five Pieces for Orchestra & Electronica as a homage to Schoenberg's iconic early work. His work, and that of his students Berg and Webern, has an inspired energy of discovery to it. The later wave of serialists, however, so dogmatically adhered to theory that their music sounds so self-similar.
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