Mason Bates: Works for Orchestra

Album review

The garden variety of orchestral pops music, whether it's Gershwin or hip-hop that's involved, grafts the orchestra onto the basic popular material. The music of California composer Mason Bates starts from the opposite premise: the music, in Bates' own words, offers "an expanded symphonic palette." Bates, who has been active in the worlds of both classical composition and electronic laptop dance performance, adds electronic components to a sound world rooted in the early 20th century: The B-Sides, which pays tribute in its final movement to the warehouse parties that were incubators of Detroit techno music, started life as a response to Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16. Two exciting developments emerge from Bates' decision. First, he finds that attaching the electronics to the orchestra in this way does not make them subordinate: the pictorial vocabulary of the music is expanded in such a way that the music leaves you with thoroughly contemporary images that wouldn't have occurred without the electronics. Sample "Glaciers Calving" (track six), the first movement of the four-movement Liquid Interface, which Bates considers a kind of symphony: the disturbing picture of glaciers destroyed by global warming might have been possible to realize with the orchestra alone, but would not have had the same resonance. Second, Bates avoids the trap of creating a novelty encounter between orchestral music and electronica. His stylistic choices broaden out into jazz, progressive rock, southeast Asian ensemble music, hip-hop, and more. Here he is really in the realm of the DJ, where the entire musical world is available, and his merging of this outlook into a consistent orchestral framework is really quite remarkable. The works here were commissioned by various orchestras, but were brought together by San Francisco Symphony conductor Michael Tilson Thomas in a series of live 2014 concerts, recorded here with very little crowd noise and just enough applause to remind you of what you're dealing with. The absolute commitment to the music of Tilson Thomas, still breaking new ground as he approaches éminence grise status, is inspiring; the optimism generated by Bates' new stylistic fusion is deep.

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