CARNEGIE HALL PRESENTS
National Symphony Orchestra

Stern Auditorium / Perelman Stage
Thursday, February 7th, 2008 at 8:00 PM

Pre-concert talk starts at 7:00 PM in Stern Auditorium/Perelman Stage with Christopher H. Gibbs, Professor of Music, Bard College.

National Symphony Orchestra
Leonard Slatkin, Music Director and Conductor
Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Piano
Mason Bates, Electronics

MASON BATES Liquid Interfaces (NY Premiere)
LISZT Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major
MUSSORGSKY Pictures at an Exhibition (orch. Ravel)

Program Notes:

By Richard Freed

MASON BATES Liquid Interface
Born January 23, 1977, in Philadelphia; now living in Oakland, California.

Composed in 2006 on a commission from the National Symphony Orchestra, Liquid Interface received its world premiere performances on February 22–24, 2007, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, DC, with the National Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin; tonight’s performance marks the work’s New York premiere.

Scoring: 3 piccolos, 3 flutes, 3 oboes, English horn, 3 clarinets, E-flat clarinet, bass clarinet, 3 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, bass drum, bongos, trap set, vibraphone, xylophone, marimba, cymbals, 3 suspended cymbals, ride cymbal, chimes, high tam-tam, castanets, triangle, glockenspiel, washboard with spoon, crotales, 2 harmonicas, slide guitar, crystal glasses (glass harmonica), wind machine, strings, and “electronica” performed by the composer himself on an electronic drum pad and laptop.

Mason Bates was raised in Virginia, where he studied piano with Hope Armstrong Erb and composition with Dika Newlin before undertaking studies in composition and English literature in the Columbia-Juilliard program in New York. His primary composition teacher there was John Corigliano (to whom Liquid Interface is dedicated), and he also studied with Samuel Adler and David Del Tredici. From his current base in the Bay Area he balances an increasingly busy career with continuing studies at Berkeley, where he works with Edmund Campion at the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies.

Mr. Bates is active as a performer as well as a composer, and is equally comfortable in the realm of concert music and that of “electronica” (the latter described by him as “a catch-all term for the various subgenres of techno music”). He has explored in his recent works such phenomena as the marriage of orchestral sonorities and the white noise of Southern insects (Rusty Air in Carolina, commissioned by the Winston-Salem Symphony Orchestra) and the fusion of techno beats with the sounds of a chamber orchestra (Omnivorous Furniture, commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic). He recently performed as soloist in his Concerto for Synthesizer and Orchestra with the orchestras of Atlanta and Phoenix, and as a disc jockey of trip-hop and electronica he appears regularly in clubs and lounges in San Francisco under the pseudonym Masonic. His compositions for purely acoustic forces, for electronic ones, and for combinations of various kinds have been performed with increasing frequency in Europe, Australia, Canada, and throughout the US. The range of his interests is further exemplified by his music for Eric Lodal’s film The Locrian Mode, which is played by the Dryden String Quartet, and his opera California Fictions, which the New York City Opera presented in its annual VOX Showcase. His symphonic works have taken hold well beyond their premieres.

As a recent winner of both the American Rome Prize and the Berlin Prize, Mr. Bates became involved in the musical life of those cities during his two years in Europe. In May 2005 he collaborated with members of the Berlin Philharmonic at the Roter Salon, the celebrated club in the former East Berlin, in an evening of his chamber music during which he performed interludes of electronica. Impressions formed in Berlin (as well as some closer to home) had a part in the background of Liquid Interface, as Mr. Bates explains in a note of his own, characterizing the work as following the layout of a four-movement symphony.

Water has influenced countless musical endeavors—La mer and “Siegfried’s Rhine Journey” quickly come to mind—and after living on Berlin’s enormous Wannsee I formed a new take on the idea. In the course of barely two months, I watched this huge body of water transform itself from an ice sheet thick enough to support sausage vendors to a refreshing swimming spot heavy with humidity. If the play of the waves inspired Debussy, then why not examine the phenomenon of water in its variety of forms?

Liquid Interface moves through all of them, inhabiting an increasingly hotter world in each successive movement. Glaciers Calving opens with huge blocks of sound drifting slowly upwards through the orchestra, finally cracking off in the upper register. (Snippets of actual recordings of glaciers breaking into the Antarctic, supplied by the adventurous radio journalist Daniel Grossman, appear in the opening.) As the thaw continues, these sonic blocks melt into aqueous, blurry figurations. The beats of the electronics evolve from slow trip-hop into energetic “drum ’n’ bass,” and at the movement’s climax the orchestra blazes in turbulent figuration. The ensuing Scherzo Liquido explores water on a micro-level: droplets splash from the speakers in the form of a variety of nimble electronica beats, with the orchestra swirling around them.

The temperature continues to rise as we move into Crescent City, which examines the destructive force as water grows from the small-scale to the enormous. This is illustrated in a theme-and-variations form in which the opening melody, at first quiet and lyrical, gradually accumulates a trail of echoing figuration behind it. In a nod to New Orleans, which knows the power of water all too well, the instruments trail the melody in a reimagination of Dixieland swing. As the improvisatory sound of a dozen soloists begins to lose control, verging into big-band territory, the electronics—silent in this movement until now—enter in the form of a distant storm.

At the peak of the movement, with an enormous wake of figuration swirling behind the soaring melody, the orchestra is buried in an electronic hurricane of processed storm sounds. We are swept into the muffled depths of the ocean. This water-covered world, which relaxes into a kind of balmy, greenhouse paradise, is where we end the symphony in On the Wannsee. A simple, lazy tune bends in the strings above ambient sounds recorded at a dock on the Wannsee. Gentle beats echo quietly in the moist heat. At near pianissimo from this point, the melody floats lazily upwards through the humidity and, at the work’s end, finally evaporates.


FRANZ LISZT Piano Concerto No. 2 in A Major
Born October 22, 1811, in Raiding, Hungary; died July 31, 1886, in Bayreuth, Germany.

Composed in 1839 and revised between 1849 and 1861, Liszt’s Concerto No. 2 was first performed on January 7, 1857, in Weimar; it received its Carnegie Hall premiere on January 7, 1897, with Raphael Joseffy, piano, and the Metropolitan Permanent Orchestra conducted by Heinrich Zoellner.

Scoring: solo piano, piccolo, 3 flutes, 2 oboes, 2 clarinets, 2 bassoons, 2 horns, 2 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, cymbals, and strings.

Liszt made his first sketches for both of his piano concertos before he reached the age of 20, but neither was brought to completion and performed until he was in his 40s. Part of the explanation for that long delay is Liszt’s inexperience in writing for the orchestra. It was not until the 1840s, when he took up his duties as court conductor in Weimar, that he began writing orchestral works in earnest. In orchestrating his symphonic poems, as well as the concertos, he initially had the assistance of his young assistant Joachim Raff (1822–1882, remembered now as an interesting minor composer). It was not until 1854 that Liszt felt confident enough to dispense with such help, and from then on he did all his orchestration himself; the final versions of the concertos, the Totentanz, and all the symphonic poems are entirely his own.

Although Liszt himself was the soloist in the first performance of his First Concerto (February 17, 1855, at Weimar, with Hector Berlioz conducting), he entrusted the solo part of the Second to his pupil Hans Bronsart von Schellendorf (1830–1911, another minor composer, remembered more as a pianist)—a gesture possibly intended to make the point that this was not merely a work by a “virtuoso-composer” for his own use, but a serious one designed for broader use and a life beyond that of its composer. The score was dedicated to Bronsart when it was finally published in 1861.

In his First Concerto Liszt departed from the conventional concerto format to add a fourth movement, indicating that the last three are to be played without pause. The Second Concerto is cast in a single movement, but, as in most one-movement symphonies and concertos, it falls into divisions corresponding more or less to the respective movement of a conventionally structured work. The big Lisztian difference is the rhapsodic sweep which renders analysis both problematical and gratuitous. The Concerto in A might be said to comprise three normal movements plus an introduction and a concluding apotheosis—or it might be regarded as a miniature three-movement work followed by an expansive fantasy on its basic materials. Since it is built almost entirely on a single theme, the effect is virtually seamless.

The treatment of that theme is not a series of variations, but rather a chain of metamorphoses in which it is always clearly recognizable—a stunning illustration of the principle Liszt called “transformation of themes.” The transformations in this instance assume many varied characters—yearning, solemn, martial, sensuous, serene, heroic—and virtuosity is never absent in this work, but it is sustained by an abundance of substance well beyond the norm for mere display pieces.


MODEST MUSSORGSKY Pictures at an Exhibition
Born March 21, 1839, in Karevo, Russia; died March 28, 1881, in St. Petersburg.

Composed in 1873, Pictures at an Exhibition was orchestrated by Maurice Ravel in 1922, and was first performed in that arrangement in Paris on October 19 of that year; Ravel’s orchestration of the work received its New York premiere at Carnegie Hall on January 31, 1925, with the Boston Symphony Orchestra conducted by Serge Koussevitzky.

Scoring: 2 piccolos, 3 flutes, 3 oboes, English horn, 2 clarinets, bass clarinet, alto saxophone, 2 bassoons, contrabassoon, 4 horns, 3 trumpets, 3 trombones, tuba, timpani, snare drum, bass drum, crash cymbals, suspended cymbal, ratchet, slapstick, triangle, tam-tam, xylophone, glockenspiel, chimes, celesta, 2 harps, and strings.

As is the case with so much of Mussorgsky’s music, Pictures at an Exhibition has become most familiar in a form in which the composer himself did not create it. It was for the piano, not the orchestra, that Mussorgsky composed this suite, in response to a specific art exhibit that had great personal meaning for him. His friend Viktor Hartmann (Gartmann), a prominent architect, painter, and scenic designer only five years older than the composer himself, died at age 39 in 1873, and a memorial exhibition of his works was mounted in St. Petersburg the following year. Mussorgsky recorded his impressions of it in this suite for piano, which he composed as a further memorial gesture. The suite was not published until five years after Mussorgsky’s own death; it received little attention from pianists for some time, but its orchestral possibilities were noted at once. Ravel, in fact, was neither the first nor the last to convert Mussorgsky’s piano suite into an orchestral one, though it is his version alone that has taken a permanent place in the orchestral repertory, and in fact earned for the music a status as one of the grandest of showpieces for the virtuoso orchestra.

In that respect it might be considered odd that Rimsky-Korsakov, who devoted himself so wholeheartedly to completing and editing many of Mussorgsky’s works, did not respond to those possibilities himself. He did, however, supervise the first orchestration, undertaken by his pupil Mikhail Tushmalov, and he conducted that version (comprising only seven of the “pictures” and omitting all the Promenades after the prefatory one) in 1891. Ravel’s attention was drawn to Mussorgsky’s music by his friend M. D. Calvocoressi, a prominent musicologist who wrote three books on the Russian composer. In 1913 Ravel and Stravinsky jointly undertook a new orchestration of Mussorgsky’s opera Khovanshchina for Diaghilev; by 1922 Ravel had become interested enough to ask Serge Koussevitsky to commission him to transcribe Pictures at an Exhibition.

This composite Franco-Russian work introduced by a Russian conductor in Paris was in a sense the culmination of the long and productive period of musical cross-pollination that began in earnest with Berlioz’s concerts in Moscow and St. Petersburg, seven years before the Hartmann exhibition itself and eight years before the birth of Ravel, and which in Ravel’s time was continued by Diaghilev and the outstanding French and Russian musicians with whom he surrounded himself. The British conductor Sir Henry Wood, who had introduced a version of his own in 1915, withdrew it upon acquainting himself with Ravel’s. Versions more or less contemporaneous with Ravel’s, by his one-time pupil Leonidas Leonardi, and by the Russian-Finn Leo Funtek, didn’t stand much of a chance. More recent ones by such figures as the mid-20th-century Russian conductor Sergei Gorchakov, the legendary conductor and frequent transcriber Leopold Stokowski, the Russian pianist and conductor Vladimir Ashkenazy, and the Bulgarian-born pianist and composer Emile Naumoff (who gave us an expanded version, introduced by the NSO in 1994, in the form of a piano concerto, in which he added material from other Mussorgsky works)—all these have tended to be regarded as interesting supplements to the Ravel version, rather than possible replacements for it. Leonard Slatkin, who has made two separate conflations drawing from more than a dozen different orchestral settings, has recorded the Ravel version twice and continues to favor it; he recently restored the section Ravel omitted, and undertook a bit of editorial revision in some of the other sections, as noted below.

Several of the Hartmann works in that 1874 memorial exhibit were of a fantastic or bizarre nature; these elements held a special fascination for Mussorgsky, and clearly influenced his selection of the drawings and paintings represented in his suite. He did not trouble to be strictly faithful to the visual model in every instance, but the liberties he took only serve to underscore the personal nature of his ties with Hartmann and his feelings on the loss of his friend. As a further gesture in that direction, he incorporated his own personality in the form of the Promenade, which introduces the suite and likes several of its sections together: “My own physiognomy,” he remarked, “peeps out through the intermezzos.”

The Promenade, following its energetic statement as prelude to the entire work, returns five times in various guises, each reflecting the character of one of the individual pictures, as noted in the following sequence.

Gnomus. The opening Promenade is broken off abruptly by a confrontation with Hartmann’s drawing of a nutcracker in the form of a gnarled and malevolent old gnome.

The Old Castle. The Promenade returns in a more wistful mood, leading to a water-color of a medieval castle before which a troubadour sings a melancholy ballad.

The Tuileries. Children Quarreling at Play. The Promenade leads into a wispy little scherzo that reminds us of the perceptive feeling for children shown by both composers in other works: Mussorgsky in his song-cycle The Nursery, Ravel in his Mother Goose and L’enfant et les sortilèges.

Bydlo is a Polish word for “cattle.” Hartmann’s drawing was of cattle in a rural Polish village; Mussorgsky created a different picture, in which an oxcart passes by on enormous wooden wheels. Mr. Slatkin has edited this section so that it “now begins forte, as Mussorgsky intended.”

Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells. A tenuous, fluttery statement of the Promenade, first in the woodwinds and then in the strings, introduces a scherzino based on Hartmann’s costume design for a ballet called Trilby, representing chicks dancing with only their legs protruding from their shells. Mr. Slatkin has added two measures to the end of this section, and changed some of the individual notes in the next one.

“Samuel” Goldenberg and Schmuyle. Mussorgsky combined Hartmann’s separate sketches of two men in the Sandomierz ghetto, one obviously well-to-do and full of himself, the other just as clearly a wheedling, groveling beggar. The title he gave the piece, with quotation marks around the somehow pretentious German form of the rich man’s name, was regarded as being so blatantly anti-Semitic that Vladimir Stassov, the St. Petersburg critic who was so influential in the lives of Mussorgsky and the other members of Balakirev’s group of nationalist composers, suppressed it before the score was published and replaced it with the heading “Two Polish Jews, One Rich, the Other Poor.”

Promenade. This is the one section Ravel omitted from his version. Leonard Slatkin has made his own transcription of it, basing his orchestration “mostly on what Ravel did in the opening of the work.”

Limoges: The Market. Another lively scherzo, more or less complementary to the earlier French scene, this one picturing gossiping women at an outdoor market.

Catacombae. In this picture Hartmann depicted himself, lantern in hand, exploring the ancient catacombs under Paris, and here Mussorgsky used his Promenade as postlude rather than introduction. The opening section, Sepulchrum Romanum, is followed by a gently elegiac treatment of the “Promenade” inscribed Cum mortuis in lingua mortua (“With the dead in a dead language”). Mussorgsky noted in his score, “Hartmann’s creative spirit leads me to a place of skulls and calls to them—the skulls begin to glow faintly from within.”

The Hut on Fowl’s Legs is the residence of Baba-Yaga, the grotesque witch of Russian folklore, who rode through the air in a mortar of glowing iron. The title in this case is misleading, in that Hartmann designed a clock face showing the witch’s hut but the music depicts the witch’s ride—which leads without pause into the final picture.

The Great Gate at Kiev. For the capstone of his memorial tribute Mussorgsky chose a picture that was itself a design for a monument: Hartmann’s proposed reconstruction of the ancient Gate of the Bogatyrs at Kiev, in the massive traditional style, with the central section topped by a cupola in the shape of a Slavonic warrior’s helmet. The middle section is a chorale motif, the second statement of which Mr. Slatkin has changed from soft to loud. The Promenade returns in the jubilant coda, in which the spirit of liturgical chants is powerfully evoked.

Copyright © 2008 by Richard Freed


There are now about 35 orchestral versions of Pictures at an Exhibition, which Mussorgsky, of course, wrote as a suite for piano alone, but which Ravel made into a very successful work for orchestra. Some 20 years ago I performed an arrangement by someone other than Ravel—by the Russian conductor Sergei Gorchakov; that led me to explore several of the other alternatives, and eventually to arrange two separate composite versions, compiled from more than a dozen different orchestral settings.

Is there anything wrong with the Ravel? Not really. The usual complaint is that it “does not sound Russian,” whatever that means. Ravel also left out one of the Promenades. In addition, he altered the piano text considerably, and in fact worked from an edition of the piano score that was known at the time to be less than fully reliable. But it remains that his is the version that is the most performed, and it is quite spectacular.

Most conductors make emendations to Ravel’s orchestration; those I have made were undertaken simply in an effort to bring certain passages more in line with the original material for piano. I have restored the missing Promenade, basing my orchestration mostly on what Ravel did in the opening of the work. The section headed Bydlo now begins forte, as Mussorgsky indicated. The Ballet of the Chicks in Their Shells has two additional measures at the end. Some notes are changed in Samuel Goldenberg and Schmuyle. And the second statement of the chorale in the concluding Great Gate at Kiev now is loud rather than soft.

The other alterations are for the most part decidedly minor, but again a bit closer to what Mussorgsky put into his original version for piano. I have made no changes merely for the sake of change. I still love the way Ravel ended the work, and I would not dream of changing it. Nor would I suggest that what I’ve done with his score is the last word on the piece. Wouldn’t it be interesting if someone were to orchestrate the edition that Vladimir Horowitz made of the piano version when he played the Pictures?

—Leonard Slatkin

National Symphony Orchestra
Leonard Slatkin, Music Director and Conductor
Now in his 12th season as Music Director of the National Symphony Orchestra, Leonard Slatkin has led the Orchestra on triumphant tours throughout Europe, Asia, and the US as well as on nationally acclaimed broadcasts and recordings. His imaginative programming and interpretations of a vast range of repertoire have been praised and awarded nationally and internationally.

Mr. Slatkin and the NSO have been celebrated at the White House for their advocacy of America’s artistic heritage, and Mr. Slatkin has been recognized with numerous honors and awards, including the National Medal of the Arts and the American Symphony Orchestra League’s Gold Baton for service to American music.

Mr. Slatkin has regularly appeared over the last two decades with the world’s major orchestras and opera companies, including the New York Philharmonic, Berliner Philharmoniker, Chicago Symphony, and Royal Concertgebouw, as well as the Metropolitan Opera and Vienna State Opera.

Mr. Slatkin is Principal Guest Conductor of London’s Royal Philharmonic Orchestra and, beginning with the 2008–09 season, the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra. In addition, in 2008–09 he will become Music Director of the Detroit Symphony Orchestra. He is Conductor Laureate of the Saint Louis Symphony and Music Advisor to the Nashville Symphony, and recently completed a successful three-year term as Principal Guest Conductor of the Los Angeles Philharmonic at the Hollywood Bowl. In addition to his conducting appearances, Mr. Slatkin is a frequent host of musical broadcasts including those of the BBC, lending his broad knowledge and expertise.

Mr. Slatkin’s extensive discography of more than 100 recordings has been recognized with nine Grammy Awards and more than 60 Grammy nominations.

Mr. Slatkin is a well-known advocate for arts education in America. He works with students of all ages, both in schools and at the Kennedy Center. This year he begins a relationship with Indiana University as the Arthur R. Metz Foundation Conductor at the Jacobs School of Music, as well as a relationship with American University as its Distinguished Artist in Residence. He holds honorary doctorate degrees from educational institutions such as Juilliard, Washington University, University of Maryland, St. Louis Conservatory, and Shenandoah Conservatory.

Mr. Slatkin is the founder and director of the National Conducting Institute, a groundbreaking program established in 2000 to prepare gifted conductors for work with major orchestras. He is an ongoing champion of both old and new music, which has placed him at the forefront of the nation’s musical leaders.

For more information, please visit leonardslatkin.com.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet, Piano
Pianist Jean-Yves Thibaudet continues to bring joy to audiences around the globe with his elegant style, depth of color, and brilliant technique. The 2007–08 season takes him to 16 countries spanning five continents, with appearances including tours with the Orchestre Philharmonique de Luxembourg, London Philharmonic Orchestra, and Orchestre Philharmonique de Monte Carlo, as well as concerts with London’s Philharmonia Orchestra and the NHK and Singapore symphony orchestras, among others. Also in 2007–08, Mr. Thibaudet gives recitals in Paris’s Théâtre des Champs-Élysées, Amsterdam’s Concertgebouw, Chicago’s Symphony Hall, and Carnegie Hall’s Zankel Hall. Mr. Thibaudet is the recipient of the 2007 Victoire d’Honneur, a lifetime career achievement award and the highest honor given by France’s Victoire de la Musique.

Jean-Yves Thibaudet is an exclusive recording artist for Decca, which has released over 30 of his albums, earning the Schallplattenpreis, the Diapason d’Or, Choc de la Musique, a Gramophone Award, two Echo awards, and the Edison Prize. His latest recording, featuring Saint-Saëns’s Piano Concertos Nos. 2 and 5 with the Orchestre de la Suisse Romande, released in early fall 2007, follows the disc Aria—Opera Without Words, which was released in February 2007, inspired by the artist’s love and admiration for the human voice as “the best vehicle for expression in music.” The disc features transcriptions of opera arias by Saint-Saëns, Richard Strauss, Gluck, Korngold, Bellini, Johann Strauss II, and Puccini; some of the transcriptions are by Mikhashoff, Sgambati, and Brassin, while others are by Mr. Thibaudet himself. Mr. Thibaudet was the soloist on the 2005 Oscar-nominated soundtrack for Universal Pictures’s Pride and Prejudice, and in 2005 released his recording of Strauss’s Burleske with the Leipzig Gewandhaus Orchestra. Among other recordings are Satie: The Complete Solo Piano Music, and the jazz albums Reflections on Duke: Jean-Yves Thibaudet Plays the Music of Duke Ellington and Conversations with Bill Evans, his tribute to two of jazz history’s greats.

Mason Bates, Electronics
The recipient of both an American Academy in Berlin Fellowship and a Rome Prize from the American Academy in Rome, Mason Bates moves fluidly between the worlds of classical concert music and underground electronica. Young Concert Artists' Composer-in-Residence from 2000-2002, he composes for a wide variety of media, with a portfolio of orchestral, chamber, theatrical, and electronic works. His music was hailed by the San Francisco Chronicle as "lovely to hear and ingeniously constructed."

The California Symphony has chosen Mr. Bates as its Young American Composer in Residence for three seasons, beginning in the fall of 2007. In May 2007, he received an Academy Award in Music from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, an award that “honors outstanding artistic achievement and acknowledges the composer who has arrived at his or her own voice.” His recent premieres include Liquid Interface, which was commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra and received its premiere, conducted by Leonard Slatkin, at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. in February 2007. Mr. Bates is participating in a Music Alive Residency with the Mobile Symphony, which performed Ode in March 2006 and his Overture to California Fictions in November 2006.

Mr. Bates’ recent successes include the premieres of Digital Loom, an electro-acoustic work commissioned by The Juilliard School to celebrate its 100th anniversary in January 2006 and Rusty Air in Carolina for electronics commissioned by the Winston-Salem (NC) Symphony in May 2006. His work Omnivorous Furniture for sinfonietta and electronica was premiered on the Los Angeles Philharmonic's Green Umbrella Series at Disney Hall in November 2004 and has received subsequent performances by the American Composers Orchestra and the Oakland East Bay Symphony. From Amber Frozen for String Quartet, commissioned by the Naumburg Foundation for the Biava Quartet, premiered in May 2004 at Alice Tully Hall.

Mr. Bates’ music is performed by orchestras including the Oakland Symphony, the Oklahoma City Philharmonic, the Annapolis Symphony Orchestra, the Louisville Orchestra, the Evansville Philharmonic, the Greenville Symphony Orchestra, the Aspen Festival Orchestra, and at the Spoleto USA Festival. His chamber works have been performed by the Claremont Trio, Ensemble X, Austrian bass Rupert Bergmann, Berlin’s Scharoun Ensemble, and the San Francisco Contemporary Music Players. Also an active performer, Mr. Bates has performed his concerto for synthesizer, Sounds for His Animation, commissioned by the New Juilliard Ensemble, with the Atlanta and Phoenix Symphonies.

His interest in writing for unconventional forces has led him to develop works for the theater as well as the concert hall. His interest in theater has been influenced by playwriting studies under Kenneth Koch, Arnold Weinstein and Mark Adamo. Song cycles, theatrical works, and a music-drama for one actor and five musicians called Trout Fishing in America, which was produced at Lincoln Center’s Clark Theater in 1997, comprise a growing list of Mason Bates’ works for the stage.

Also active as underground hip-hop DJ “Masonic,” Mr. Bates often appears at clubs such as 111 Minna, Skylark, Cloud 9, and for Plado Media in San Francisco, Scarabocchio and Metaverso in Rome’s Testaccio district, and Zu Mir Oder Zu Dir and Kinzo in Berlin.

Raised in Virginia where he studied piano with Hope Armstrong Erb and composition with Dika Newlin, Mason Bates enrolled in the Columbia-Juilliard program in New York City. Earning degrees in music composition and English literature, he worked with John Corigliano, David Del Tredici, and Samuel Adler. He is currently pursuing a doctoral degree from the University of California, Berkeley, where he has worked with Edmund Campion, David Wessel,and Jorge Liderman. Awards include a Charles Ives scholarship and fellowship from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the Jacob Druckman Memorial Prize from Aspen Music Festival, ASCAP and BMI awards, and a Fellowship from the Tanglewood Music Center.