Today, I want to talk about Mason Bates and the music he composed for the opera (R)evolution.
As I mentioned before, I literally know nothing about opera.
But I am learning.
When creating an opera, first someone writes the music.
Mason Bates is a forty-five-year-old man who is (R)revolutionizing orchestral music. Apparently, he worked as a techno D.J. at night after his kids went to bed and he has a real hankering for techno and combining it with orchestra. To me, he is bringing orchestral music into the twenty-first century and contemporizing it.
Here is an excerpt from an article in the Mercury News newspaper article from several years ago.
By Mercury News | migration@dfmdev.com | PUBLISHED: December 30, 2013 at 8:57 a.m. | UPDATED: August 12, 2016 at 11:13 a.m.
Boyish-looking and easygoing in conversation, Bates is known for his workaholic tendencies and for the intricate craftsmanship of his scores. “He is one of the extraordinary colorists in music today,” says conductor Leonard Slatkin, who premiered Bates’ “Liquid Interface” (also part of the San Francisco festival) with the National Symphony Orchestra in Washington, D.C., in 2007, and in September recorded Bates’ purely acoustic Violin Concerto with the London Symphony Orchestra and soloist Anne Akiko Meyers. “I’m taken orchestrally by the sounds he creates, with or without electronics.”
So am I.
His style befits the subject of Steve Jobs fantastically.
In one interview he explained how he wrote the music for (R)evolution so each main character had distinct musical characteristics that were easy to identify. In addition, there is a tech vibe throughout the opera that connects all the characters and the story together.
Watch Mason perform at the Kennedy Center with the orchestra.
He composed this song Mothership which is an example of his work, but not in the opera; however, it exemplifies his style and the music style of the opera.
It is just fun to watch him playing his techno-computer "instrument".
You will see what I am talking about.
"By collapsing the gap between those two worlds — finding a place in orchestral music for the technology and rhythmic textures of the club scene — Bates is cajoling “the beast,” as he calls the orchestra, to “dance in a new style. … I’m fascinated by what an orchestra can do on a dramatic level, on a sonic level; there don’t seem to be any limits. And the more I’ve gotten involved with electronic music, the more I’ve come to appreciate the orchestra as the great synth that it is — the original synthesizer.”
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