Mason Bates

Bates was raised in Richmond, Virginia and Newton, Virginia, where his family homestead and farm is located. He exhibited an early interest in creative writing at St. Christopher’s School and received a letter from the Mayor of Munich in response to his poem “The Village of a Million People,” written after a visit to the German city. His earliest choral compositions were conducted by his piano teacher Hope Armstrong Erb, and he studied composition with Dika Newlin, a disciple of Arnold Schoenberg.

While gaining national prominence for his electro-acoustic symphonic music, Bates began experimenting with concert format in his curating projects in partnership with institutions such as the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and the Kennedy Center. Through his club show Mercury Soul, Bates became familiar with lighting, production, and staging techniques that create fluid, information-rich environments in social settings. With composer Anna Clyne, Bates expanded the Chicago Symphony’s MusicNOW series to include cinematic program notes, immersive production, and pre- and post-concert parties in partnership with the illmeasures DJ collective. After his residency with the CSO, Bates was named the first composer-in-residence of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington DC, where he launched the new-music series KC Jukebox. The series animates venues across the Center, pairing classical ensembles and composers with artists outside the field, such as Thievery Corporation and the composers Kyle Dixon and Michael Stein of the Netflix series Stranger Things.

Bates has spoken about his symphonies as a revival of the narrative symphonies of the 19th Century using 21st Century sounds, as exhibited by his 2018 symphony Art of War. The piece “explores the drama of human conflict” using field recordings of mortar and artillery explosions made during two visits to Camp Pendleton, as well as recordings of the printing presses of the US Mint which appear in the work’s opening movement “Money as a weapons system”. Many Bates works do not include electronic sounds, such as Resurrexit which was premiered by Manfred Honneck and the Pittsburgh Symphony Orchestra.

His first opera, The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, was premiered in 2017 by the Santa Fe Opera, which added a performance to accommodate the high demand after selling out all seven performances. General Director Charles McKay announced that it was one of the best-selling new works in its history, and Santa Fe Opera’s recording on Pentatone Records went on to win the 2019 Grammy® for Best Opera Recording. Co-commissioners include San Francisco Opera, Seattle Opera, and Indiana University. In 2018, the Metropolitan Opera announced the commission of The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, with music by Bates and libretto by Gene Sheer. The opera is based on the Pulitzer Prize-winning novel by Michel Chabon about a Jewish immigrant who writes comic books to make enough money to save his family from the Holocaust.

Film projects begin in 2015 with the score for Gus Van Sant's movie The Sea of Trees, starring Matthew McConaughey, Naomi Watts and Ken Watanabe. In November 2019, Vulcan Productions announced details about Philharmonia Fantastique: The Making of the Orchestra, a 25’ multimedia work integrating film, animation and pre-recorded sound with a live orchestra. The work is a collaboration between Bates and director / sound designer Gary Rydstrom of Lucasfilm and Skywalker Sound, and animator Jim Capobiano of Aerial Contrivance Workshop. Philharmonia Fantastique is a ‘guide to the orchestra’ with a script by Bates and Rydstrom, who directs the film, and an electro-acoustic symphonic score by Bates. It will be premiered in March and April 2020 by the Chicago Symphony and the San Francisco Symphony, followed by performances in the 2020-2021 season by the Dallas, Pittsburgh, and National Symphonies. Vulcan Productions, which is producing the film, will release it in theaters and on television in late 2020.

A long partnership with the San Francisco Symphony began with the 2009 premiere of The B-Sides under Michael Tilson Thomas, who subsequently conducted several Bates works with the YouTube Symphony. The latter premiered Mothership was premiered at the Sydney Opera House in 2011 to an online audience of two million, and the work has become one of the most-performed orchestral works by a living composer. Thomas and the SFS recorded three Bates works during the Beethoven & Bates Festival of 2017, earning a Grammy® nomination for Best Orchestral Performance. That same year also saw a nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for his Alternative Energy for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where Bates was named composer-in-residence from 2010-2015.

In 2001, he relocated to the Bay Area and graduated from the University of California, Berkeley with a PhD in composition in 2008, where he studied with Edmund Campion while working as a DJ in San Francisco clubs and lounges in San Francisco. His work as a DJ led to the founding of Mercury Soul, a San Francisco-based non-profit organization that mounts club shows combining classical music and DJ sets in clubs. Residencies at the American Academies in Rome and Berlin led to two years in Europe from 2003-2006, and he currently lives in the Burlingame Hills south of San Francisco.

Bates showed an early interest in bridging the worlds of electronic and symphonic music, premiering his Concerto for Synthesizer in 1999 with the Phoenix Symphony and subsequently performing it with the Atlanta Symphony. Robert Moody premiered that work in addition to Rusty Air in Carolina, a tribute to the summer ambience of the South integrating field recordings from the Carolinas. He gained national attention in 2007 with Liquid Interface, a water symphony commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin, who premiered and several Bates works including Violin Concerto for Anne Akiko Meyers.

During the summer of 1993 at Brevard Music Center, Bates’ music caught the attention of conductor Robert Moody, who subsequently commissioned his first symphonic work Free Variations for Orchestra for his orchestra in Evansville, Indiana. Bates subsequently attended the Columbia University-Juilliard School program and earned a BA in English literature and MM in music composition. He studied music composition with John Corigliano, David Del Tredici, and Samuel Adler while also studying playwriting with Arnold Weinstein.

Mason W. Bates (born January 23, 1977) is a Grammy award-winning American composer of symphonic music and DJ of electronic dance music. He is the first composer-in-residence of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and he has also been in residence with Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and the California Symphony. In addition to his notable works Mothership, Anthology of Fantastic Zoology, and The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs, he composed the score to Gus Van Sant’s film The Sea of Trees.