Mason Bates is a hot property in the contemporary music world right now.  The composer/performer is making a name for himself by marrying electronica with symphonic and chamber music sounds, for uniting string quartets with techno beats, and for making the sounds of our time be nice to the sounds of decades – or centuries – before.  It is interesting to note that we live in a world where electronic music is nothing new, but is still considered unquestionably ‘modern.’  In fact, its roots can be traced for over 100 years, well back into the 19th century, and the common practice of including electronic sounds or manipulation of acoustic sounds with live performances has a history almost as long.  That’s to say nothing of the long history of using the rhythms and effects from popular dances of the day to inform and create ‘classical’, or more accurately, concert music.  But common misuse of the words ‘new’, ‘modern’ and ‘contemporary’ when describing new, modern, contemporary music seems a topic for another day.  Here we have a CD release from one of the newly minted rising stars of this art, Mason Bates.

Bates’ particular impact on the new music scene is his infusing standard acoustic music ensembles with electronically produced beats, loops, and effects from techno and other modern dance styles.  The primary difficulty of this alchemy is that the composer is marrying styles which may be so incompatible as to detract from each other’s strengths.  Modern chamber music necessitates the ‘long listen’; it has material which evolves over time, and often uses irregular phrase length and meter, whereas techno’s hallmark is repetition, steady pulses, and stasis or slow development.

On this CD we find a happy marriage of the 2, and one that doesn’t quite work.  Bates’ Red River, an aural depiction of various points along the Colorado River, works.  Whether it be actual sounds of rushing water (a novel take on ‘program music,’ but not entirely original – think of Respighi’s The Birds) or the mechanical sounds depicting the construction of Las Vegas, the live music (performed excellently by the Antares ensemble) and the electronica meld together and produce one sonic result, which, if electronic sounds are to be considered an instrument in an ensemble, should be the goal of any electro-acoustic composer.  Another work on the CD though, Digital Loom (source of the album’s title) for organ and electronica, is less convincing.  In the program notes, which one assumes Bates wrote himself since they are not credited, our eyes are opened to the possibilities of combining an instrument associated with all things old with the newest development in instrumental sound production.  The intriguing thoughts of how the organ needs and uses space, as well as the obvious religious overtones, whet our aural appetite.  Sadly, though, the listener will get as much out of reading the program notes as s/he will listening to the notes of the work, which should not be.  It is not the great piece of music that can be adequately or better described in text than by listening.

The CD is tastefully ordered with the 3 large works being separated by 4 unrelated shorter pieces - 2 interludes, bookended by an intro/outro pair.  The shorter works, including the 2.5 minute Siren Music (which I found, after prematurely lowering my speakers, is actually a choral piece sung by Chanticleer), are not up to the level of the major works, and seem by comparison like compositional experiments included to round out the form of the album.  An example of when loop-based electro-acoustic music fails to work: when Siren Music ended, I thought: “this could have continued for 30 more seconds, or 5 more seconds, or ended 30 seconds earlier.”  Just as in some ‘classical’ music (including works by avowed masters that just don’t work that well), if there is no appreciable form, that is to say if there is no discernable musical problem to be solved in a piece, its length becomes problematic, and short works seem simply like random snippets from larger works.  This is where I feel the introduction of relatively repetitive, formless techno into otherwise mainstream concert music within a classical tradition presents a major hurdle for a composer like Bates to overcome, although he shows in the larger pieces how he is working to tackle it.

© 2009 Patrick Valentino