Mason Wesley Bates was born on January 23,1977 and is a Grammy award-winning American composer of symphonic music and DJ of electronic dance music.
11 Facts About Mason Bates
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Mason Bates is the first composer-in-residence of the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, and he has been in residence with Chicago Symphony Orchestra, the San Francisco Symphony, the Pittsburgh Symphony, and the California Symphony.
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Mason Bates's earliest choral compositions were conducted by his piano teacher Hope Armstrong Erb, and he studied composition with Dika Newlin, who was a student of Arnold Schoenberg.
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Mason Bates subsequently attended the Columbia University-Juilliard School program and earned a Bachelor of Arts in English literature and Masters of Music in music composition.
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Mason Bates studied music composition with John Corigliano, David Del Tredici, and Samuel Adler, while studying playwriting with Arnold Weinstein.
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In 2001, Mason Bates relocated to the Bay Area and studied under Edmund Campion in the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at the University of California, Berkeley and graduated in 2008 with a PhD in composition.
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Mason Bates worked around that time as a DJ and techno artist under the name Masonic in clubs and lounges of San Francisco.
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Mason 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.
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Mason Bates gained national attention in 2007 with Liquid Interface, a water symphony commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra under Leonard Slatkin, who premiered several works by Bates including Violin Concerto for Anne Akiko Meyers.
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Mason 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.
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That same year saw a nomination for Best Contemporary Classical Composition for his Alternative Energy for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, where Mason Bates was named composer-in-residence from 2010 to 2015.