Mason Bates
Stereo Is King
Innova 882
01 Stereo Is King 12:35
Cynthia Yeh, Jacob Nissly, Eric Banks, percussion
Mason Bates, electronica
02 Observer in the Magellanic
Cloud 6:22
Chanticleer
03
Difficult Bamboo 23:31
Baird
Dodge, violin • Jennifer
Gunn, flute
Susan
Warner, clarinet • Kuang-Hao Huang,
piano
Cynthia
Yeh, percussion • Cliff Colnot, conductor
04 Terrycloth Troposphere 5:11
Mason Bates, electronica
Bill Ryan & Grand Valley State New Music Ensemble
05 String Band 12:26
The Claremont Trio
Emily Bruskin, violin • July Bruskin, cello • Donna
Kwong, piano
06 White Lies for Lomax 6:13
Tania Stavreva, piano
Total: 66:16
1 STEREO IS KING
Cynthia Yeh, Jacob Nissly, Eric Banks percussion
Mason
Bates electronica
Commissioned
by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW series
Stereo
Is King
exists at the intersection of indigenous percussion sonorities and lightning-fast
electronica rhythms. Throughout the piece, the marimba is shadowed by a set of
Thai gongs, which produce slightly bent pitches when laid flat atop foam. The antiphonal interplay between these two players is further
enhanced by hard-panned stereo effects in the electronics, and a third
player supports them on a ‘toy drum set’ of baby rotos
toms and woodblocks.
The tribal music of the opening, which features Tibetan prayer-bowls,
quickly transforms into the shattered sound of drum ‘n
bass electronica. An ambient middle section explores the Tibetan prayer-bowls
more lyrically, with processed prayer-bowl recordings wafting by. As things
become restless again, the fast-paced antiphonal music of the opening returns
with a vengeance.
Dedicated
to Cynthia Yeh, principle percussionist of the
Chicago Symphony Orchestra.
2 OBSERVER IN THE MAGELLANIC CLOUD Chanticleer
Commissioned
by Chanticleer
Eons from
now, a lost satellite floats in the Megallanic Cloud
(Nubeculae Megallani),
a group of dwarf galaxies. The satellite picks up a glimpse of ancient light
from Earth. The light is old because it has been traveling for so long, and it
reveals a look into Earth’s distant past. Focusing its telescope, this robotic
observer witnesses the Maori (the indigenous people of New Zealand) chanting to
the Megallanic Cloud, which appears as a cluster of
stars when seen from Earth’s surface:
Tuputuputu atua Magellanic Cloud, sacred one,
Ka eke mai
i te
rangi e roa e Mounting the heavens,
Whangainga iho
ki te
mata o’te tau e roa e. Cause all the new
year’s growth to flourish.
Distant
future meets distant past in this brief moment. Then the telescope retracts,
the satellite floats on, and the Maori leave their food in thanks.
3 DIFFICULT BAMBOO
Baird
Dodge violin |
Ken Olsen cello |
Jennifer Gunn flute
Susan
Warner clarinet |
Kuang-Hao Huang piano
Cynthia Yeh percussion | Cliff Colnot conductor
Commissioned
by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra’s MusicNOW series
Difficult
Bamboo’s
transformation from eerie minimalism to frenetic maximalism
is based on the premise of an aggressive species of running bamboo invading a
bucolic landscape.
The
pentatonic-tinged harmonies that open the piece, articulated by fluttertonging and tremolo sonorities, conjure a West Coast
pastoral. But this lyrical music is quickly visited by an insidiously
persistent ‘replicating music’ of a pulsing, bending unison. Flickering motives
and out-of-tune notes soon infect each instrument, and the harmony then morphs
into highly chromatic territory. Even the percussionist’s shaker rhythm jumps
to the others’ music stands. At several moments, the lyrical pastoral music
returns, but the ‘replicating music’ (like the plant itself) is impossible to
kill.
Dedicated
to conductor Cliff Colnot and the musicians who
brought the work to life.
4 TERRYCLOTH TROPOSPHERE
Mason
Bates electronica
Bill Ryan
& Grand Valley State New Music Ensemble
An homage to California minimalist
Terry Riley, this piece surrounds fragments of his seminal In C with
quicksilver electronica rhythms and trippy harmonies.
5 STRING BAND
The
Claremont Trio
Emily Bruskin violin | July Bruskin cello
| Donna Kwong piano
Commissioned
by Young Concert Artists, Inc.
This work
begins as a reimagination of old-time string-band
music, but it evolves rapidly away from this music into other spaces. A unison
that slowly bleeds lower, made more effective by the use of pencil erasers and small
screws inserted in the piano, grows into bluesy, sliding half-steps. This
ultimately flowers, in the middle of the work, into a long melody framed by
bent notes — but at that moment the piece begins to disintegrate. With
the pitch world fractured and the grooves of the beginning now fading into the
chemical sunset, the last half of the piece shows the ensemble as a very
different kind of string band. It is a unified band of resonating strings, with
the melody regressing back to its original space of a bleeding unison.
Dedicated
to Edmund Campion.
6 WHITE LIES FOR LOMAX
Tania Stavreva piano
Winner of
the 3rd Van Cliburn American Composers Invitational, May 30,
2009
It is still a surprise to discover how few classical musicians are
familiar with Alan Lomax, the ethnomusicologist who ventured into the American
South (and elsewhere) to record the soul of a land. Those scratchy recordings
captured everyone from Muddy Waters to a whole slew of anonymous blues
musicians.
White
Lies for Lomax
dreams up wisps of distant blues fragments –more fiction than fact, since
they are hardly honest recreations of the blues – and lets them slowly
accumulate to an assertive climax. The homage ends with an old recording of a
blues musician floating in from an off-stage radio, briefly crossing paths with
the cloud-like remnants of the work’s opening. The seemingly recent phenomenon
of sampling – grabbing a sound-bite from a song and incorporating it into
something new – is in fact a high-tech version of the very old practice
of allusion or parody, and the inclusion of a scratchy field recording at the
end is a nod to that tradition.
MasonBates.com
CREDITS
Recording
engineers: Chris Willis (Stereo Is King, Difficult Bamboo), Ron
St. Germain (White Lies for Lomax), Chris
Manning, Donald Fraser, Matthew Oltman (Observer
in the Magellanic Cloud), Adam Abeshouse (String Band)
Mastering
engineer: Greg Reierson | RareFormMastering.com
Artwork:
Chained to the Future by Jason Brammer | JasonBrammer.com
Graphic
design: Tim Schwartz |
OnionProductions.com
Special
thanks to Riccardo Muti and the Chicago Symphony
Orchestra for its Mead Composer in Residency, with support from Cindy Sargent.
Innova is supported by an
endowment from The McKnight Foundation
Philip
Blackburn director, design
Chris
Campbell operations manager
Steve
McPherson publicist
www.innova.mu