Mason Bates
White Lies for Lomax
Recipient of a 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship in the Creative Arts, Mason Bates moves fluidly between the worlds of classical concert music and electronica. He earned a master's degree from Juilliard and at the age of twenty was appointed as a Fellow in Composition at the Tanglewood Music Festival. Subsequent honors have included Fellowships from the American Academy of Arts and Letters, the American Academy in Rome, and the American Academy in Berlin.
Mr. Bates has received numerous commissions from the National Symphony, the Koussevitsky Foundation, and the New Juilliard Ensemble among others. Although his recent compositions employ the interplay of acoustic and electronic sounds, his love of music has its roots in his experiences as a member of the all-boys' choir and glee club at St. Christopher's School in Virginia. Mr. Bates lives in San Francisco where he frequently works as a DJ. His works have been performed in such varied venues as Carnegie Hall, the San Francisco Museum of Contemporary Art, and the Roter Salon in Berlin.
Of White Lies for Lomax, the composer notes:
"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 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 'Dollar Maime' at the end is a nod to that tradition."
