The garden variety of orchestral pops music, whether it's Gershwin or hip-hop that's involved, grafts the orchestra onto the basic popular material. The music of California composer Mason Bates starts from the opposite premise: the music, in Bates' own words, offers "an expanded symphonic palette." Bates, who has been active in the worlds of both classical composition and electronic laptop dance performance, adds electronic components to a sound world rooted in the early 20th century: The B-Sides, which pays tribute in its ...
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The garden variety of orchestral pops music, whether it's Gershwin or hip-hop that's involved, grafts the orchestra onto the basic popular material. The music of California composer Mason Bates starts from the opposite premise: the music, in Bates' own words, offers "an expanded symphonic palette." Bates, who has been active in the worlds of both classical composition and electronic laptop dance performance, adds electronic components to a sound world rooted in the early 20th century: The B-Sides, which pays tribute in its final movement to the warehouse parties that were incubators of Detroit techno music, started life as a response to Schoenberg's Five Pieces for Orchestra, Op. 16. Two exciting developments emerge from Bates' decision. First, he finds that attaching the electronics to the orchestra in this way does not make them subordinate: the pictorial vocabulary of the music is expanded in such a way that the music leaves you with thoroughly contemporary images that wouldn't have occurred without...
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