February 3, 11:15AM: This post has been revised to correct and amend typing and editing errors on my part in the section on Anna Clyne's new work. Apologies to Anna!
Chicago Sun-Times and suntimes.com, Wednesday February 1, 2012 8:30PM CST
Mason Bates visits Fermilab in Batavia last year to record sounds for his work Alternative Energy. The 22-minute work premières Thursday evening. | © Todd Rosenberg Photography
The Current Sound
Tones recorded at Fermilab juice up composer’s piece for CSO
Mason Bates takes an exterior route whle Anna Clyne follows interior paths for her subsequent première
CHICAGO SYMPHONY ORCHESTRA
◆ Thursday through Tuesday
◆ Orchestra Hall, 220 South Michigan Avenue
◆ $34-$207
◆ (312) 294-3000; cso.org
BY ANDREW PATNER
Composer Mason Bates is a fusion of All-Americanness and 21st century globalism.
At 35, and long resident in the San Francisco Bay Area and before that in New York City, he still speaks with an only slightly modified variant of the unique drawl of Richmond, Va., where he grew up. He has a last name for a first name, a choirboy’s features, and what looks like a perpetual tan.
One of two Mead composers in residence with the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, Bates made his formal studies at Columbia University and the Juilliard School with teachers who pushed for American voices in a world they regarded as overrun by European influences.
Yet his early embrace of electronics and his “night job” as turntable spinner under the play on words name DJ Masonic shows the influence of Europe’s inhalation of American club dance sounds and its transformation of those beats and effects into a sort of international Esperanto background music. A listener wandering into CSO performances last season of Bates’s Music for Underground Spaces or The B-Sides would have a hard time identifying the composer’s national, or even hemispheric, origins.
This could change with the world première performances Thursday through Tuesday of Alternative Energy, the first work Bates has written expressly for the CSO and its music director Riccardo Muti.
The maestro appointed Bates and his fellow Mead composer Anna Clyne to their positions and this week extended the appointments for two more seasons. Muti is also taking Bates’s piece and Clyne’s Night Ferry on the CSO’s California tour this month and the Bates work to New York’s Carnegie Hall in October. (Bates also will host a new CSO lounge party called “POST” after Friday’s concert.)
“This is my biggest commission to date,” Bates said by phone recently from Miami, where he was presenting one of his techno/classical “Mercury Soul” concert-cum-party evenings. “At 22 minutes, it’s my longest work for full orchestra. I thought it was very important that this piece take note of Chicago and the Midwest, because they are giving it birth in idea and performance.”
Staying in close contact with Muti -- “We shared a lot of trans-Atlantic phone calls!” -- Bates created a work that tells a story of the evolution, or devolution, of man-made energy. Its opening movement evokes a turn-of-the-last-century junkyard inspired “both by places I’ve driven to around Chicago, and by that great American tinkerer, Henry Ford.”
“Ford’s Farm 1896” is followed by “Chicago 2012” with sounds Bates gathered on site from the recently closed Tevatron particle accelerator at Fermilab in exurban Batavia, as well as others Chicago has sent out into the world via its development of house and other club music. An explosive meeting of acoustic and electronic music takes the work through a nuclear meltdown in China in 2112; a coda of bird song and tribal voices closes out the piece in a 23rd-century Iceland as the Earth starts a repopulation.
“Maestro Muti really helped me to stretch here,” Bates said. “Both in crafting the electronics and their sound from laptop [which Bates operates onstage with the orchestra] to speakers with the same care as the orchestra’s acoustic parts and in bowing to classical antecedents, such as the idée fixe that Berlioz used in the Symphonie fantastique -- except we’ll be doing this with a fiddle tune and junkyard car parts.”
Anna Clyne and a part of the planning timeline painting she created and used. © Todd Rosenberg Photography
Anna Clyne’s new work delves into depths of Schubert
A few blocks from Orchestra Hall, in a sunny courtyard studio at the happily eccentric Fine Arts Building, composer Anna Clyne has created an almost purpose-built home where she wrote her new work, Night Ferry, to receive its world première performances February 9 to 11.
Riccardo Muti had suggested that Clyne might look to Schubert for inspiration in some way, as he was planning an otherwise all-Schubert program. The London-born, Scotland- and New York-educated composer, 31, went to work.
In an unusual process, Clyne, one of whose entrées to Schubert came when growing up as a cellist and playing his chamber music, researched the brief life of the Viennese genius who at his death at 31 in 1828 had produced some 1,000 works. Examining his interior life, she came to accept the hypothesis that Schubert suffered from cyclothymia, a rapid-swinging form of manic-depression.
An elegiac poem by Irish Nobel laureate Seamus Heaney in memory of the American poet Robert Lowell, a severe manic-depressive, gave her imagery and a title: “You were our Night Ferry,” Heaney wrote of Lowell, moving “wilfully across/the ungovernable and dangerous.”
From there, Clyne created a timeline wrapped around the walls of her studio and made a mostly abstract painting -- “I am not a visual artist!” she said, laughing. “This was a tool of exploration and creation -- of a journey” paralleling the sections of another poem, Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s 1798 epic Rime of the Ancient Mariner, even though the work itself is entirely instrumental and has no voices or text.
The CSO’s individual players gave her “inspiration as to the sounds and musical voices for the piece, and Maestro Muti gave me the confidence and support to write a large-scale 20-minute orchestral work.” Muti, who in studying the score told me that “though there is not a note of Schubert and no direct reference to his music in her score, I believe that she has a real affinity with Schubert.” Still, he had encouraged her to make a piece entirely of her choosing, one that became a kind of interior journey, in contrast with Bates’s also independent project which could be seen and heard as more exterior music. And this is what commissioning a work should truly be about.
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