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Issue 105 Fall 2008
THE BOMB BLAST
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Benedict Mason, Berlin, 2006. Photo: Astrid Karger.
Benedict Mason is one of my favorite composers. His music is infinitely inventive, gleeful, and always a happy surprise to hear. He is a brilliant manipulator of form, perception, and of the basic materials of music. Mason came to composition (in the late 1980s) at a time when composers seemed to have an unwholesome preoccupation with manipulating pitches (As, F-sharps, and their 10 friends) and little else. Mason responded by focusing his boundless sense of invention on other too-long-ignored musical parameters: rhythms (many of them, simultaneously!), space (literally having musicians front and back, near and far, inside and outdoors), timbre (an entire aviary of noises from known and unknown instruments), and, most important of all, style. His was the first music I heard (from the late 1980s) that seemed to be actually “post-modern”; he is a perspicacious polyglot who is able to reference, parody, and idolize another musical style in a single gesture. His works can be deeply moving, and they spark with the finger-in-an-electrical-socket energy—an admixture of Terry Gilliam, Conlon Nancarrow, and S. J. Perelman, on one of his early stream-of-consciousness jags.
In 2004, I was pleased to produce a Composer Portrait concert of Mason’s music at the Miller Theatre of Columbia University, where I produce the programs. The group Alarm Will Sound played his incredible work Animals and the Origins of the Dance, a dozen 90-second “polymetric” dances, each with up to 12 different tempi (coordinated by 12 different click tracks). The second half of the program was a site-specific adaptation of his work Fifth Music: Résumé with CPE Bach, a fully spatialized work that had 24 or so players running inside, in and out of, and around the theater and included solos for air compressor, dog, and Barbie® Boombox. Yet for all the madcap fun of the piece, it revealed itself to be a carefully constructed essay in sound, color, and space, and in the coordination and non-coordination of tempo and style. The piece ended (or, rather, failed to end) as the musicians left the theater one by one, climbed aboard a double-decker bus, and headed off into Harlem, still playing. When they reappeared some 20 minutes later, still playing (!), the audience, by then at the reception, broke into an uproarious ovation.
In May 2005, Lincoln Center gave the US premiere of his work ChaplinOperas, three Chaplin shorts with a live score (and parallel narrative) by Mason. In 2006, we gave the premiere of the Double Concerto for Tuba and Double Bass that we commissioned from him. It was a sensation, in all senses of the word. This year sees revivals of Second Music opening the SPOR Festival in Denmark; a completely new version of his opera Playing Away to premiere at the Bregenzer Festspiele; as well as new commissions for Germany’s top orchestra, the Bamberg Symphony, led by Jonathan Nott (well known to New York audiences) and a new installation for orchestra in the Museum of Modern Art in Stockholm.
