Benedict Mason
b. 1954
British
Summary
Biography
Mason gained a scholarship to King's College, Cambridge, and after graduating, took a degree in film making at the Royal College of Art. He turned to composition relatively late, but immediately attracted attention with his first acknowledged work, 'Hinterstoisser Traverse', and gained the Guido d'Arezzo Prize for 'Oil and Petrol Marks on a Wet Road are Sometimes Held to be Spots where a Rainbow Stood', while his first orchestral piece, Lighthouses of England and Wales, won the Benjamin Britten Competition in 1988. Subsequent awards include a Fulbright Fellowship, the Paul Fromm Award (for 'Steep Ascent within and away from a non-European Concert Hall: Six Horns, Three Trombones and a Decorated Shed') in 1995, and the Third Britten Award (for 'Rilke Songs') in 1996.
Mason's early works display a characteristically post-modern stylistic diversity, which arises in part from their 'investigative' intentions: the 'String Quartet No.1' examines various modes of travelling, 'Lighthouses of England and Wales' analyses the phenomenon of 'sea music', while 'Oil and Petrol Marks...' collates and classifies children's games. Works around 1990 show an increasing interest in polyrhythm which culminates in two highly virtuosic ensemble pieces: the glittering 'Double Concerto' (a virtual 'homage to Ligeti') and above all, the typically whimsically entitled 'Animals and the Origins of Dance', a set of 'twelve ninety-second polymetric dances' which at some points calls for as many as eleven separate click-tracks. 'Playing Away', a grand opera about football, opera, pop music and Germany also dates from this period.A particular feature of Mason's later music is its spatial dimension, which goes way beyond the 'multi-ensemble' approach pioneered by Brant and Stockhausen. Since 1993, Mason has written works for particular halls, which then act as highly diverse resonators for the sounds produced by the musicians (and vice versa - the musicians also articulate the acoustic and architectural properties of the halls).
The main outcome of this preoccupation is an extended series of pieces - mostly much more austere than Mason's preceding works, but all featuring a strong extra-musical or visual input - generically entitled 'Music for Concert Halls' ; locations involved have included the Mozartsaal of the Alte Oper, Frankfurt, the 'Espace de Projection' at IRCAM, Paris, the Paradiso in Amsterdam and the new Kultur und Kongresszentrum Lucerne designed by Jean Nouvel.
In many cases, the musicians participating in the 'Concert Hall' pieces are located outside the main auditorium - in the 'Trumpet Concerto', only the solo trumpeter is inside the auditorium - and perform at the verge of audibility (in terms of the audience). Thus the pieces not only break with the ceremonial aspects of the traditional concert - one could regard them as 'concert installations' - but also become an invitation to acute listening. Such pieces are, by their nature, virtually unrecordable, reflecting the composer's current insistence on music as something to be produced by live musicians in authentic acoustic environments, as opposed to the artificiality of music conveyed via domestic loudspeakers."
© Richard Toop 1998
Mason's early works display a characteristically post-modern stylistic diversity, which arises in part from their 'investigative' intentions: the 'String Quartet No.1' examines various modes of travelling, 'Lighthouses of England and Wales' analyses the phenomenon of 'sea music', while 'Oil and Petrol Marks...' collates and classifies children's games. Works around 1990 show an increasing interest in polyrhythm which culminates in two highly virtuosic ensemble pieces: the glittering 'Double Concerto' (a virtual 'homage to Ligeti') and above all, the typically whimsically entitled 'Animals and the Origins of Dance', a set of 'twelve ninety-second polymetric dances' which at some points calls for as many as eleven separate click-tracks. 'Playing Away', a grand opera about football, opera, pop music and Germany also dates from this period.A particular feature of Mason's later music is its spatial dimension, which goes way beyond the 'multi-ensemble' approach pioneered by Brant and Stockhausen. Since 1993, Mason has written works for particular halls, which then act as highly diverse resonators for the sounds produced by the musicians (and vice versa - the musicians also articulate the acoustic and architectural properties of the halls).
The main outcome of this preoccupation is an extended series of pieces - mostly much more austere than Mason's preceding works, but all featuring a strong extra-musical or visual input - generically entitled 'Music for Concert Halls' ; locations involved have included the Mozartsaal of the Alte Oper, Frankfurt, the 'Espace de Projection' at IRCAM, Paris, the Paradiso in Amsterdam and the new Kultur und Kongresszentrum Lucerne designed by Jean Nouvel.
In many cases, the musicians participating in the 'Concert Hall' pieces are located outside the main auditorium - in the 'Trumpet Concerto', only the solo trumpeter is inside the auditorium - and perform at the verge of audibility (in terms of the audience). Thus the pieces not only break with the ceremonial aspects of the traditional concert - one could regard them as 'concert installations' - but also become an invitation to acute listening. Such pieces are, by their nature, virtually unrecordable, reflecting the composer's current insistence on music as something to be produced by live musicians in authentic acoustic environments, as opposed to the artificiality of music conveyed via domestic loudspeakers."
© Richard Toop 1998
Performances
There are no upcoming performances
Features
- New works for live ensemble to film
- Since the invention of machines that projected images onto screen in the early 1800’s, filmmakers such as Alfred Hitchcock, Dziga Vertov, Charles Chaplin and many others created silent moving pictures for presentation on theatre screens, in this golden era of cinema between 1894-1929. The genre has inspired composers from George Antheil to Joby Talbot to write new scores to accompany these silent masterpieces in the concert hall.