Borges Music – Mason Bates
Mason Bates (B. 1977)
Mason Wesley Bates was born in Philadelphia and raised in rural Virginia. After attending the Brevard Music Center, Bates went to Juilliard and studied composition with John Corigliano and David Del Tredici. He earned a BA in English literature and a Master of Music in composition. In 2001 he relocated to California and attended the Center for New Music and Audio Technologies at Berkeley, earning a PhD in composition in 2008. An active deejay in the San Francisco club scene, he continued to compose orchestral music while simultaneously developing a career in electronic and electro-acoustical music. His work gained the attention of Michael Tilson Thomas, and the San Francisco Orchestra premiered Bates’ The B-Sides, a s a symphony in five movements for electronics and orchestra in 2009.
From that point on Bates’ career exploded. He was appointed composer-in-residence of the Chicago Orchestra from 2010–2015, and became the first composer-in-residence at the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C. His Alternate Energy, a symphony in four movements for electronica and orchestra, was nominated for a Grammy; and his first opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs became one of the most successful productions in the history of the Sante Fe opera, winning a Grammy award for Best Opera Recording. In 2018 the Metropolitan Opera commissioned The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay, which is scheduled to premiere at the Indiana University Bloomington in November 2024 and at the Met in 2025.
In 2018, a survey of American orchestras revealed that Mason Bates was the second most-performed living composer, right after John Adams.
Borges-Related Works
Anthology of Fantastic Zoology (2015)
This colorful orchestra suite was inspired by The Book of Imaginary Beings by Jorge Luis Borges and Margarita Guerrero.
Anthology of Fantastic Zoology
(2015)
Scored for an orchestra comprising three flutes (3rd doubling piccolo), three oboes (3rd doubling English horn), three clarinets (2nd doubling E-flat clarinet and bass clarinet), two bassoons, contrabassoon, four French horns, three trumpets, two trombones, bass trombone, tuba, three percussionists, timpani, harp, piano/celesta, and strings.
- Forest: Twilight—
- Sprite
- Dusk—
- The A Bao A Qu
- Nymphs
- Night—
- The Gryphon
- Midnight—
- Sirens
- The Zaratan—
- Madrugada
Composed for the Chicago Symphony Orchestra and dedicated to Ricardo Muti, Anthology of Fantastic Zoology is inspired by Jorge Luis Borges’ Manual de zoología fantástica, the first version of The Book of Imaginary Beings. Bates’ first major composition to forgo electronics, Anthology divides the orchestra into novel instrumental groupings and employs various spatial effects, including placing strings offstage and carefully numbering each musical stand for sequential activation. The piece also requires a wind machine and extended timpani (or rototoms.)
As one might imagine from this description, Anthology of Fantastic Zoology is a very dynamic and colorful work! Bates modeled its structure on two late Romantic classics: Modest Mussorgsky’s Pictures at an Exhibition, and Camille Saint-Saën’s Le Carnaval des animaux. Like these famous forebears, Anthology conjures a series of musical portraits. As with Mussorgsky, these portraits are loosely separated by “promenades,” here “forest interludes” named after increasingly darker periods of the evening. And as with Saint-Saëns, Bates’ fantastic beasts are inscribed with playful allusions, each a musical reflection of its source material.
We begin with “Forest: Twilight—,” a trilling prelude that sets the stage for the entrance of “The Sprite.” Probably the most celebrated piece in the suite, “The Sprite” takes the form of a musical figure that flits from one “music stand” to the next. When experienced in concert, the “sprite” may be tracked by the eye as well as the ear, its path delineated by instruments tripping to life both onstage and off. (It’s also the one fantastical creature that does not appear in Borges’ original collection; but complaining about spurious attributions seems very anti-Borges.)
The elusive fairy departs as the orchestra darkens to “Dusk—,” a brief reprise of “Twilight.” A gong announces the entrance of “The A Bao A Qu.” Perhaps the most famously Borgesian creature in Borges’ bestiary, the A Bao A Qu was attributed to C.C. Iturvuru, one of Borges’ many bibliographic illusions. Ostensibly the A Bao A Qu is a Malaysian spirit that dwells at the base of the Tower of Victory in Chitor. When a human pilgrim climbs the spiral staircase, the spirit shadows his footsteps, growing increasingly more radiant and sprouting “extensions like little arms.” The A Boa A Qu achieves its ultimate form “only at the topmost step, when the climber is a person who has attained Nirvana and whose acts cast no shadows.” Unfortunately, this has only happened once since the beginning of time! The wretched creature’s usual fate is to collapse with the defeated climber, to “wheel and tumble” down the stairs with a moan like “the rustling of silk.”
Although Borges never fully describes the A Bao A Qu, many readers and critics have bestowed the creature with the characteristics of a serpent. (Bates claims that the A Bao A Qu “gloriously molts” at the top of the tower, an assertion not supported by the original story.) Intrigued by the creature’s slithering ascent and descent, he composed “The A Bao A Qu” as a musical palindrome. (Interestingly, Robert Parris’ Book of Imaginary Beings also contains a musical palindrome, but Parris selected the Amphisbaena—a two-headed serpent—upon which to double-back his score. Parris’ musical portrait of the A Bao A Qu is more ethereal.)
The piece builds in a stepped, spiraling cadence punctuated by exotic percussion. The horns reflect the creature’s mounting excitement as it nears the summit. A brief pause symbolizes the halfway point, marked by an “ecstasio” outburst from a wind machine. At this point the score reverses itself. Bates has remarked that he didn’t just want to play the score in retrograde; he selected specific sounds that would give the appearance of an orchestra running in reverse. While this may be more evident in the concert hall, the effect is somewhat lost on a recording—until the final gong, which is brilliantly played to mimic musical backmasking.
In the end, “The A Boa A Qu” is a delightful three minutes that requires virtuoso execution, but it bears little relationship to its namesake—it could have just as easily been about a corkscrew. The music fails to capture the mystery of the spirit or the growing ecstasy and radiance of its ascent. Indeed, despite what’s stated in the program notes, Bates’ creature seems to fail its ascent. The “ecstasio” outburst sounds more like Borges’ “barely audible” moan of disappointment than the “bluish” and “brilliant” radiance of its ultimate form.
This brings us to “Nymphs,” a pretty piece for two fluttering clarinets. It’s easy to imagine naked fairies frolicking in the gloaming, but nowhere does the piece suggest the darker undertone of Borges’ description—that laying eyes upon these women causes blindness or even death. Bates’ nymphs are pure Disney, free of Eros or Thanatos.
“Night” falls with a suggestion of darker shapes ahead, and our next imaginary being is “The Gryphon,” which Bates’ describes as a “flying lion that hunts horses (in this case, the violins.)” The most dramatic movement in the suite, “The Gryphon” fuses Aaron Copland’s brash populism with John Adam’s propulsive post-Minimalism. The result is the soundtrack to a dynamic chase scene: drums roll and stutter, strings flutter anxiously, horns pulse and surge, there’s even a whipcrack or two. An eruption of horns and timpani concludes a successful hunt, a reminder that Borges’ gryphon is a kingly being of “strength and might.”
“Midnight” arrives with a sense of hushed expectation, a suitable introduction for a predator of an entirely different kind. Here the “Sirens” are embodied by a pair of offstage violins who play a lush melodic line, slowly beguiling the remainder of the orchestra into harmonious accompaniment. Even though this spatial effect is diminished on a stereo recording, the piece sounds lovely, and the whole orchestra finally coming together is quite satisfying—although the question of what the sirens plan to do with the enraptured players remains unanswered, as the collective has fallen prey to another deception: “The Zaratan,” a living island that attracts stranded mariners only to drown them by sinking. Bates evokes this monstrous creature by drawing the orchestra into a dense, sustained cluster—a dissonant but triumphant climax that dissolves into fragments and echoes.
The final movement of Anthology is the longest: “Madrugada,” that wonderful Spanish term for the period between midnight and dawn. Bates scores this “witching hour” as a recapitulation of his bestiary; its instruments, colors, and themes revisited in new configurations and spawning fresh relationships. These musical figures conduct a swirling procession through the orchestra, gathering momentum and propelling the work to a suitably dramatic conclusion.
Like the two works that inspired it, Bates’ Anthology of Fantastic Zoology is kinetic, colorful, and fun. Nevertheless, it’s unlikely to produce anything as durable as Mussorgsky’s “Great Gates of Kiev” or Saint-Saëns’ “The Swan.” Bates is a wonderful colorist with tremendous technical skill. But like many American composers in the post neo-Romantic tradition, his sense of lyricism tends towards the pretty rather than the beautiful. “The Sirens” is a lovely piece of music and worth hearing; but the central melody never really soars, never touches the heart; it’s not going to attract descriptions like aching, sublime, or fragile.
This touches upon my general critique of Bates’ music, and it’s a complaint I have of many younger American composers. Much of Anthology feels like a soundtrack. This isn’t to belittle soundtracks, some of which are quite memorable. But let’s face it, most of today’s Hollywood composers are not Bernard Herrmann or Ennio Morricone. Modern soundtracks avoid experimentation, require a quick turnaround time, and signal “correct” emotions with an abundance of overdetermined musical cues. There’s often a superficiality to the music, a privileging of style over substance. At times, Anthology of Fantastic Zoology falls into this trap. It confuses pretty for lyrical, volume for drama, and gimmickry for wit. At its best it sounds like a less-melodic John Adams, a less-refined John Corigliano, a less-daring Thomas Adès. At its worst it sounds like an above-average movie soundtrack; intended to elicit a sympathetic response and soon forgotten.
Having said that, Bates has the power to produce compelling and meaningful music—while it doesn’t rank up there with Adams’ Doctor Atomic or Adès’ Powder Her Face, Bates’ opera The (R)evolution of Steve Jobs is quite good, a worthy addition to the modern “ripped from the headlines” repertoire. But here the subject seems to interest Bates on a personal level. A Gen-X deejay widely recognized for his innovative use of technology, Bates clearly resonates with the subject of Steve Jobs, and he’s transformed the politics and personalities of Silicon Valley into genuinely engaging art.
The same cannot be said for Anthology of Fantastic Zoology. Not only does Bates consistently refer to Borges as a “magical realist”—an appellation that notoriously grates on Borges scholars—his reading of Borges seems superficial. The A Bao A Qu is not a serpent that slithers up and down a tower; it’s a spirit that responds to human souls, a spirit whose sole purpose is to achieve radiant perfection; a climax that has only happened once in all of recorded time. Borges’ nymphs aren’t just frolicking cuties; to see one is to be struck blind, to see one naked is to perish. The gryphon is not just a flying lion that eat horses; it’s the majestic symbol for an infallible papacy. Only with the Zaratan does Bates come close to capturing the spirit of Borges’ writing, and he does so by allowing his audience to experience a moment of genuine dissonance that reaches an almost unbearable intensity. It’s the only piece in Anthology that truly invokes the “terrible grounds” of Borges’ fantastic zoo. In an interview with Ricky O’Bannon, Bates remarked that “I go to the symphony to have my head explode.” Anthology of Fantastic Zoology may certainly do that. But it won’t fire the imagination, break the heart, or stir the soul.
Liner Notes
By Phillip Huscher
Mason Bates: Anthology of Fantastic Zoology
CSO Resound, 2016
“The task of art,” Jorge Luis Borges said in an interview shortly before his death, “is to transform what is continuously happening to us, to transform all these things into symbols, into music, into something which can last in man’s memory.” Mason Bates discovered Borges in a Latin American literature course at Columbia University. “His use of nonfiction prose style when describing the realm of fantasy and imagination is unmatched by any writer,” Bates says today. Bates’s Anthology of Fantastic Zoology—written for the Chicago Symphony and Riccardo Muti, to mark the end of Bates’s five years as the Orchestra’s Mead Composer-in-Residence in 2015—is a fabulist concerto for orchestra that was inspired by one of Borges’s greatest flights of fancy.
Borges’s Manual de zoología fantástica was first published in 1957, at the time when Borges’s eyesight had deteriorated to the point that he could no longer read what he was writing. His inner vision, however, had never been more vivid, as he described mythical beasts from folklore, legend, and literature. When an expanded version of the anthology came out a decade later, under the title The Book of Imaginary Beings, The New York Times suggested it was the “skeleton-key to Borges’s literary imagination.” Although Borges’s writings have inspired composers before, Bates is the first to take the anthology as a point of departure. [Editorial note: This is not true; see Robert Parris and Gheorghi Arnaoudov.]
At the time, Bates was an English major—he attended the Columbia-Juilliard joint program and received degrees in both English literature and musical composition—he didn’t realize that magical realism or any other form of fiction would have a direct impact on the music he would write. Now that he is an established composer with a catalog of works that get regular performances, Bates says that literature is his primary nonmusical influence. Yet although books have often served as a reference point, this is his first major work that is actually based on a book. In his preface to the anthology, Borges says that it was never intended for consecutive reading, and he recommends that the reader dip into the pages at random, “just as one plays with the shifting patterns of a kaleidoscope,” giving Bates free reign to pick and choose from among Borges’s 120 creatures in compiling his own musical anthology.
Bates selected creatures based on the musical possibilities they offered. The Sprite, for example, allowed him to toss material from one violin stand to another—an effect he had long wanted to try—and then finally offstage. It is “something like a miniature relay race at high speeds,” he says. The A Bao A Qu, a serpent that slithers up a tower and then slides back down, suggested the form of a palindrome—music that is the same backwards and forwards. Bates had never heard a musical palindrome that actually sounds like one—“as if the record suddenly spins backwards,” he says—and he spent a lot of time finding material that could be “perceptively reversible.” (The midpoint, when the music turns back on itself, is marked by a pause in the orchestra and the “ecstasio” outburst of the wind machine.)
Bates wanted to create a series of colorful character movements—similar to a ballet suite—and then combine them in the finale. But Bates knew that the success of a work structured like a ballet depends on the highly individual and colorful identity of each movement. “Creating distinctive music that can be remembered has always been a challenge for contemporary composers,” he says, “but whole vistas open if you can create memorable music”—something that can last in man’s memory, as Borges put it.
Linking Bates’s movements are “forest interludes” that work like the promenades in Pictures from an Exhibition. But while Mussorgsky’s interludes are relatively simple— “like a palate-cleanser between paintings,” as Bates says—the Anthology interludes are surreal and increasingly dark, as the work progresses from twilight to dawn. As a result, the sequence of bestiary portraits, themselves growing in size as the work progresses, is overlaid with a sense of time moving forward through the hours of the night—all leading up to the witching-hour finale. Bates is a natural storyteller, and he has written this score with Riccardo Muti’s “unique abilities as a musical dramatist” in mind. “Imaginative narratives were once a powerful force in symphonic music,” Bates says, “and I have been fascinated with bringing them back with entirely new sounds.”
The Anthology of Fantastic Zoology is the largest work Bates has written—and one of the few without his signature infusion of electronica. In the Anthology of Fantastic Zoology, Bates found that he needed no more than the musicians of this orchestra to create even the wildest and most fantastical music he was after —the score is so full of unconventional sonic effects, he says, that you may imagine you are hearing electronic sounds. For what he calls his “swan song” to the Chicago Symphony, Bates has paid it the greatest tribute by writing a concerto for orchestra.
By Mason Bates
The slim size of Jorge Luis Borges’s Anthology of Fantastic Zoology belies the teeming bestiary contained within its pages. A master of magical realism and narrative puzzles, Borges was the perfect writer to create a compendium of mythological creatures. Several are of his own invention.
The musical realization of this, a kind of psychedelic Carnival of the Animals, is presented in eleven interlocking movements (a sprawling form inspired by French and Russian ballet scores). In between evocations of creatures familiar (sprite, nymph) and unknown (an animal that is an island), brief “forest interludes” take us deeper into the night, and deeper into the forest itself.
Imaginative creatures provoke new sounds and instrumentation, with a special focus on spatial possibilities using a variety of soloists. For example, the opening Sprite hops from music stand to music stand, even bouncing offstage. The A Bao A Qu is a serpentine creature that slithers up a tower; gloriously molts at the top; then slides back down, so the entire movement—like the life-cycle of the animal—is an exact palindrome.
Nymphs features two frolicking clarinets, while The Gryphon uses timpani and brass to conjure a flying lion that hunts horses (in this case, the violins). The lyrical core of the piece, Sirens, features offstage violins that lure the rest of the strings, one by one, to an epiphany. But it is short-lived, as the island they near devours them in The Zaratan, an island-sized animal conjured by tone clusters. The sprawling finale occurs at the witching-hour moment between midnight and dawn (madrugada, from the Spanish). This movement collapses the entire work upon itself, and all of the animals fuse together in the darkest, deepest part of the forest.
In the virtuosity the piece requires of soloists and sections, it resembles a concerto for orchestra, and every note was written with specific players in mind. Many of the players in the Chicago Symphony Orchestra have become dear friends, as has Maestro Riccardo Muti—whose unique abilities as a musical dramatist inspired the piece from beginning to end.
Interview Excerpts
From an interview conducted by Doyle Armbrust on 8 June 2015
For his final commission as the CSO’s Mead co-composer-in-residence, Mason Bates summons the sprites, griffins and serpents of Jorge Luis Borges for his Anthology of Fantastic Zoology. Dedicated to Maestro Riccardo Muti, this fanciful suite leaves the laptop, Bates’ frequent instrument of choice, tucked backstage in its sleeve, as the composer elects instead to unleash purely acoustic creatures through the aisles of Symphony Center.
Music writer Doyle Armbrust recently connected with the zookeeper himself, to get the scoop on this carnival of mythic beasts:
Doyle Armbrust: Did you come across Borges’ anthology, Manual de zoología fantástica, as a father looking for books for his kids?
Mason Bates: I actually found it before I had kids. Now that I’m reading Lord of the Rings with them, though, I look back and see that it does have a childlike component to it. I came across Borges as an English major at Columbia [University], some 20 years ago, and I was drawn to his collision of non-fiction writing style and completely wild, magical realism.
DA: How did you excavate it for source material?
MB: There’s a chick-and-the-egg aspect to my music and the forms it inhabits. On the one hand, a piece like Alternative Energy or this Anthology of Fantastic Zoology are dramatic, programatic pieces. On the other hand, I’m attracted to these forms because they are the kind of music I’m looking to write. For this piece, I was looking to write one of those giant, ballet-type suites in which you have lots of little movements that are all very colorful and very distinctive. I wanted to challenge myself to write memorable music that had a surreal, psychedelic component to it.
A lot of new music doesn’t put a priority on being memorable in the way that the music of a different era might have. I wanted to see how I could create a sprawling form and have it all come together at the end. In the Anthology, I found the perfect vehicle for that, going through Borges’ book and picking out specific animals that suggested interesting musical realizations.
DA: Given your laptop savvy, was it a specific constraint you placed on yourself to not include electronic elements in conjuring these mythic creatures?
MB: It’s a natural question because, for me, electronics have become a new section of the orchestra. It’s almost a given that you should be able to access that sound world. However, there are advantages to having a diverse catalog as a composer. I have several symphonies for orchestra and electronics, and I always figured I would have an electronic component, but for this piece, I thought, let’s have it entirely unplugged and see where that takes me. What I’ve found in my acoustic pieces is that I’ve pushed into new sonic territory with the instruments themselves, say, with my Violin Concerto, where the string section becomes a percussion ensemble. In the Anthology, there are hugely imaginative effects that I don’t think I would have come up with otherwise.
DA: Like the offstage violins?
MB: Even the onstage ones. I’ve spent the past couple years at the symphony looking at the strings and thinking, why can’t we activate those like dominoes? Why can’t we have a riff whip through the section in an almost visual way? You can imagine material spreading outwards from the conductor’s podium, running down the first violins or the cellos.
DA: You haven’t made any secret about your admiration and affection for Maestro Muti, to whom the piece is dedicated. How did he help inspire the piece?
MB: In addition to being a phenomenal musician and conductor, Maestro Muti is a master dramatist. He brings theater to the concert hall, and that’s something I’ve embraced in my music over the years—having the symphonic experience become a journey that leaps off the stage. He reminds us that the symphonic space is a highly theatrical space.
DA: Do you see a life for The Anthology of Fantastic Zoology beyond the concert hall, say, in a Carnival of the Animals realm?
MB: I’ve gotten to a place where I always think about the life of the piece, given that living composers are typically programmed alongside historical pieces. For instance, [Debussy’s] La mer hasn’t been programmed with my water symphony, Liquid Interface, nearly as much as I would have thought. In terms of young audiences, it’s not a light piece and has big stretches that are thick territory, but I could see a ballet coming out of it because it’s so evocative. I don’t know if my kids would last through all 30 minutes of it, though!
[Copyright Doyle Armbrust. Originally published in CSO Sounds & Stories on 8 June 2015]
Interview Excerpts
From an interview conducted by Ricky O’Bannon in 2015
Mason Bates’ Anthology of Fantastic Zoology received its second performance Friday at the Cabrillo Festival. His new work, which was premiered in June by the Chicago Symphony Orchestra, is something of a psychedelic take on Camille Saint-Saëns Carnival of the Animals. Inspired by Argentine magical realist author Jorge Luis Borges’ book of the same name, Bates said he imagines the listener taking a walk through a dark forest encountering fictional and fantastic creatures one by one before they converge later in the piece.
2015 marks Bates’ fifth trip to Cabrillo, and the composer is best known for incorporating electronic music, which he knows well as a DJ, into the symphonic form. Bates talked about his new piece and the changing attitudes toward electronics in the orchestra that he’s seen during his career.
Ricky O’Bannon: You seem to really look for a narrative in your work. In classical music there is programmatic music that has a story or concept and absolute or abstract music that isn’t explicitly about anything. Why do you find programmatic music to be more fertile territory for you?
Mason Bates: If you look in the 19th century, there was a fairly robust debate between the Berlioz/Wagner camp and the Brahms camp [about whether music should have a program or be abstract.] I feel there is an interesting kind of tension between those two camps. But those giant programmatic pieces always pulled new sounds out of those composers. [Berlioz’s] Symphonie Fantastique is probably the best example. It really pushes those composers to find new theatrical, sonic territory.
That’s something that I think is a wide-open artistic opportunity. It’s especially thrilling to look at that model of a narrative journey with new tools — with new sounds in the orchestra.
ROB: So for you as a composer, a story or idea in your piece gives you something to respond to. Like with Anthology of Fantastic Zoology, you have to figure out musically how to make it sound like a sprite is flying around the concert hall by having a musical theme traded by violinists throughout the orchestra and even off stage.
MB: I would have never thought of that effect had I not been trying to conjure a sprite. In the Space movement of B-Sides I ended up finding a lot of Ligeti-esque textures to evoke clouds and atmospheres that I never would have thought of [without the piece’s narrative.] I don’t think everybody has to do that, but for me it’s thrilling. I think the challenge of that is to make the music work on its own.
There’s a concept, and then there’s the execution. People have been slamming programmatic music or praising it for hundreds of years. It’s never in fashion. I go to the symphony to have my head explode. I don’t really want to just sit on my hands and behave like I’m in a loft concert in the 60’s. I want something that engages.
You also walk that line of coming close to something [in sound that the audience] has a recognition of, and that is kind of the riskiest thing of all. If you’re conjuring up something that’s a known thing, you want to do that in a way that’s fresh but sounds like a known thing.
Bringing the theater to the symphony has been a mission of mine. It really has to be musically interesting. It can’t just be some kind of an effect that comes and goes. So for me having the violin stands behave like a set of dominoes [in Anthology of Fantastic Zoology], that was a challenge. And it was a logistical challenge, too. I had to have a map of the orchestra in front of me while I was composing.
ROB: With Anthology of Fantastic Zoology, I’m remind of Saint-Saenz’ Carnival of the Animals. Were you trying for something like that structurally?
MB: Sure. To me the challenge of this piece was creating memorable musical themes. If you can create six different themes that are fresh and unique, then you can go into this whole different world where you bring them back and have them collide. I was really inspired by French and Russian ballet scores. Something like Pictures at an Exhibition had this sprawling form with very colorful movements that you remember and could return to.
I wanted all of these animals come back in the end. In order to do that, I needed to create memorable themes. The extra challenge is that they’re non-existent, surreal animals. What I love about magical realism is that in this term it needs to be very real and very unreal. So in this piece it was like creating highly vivid animals and then hitting them with a little drop of acid.
ROB: Anthology of Fantastic Zoology doesn’t use any electronics, but it is the thing you are best known for. How have you seen the landscape change since you first started writing pieces that incorporated electronics into a symphonic form?
MB: When I first started writing music for orchestra and electronics, I don’t know if “resistance” is the right word, but there were a fair number of psychological barriers. This idea that we’re going to have electronic sound mixed with the orchestra — this epitome of analog sound — was hard to swallow.
Fast-forward to now, and there are orchestras all over the country that do pieces like Mothership and Alternative Energy when I’m not there [to perform the electronic parts]. The fact they can do it on their own with very little budget impact I think says something about the orchestra that’s actually been true over the centuries: It can change.
[Copyright Ricky O’Bannon. Originally for the Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music]
Recordings
Mason Bates: Anthology of Fantastic Zoology
Conductor: Ricardo Muti
Musicians: Chicago Symphony Orchestra
Digital: Mason Bates: Anthology of Fantastic Zoology. CSO Resound CSOR 901-1601 (2016)
Purchase: Digital [Amazon | Presto Music]
Online: YouTube [Album Playlist]
Anthology of Fantastic Zoology was recorded live in 2015, with Ricardo Muti conducting the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. It’s a digital-only release, and has never been commercially available on vinyl or CD. The recording quality is excellent, as one expects from the CSO. Furthermore, Anthology is conducted by its dedicatee and played by the orchestra for which it was written; so describing the performance as “authoritative” doesn’t seem like an exaggeration! It’s only a shame this couldn’t have been produced as a multi-channel 5.1 surround-sound recording; or even better yet, captured live on Blu-ray. Anthology is a highly visual work that features many spatial effects, most of which can’t be translated to an audio-only stereo format.
The digital recording comes with detailed liner notes; however there are a few errors. For one, CSO scribe Phillip Huscher claims that “Bates is the first to take the anthology as a point of departure.” This is not true. Robert Parris composed The Book of Imaginary Beings Part 1 and Part 2 in 1972 and 1983 respectively—he even included musical palindromes and quotations from Saint-Saën’s Le Carnaval des animaux! Also, the Bulgarian composer Gheorghi Arnaoudov incorporated The Book of Imaginary Beings into his Phantasmagorias I from 2010. Considering these facts would be accessible to a simple Internet search—directing one, perhaps, to the “Borges and Music” pages of the original Garden of Forking Paths!—it seems like a curious oversight. The second point of contention is perhaps more debatable, and that’s calling Borges a “magical realist.” Of course Borges was influential on so-called “magical realism,” but applying that term to Borges himself is lazy and reductive, the kind of pop-categorization that transforms Brian Eno into New Age music and Infinite Jest into “bro lit.”
Additional Information
Mason Bates Homepage
The composer maintains a very informative homepage with many musical samples.
Wikipedia Bates Page
Wikipedia maintains a page on Mason Bates.
Wikipedia Anthology of Fantastic Zoology Page
Wikipedia page on Bates’ Anthology of Fantastic Zoology.
Anthology of Fantastic Zoology Score
The score can be purchased from J.W. Pepper.
Mason Bates YouTube Playlist
A playlist of Mason Bates interviews and performances.
Interview with Doyle Ambrurst
Bates discusses Anthology extensively in this interview conducted published in CSO Sounds & Stories, 8 June 2015.
Interview with Ricky O’Bannon
Bates discusses Anthology in this interview conducted by Ricky O’Bannon before the 2015 Cabrillo Festival of Contemporary Music.
A Composer Offers the Field Just What It Needs
2 April 2016 Washington Post. Anne Midgette profiles Mason Bates at the Kennedy Center.
BBC Teach: Sprite; A Boa A Qu
A small educational segment on the “The A Boa A Qu” section of Anthology.
Author: Allen B. Ruch
Photo Credit: Ryan Schude
Last Modified: 8 October 2024
Borges Music Page: Borges Music
Main Borges Page: The Garden of Forking Paths
Contact: quail(at)shipwrecklibrary(dot)com
My quotations from The Book of Imaginary Beings were adapted from two English translations, the more poetic Norman Thomas di Giovanni translation of 1969 and the more faithful Andrew Hurley translation from 2005.
Additional Information