San Francisco Symphony / Michael Tilson Thomas MASON BATES Works for Orchestra

Music Director Michael Tilson Thomas (MTT) and the San Francisco Symphony (SFS) will release a new recording featuring Bay Area composer Mason Bates’ s three largest electro - acoustic orchestral works on the Orchestra’s Grammy Award - winning SFS Media label on Friday, March 11, 2016. The album of Bates’s largest orchestral works features the first recordings of the SFS - commissioned The B - Sides and Liquid Interface, in addition to Alternative Energy . These three works illustrate Bates’s exuberantly inventive music that expands the symphonic palette with sounds of the digital age: techno, drum‘n’bass, field recordings and more, with the composer performing on electronica . MTT and the SFS have championed Bates’s works for over a decade, evolving a partnership built on multi-year commissioning, performing, recording, and touring projects .

“The three pieces on this album are my largest electro - acoustic works, my wildest explorations into the power of an expanded symphonic palette and its implications for imaginative new forms,” said Mason Bates. “The sounds range from glaciers to industrial techno to a NASA spacewalk. New sounds have of ten provoked new forms throughout music history... and I look to the digital world as an important twenty-first century expansion of the orchestral sound world.”