You & Mr Mason (1997) by Plainsound Music Edition

You & Mr Mason (1997)
for 11 pianos and 11 players
with no previous experience required

composed for Sommerfest at the Akademie Schloss Solitude

“You and Mr Mason” was written for the 1997 Sommerfest celebrations during a residency at the Akademie Schloss Solitude. There were 11 grand pianos in a corridor of neighboring studios, with doors opening out into a courtyard. Since quite a few of the available players had limited (or no) previous experience, and would not be able to see or
hear each other while playing, I decided to work with reduced materials—very few notes in each part, coded by color for those who could not read music, co-ordinated by stopwatch time.

Walking through the streets of Stuttgart, I loved hearing the microtonal church bells ringing in and out of phase, especially how a new set of bells changed the harmony. Around the same time, I recalled a recent conversation with James Tenney, about modulating between different harmonic series fundamentals sharing one high-pitched common tone (the idea linking Harry Partch’s utonality and otonality). The shifting fields of pitches in this piece are based on this idea, realized within the intonation tolerance of the piano’s historical Equal Temperament, shaded by the spatial and intonational variation of the 11 instruments. The title is a poetic reference to making lines, demarcations.