How radically is Bay Area composer Mason Bates shaking things up with his works for orchestra and electronics? It sort of depends on whom you ask.

"Everybody gets so hung up on, 'Oh my God, there's electricity involved,' " Bates said during a recent interview. "But really, this is just part of the evolution of the orchestra, which I find to be a limitless medium. It's like the world's greatest synthesizer."

Local audiences will have a chance to judge the issue for themselves during the coming weeks, as Michael Tilson Thomas and the San Francisco Symphony devote two programs to the music of Beethoven and Bates. In addition to Beethoven's Seventh Symphony and Mass in C, Thomas will lead the orchestra in two of Bates' large works: "The B-Sides," a Symphony commission that had its premiere in 2009, and "Liquid Interface," a "water symphony" whose four movements trace the phases of the water cycle from glaciers through oceans to evaporation.

Like much of Bates' music, both pieces integrate electronic elements - sampled sounds and textural processing overseen by the composer at his laptop onstage - with the traditional orchestral lineup.


But the idea is not to create some kind of space-age fugue of synthesized blips and bloops (though Bates' terrific "Alternative Energy," which the Symphony is poised to perform next season, does include some futuristic imaginings). Rather, Bates sees his project as the attempt to use new sounds to tell stories - not unlike such orchestral innovators as Berlioz and Richard Strauss before him.

"Almost all music these days is process-driven," he says. "But the idea of music that has any relationship to the great programmatic composers of the 19th century - that's sort of untouched. My orchestral palette is a response to narrative forms, not just a matter of figuring out how many beats per minute to add."

Bates, who turns 37 this month, has a lengthy pedigree in both the classical and electronic worlds. Growing up in Virginia, he took to the piano and composing as a child, then went off to New York City to pursue a joint degree at Columbia University and the Juilliard School.

New York introduced him to the world of dance music, and he spent several years spinning records at clubs and parties. What resulted was a dual career as a composer and DJ, with each strain informing the other.

Chicago position

But since moving to California in 2001 to get a doctorate in UC Berkeley's composition program, Bates has found himself increasingly in demand for his orchestral music. He's also become a fairly committed surfer.

In addition to Thomas, Bates has another high-profile podium advocate in the person of Riccardo Muti, the music director of the Chicago Symphony Orchestra. Bates is in the middle of a five-year stint as the orchestra's composer-in-residence, which involves not only writing new works for the ensemble but advising Muti on the world of contemporary music.

Muti, he says, "is a disarming combination of complete dominance, of intellectual ferocity, and at the same time a charming humility. When he conducted the premiere of 'Alternative Energy,' he said to me, 'I'm an old dog, but I want to learn new tricks.' "

Asked about the differences between working with Thomas and with Muti, Bates took a long pause, then another, as he tried to craft an answer that would tread delicately between two large egos.

"They're both legendary musical figures. and they come with a lot of great baggage," he said finally. "A lot of people think of Muti as the guy who does Verdi, but at the Philadelphia Orchestra he did a lot of very complex new music and was very committed to it. He's a southern Italian, but he also has this northern rigor that would give any German a run for their money."

What Thomas brings to the table, of course, is his deep knowledge of American vernacular music. One movement in "Liquid Interface" is an homage to New Orleans jazz.

"It's hard to notate swing figuration when you're writing for orchestra," Bates says. "You can't just write something and say, 'Add swing.' So the notation ends up being incredibly complicated on the page, in the way it would if you notated a Coltrane solo. But Michael understands how that works."

Bates has been working closely with Thomas on this month's pieces and will be involved in the performances - Davies Symphony Hall is just a short commute from the Burlingame home that Bates shares with his wife, Jamie, a cancer researcher, and their two young children.

With or without him

But as his works are programmed more frequently by orchestras across the country, many of those performances have to go ahead without him.

"It involves a Department of Defense-level amount of work on my end, but the result is very simple," Bates says. "A percussionist in the orchestra will trigger keys on a laptop. No special equipment is needed, and when they rent the music they get a download link."

But surely having Bates participate in a performance adds something more to the proceedings?

"I'm like live cooking," he says. "I've got a fader and a mixer, and I can react to little things that happen during the performance. That level of control is nice for everybody, including the conductor.

"But when the Nashville Symphony, say, does one of my pieces, I basically give them a Betty Crocker mix. They lose some flexibility, but because the electronics have been designed as something that's not a soloistic part of the piece, it does not live or die depending on whether I'm there."

At the moment, Bates just finished "Garages of the Valley," an all-acoustic piece celebrating the tech visionaries of Silicon Valley. His next project is "Anthology of Fantastic Zoology," a piece for Chicago based on the work of Jorge Luis Borges.

In both cases, the expressive and narrative content of the music will take precedence over any technological innovation.

'You can go anywhere'

"I'm really not interested in technology as a component of research," Bates says. "There are researchers at work on interactive machines, and that's an admirable thing - it could allow for great developments in video game technology or something.

"But I'm only interested in it as an extension of your imagination. With electronics, you can go anywhere."

San Francisco Symphony: Beethoven and Bates Festival, Jan.8-18, Davies Symphony Hall, 201 Van Ness Ave., San Francisco. $15-$140, (415) 864-6000,
