The symphony, which premiered in February at the Kennedy Center in New York, aims to convey the awesome strength of water and involves a full orchestra, an electronic drum pad and electronic recordings of glaciers.
“It went beautifully. The orchestra was really behind it,” said Bates, who has won prizes from the American Academies in Rome and Berlin.
But symphonies are not the only medium in which Bates combines classical and electronica: By night, he deejays in San Francisco as DJ Masonic, mixing classical, jazz and trip-hop.
“It’s groovy, it’s fun, but it’s not very commercialized,” he said.
Bates said combining classical and electronica comes naturally to him as both genres are
instrumental and focus the listener on “texture,” which he described as the subtleties of the music that are easily overlooked when the music is dominated by a singer.
By focusing on the texture of the music, Bates said he can express ideas and events in a creative way.
For example, to convey glaciers breaking off and crashing into the sea in the first movement of “Liquid Interface,” he had a chord played by one section of the orchestra slowly move across the stage before crashing in a flurry of noise and recorded glacial sounds.
He said UC Berkeley’s Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, which he described as a “well-kept secret,” helped him combine the glacial noises with music.
“You plug your music in around the physical properties,” he said.
However, programming the sounds is not his favorite part of making music, he said.
“I tend to want to spend most of my energy creating music and not necessarily programming code,” he said.
The symphony goes on to show the playful and then destructive power of water before taking the listener to a “balmy, greenhouse paradise.”
“In each movement you explore a hotter version of water,” he said.
He said he did not intend for the symphony, which depicts global warming with a happy ending, to be a political statement.
“I didn’t want to take a political approach, I wanted to take a dramatic
approach,” he said. “I don’t think the composer can answer the question (of global warming).”
He said he was inspired to write a symphony about water after watching the Wannsee Lake in Germany go from completely frozen to a beach paradise in a couple of weeks.
“If you look at music history, you have a lot of music inspired by water,” he said. “The idea is not a new thing.”
Bates says that, at half an hour long, “Liquid Interface” was his longest piece.
Nonetheless, the National Symphony Orchestra learned the piece with only two days of practice, he said.
“Prime time doesn’t happen until the Tuesday before the Thursday premiere,” he said. “It’s like having 100 heart surgeons on stage.”
Bates also teaches the department of music’s harmony class, where he draws lessons from pop, hip-hop and classical, among other sources.
In the future, he said he hopes to compose an opera and to focus more on live electronica.