Grace-evangeline Mason
Since winning BBC Young Composer in 2013, Grace-evangeline Mason has written works that blend orchestral, choral and electronic textures. Her River for chamber orchestra was performed at the 2017 BBC Proms, and she returns to the Royal Albert Hall this year for the premiere of her The Imagined Forest on 5 September.
I o en write music based on extra-musical sources, usually poetry or contemporary art. It’s a way of grounding myself in my mission. I want to see how much I can take from a poem to influence a piece’s structure, melodic contour and musical material. The Imagined Forest is based on an artwork by a Berlinbased artist called Clare
Celeste Börsch. She creates immersive installations using fragile, hand-cut paper images of flora and fauna, which feel familiar, but not an exact depiction. My starting point was to imagine a forest that exists in anyone’s imaginations. When people are looking at a piece of art, they are having the same experience but with their own unique interpretations, which is something you can replicate in a concert hall. I don’t want to provide a prescriptive experience. It’s a journey through an imagined space, which in this instance is an imagined forest. The soundworlds I create are very ethereal and atmospheric.
The soundworld I’m chasing is quite an amorphous concept – it’s always moving. It’s always important that my pieces have a narrative journey, like a poem. I want the audience to feel like they’ve gone somewhere.
When you’re taken away from musicians and live music, it’s much more di cult to write. I’m always envisioning the venue, those particular musicians and the acoustic of the space, so when you don’t have those things, there’s a distance between you and what you’re aiming for. I was surprised how much lockdown a ected the writing process –
I’m hoping that being around musicians and going to concerts again will inspire new works.
I always start at the piano.
I improvise, o en with a poem in front of me, and will create musical lynchpins to then develop. I’ll also sketch out the shape of the piece with a line, which shows where the musical peaks and troughs will go. This means I’ve got a visual of how I’m going to build the structure.