Big composer prize goes to Brit
OrchestrasThe 2025 Grawemeyer music composition award, worth US$100,000, has gone to a Londoner, Christian Mason, for his work Invisible Threads.
The piece, lasting 70 minutes, employs ‘a spatially shifting ensemble of 12 musicians and encourages its audience to roam the performance space’.
(Erik Satie, you hear me?)
The text is by ex-Times critic Paul Griffiths. It is his third Grawemeyer winning work. Mason, 40, is the first British winner since… Julian Anderson in 2023. The last before him was Thomas Ades in 2000.
photo: Karsten Witt Management
Hmmm. You do you, Grawemeyer.
In this way, tired and completely outdated conventions of half a century old that have nothing to do with music, are kept in place, entirely artificially. It’s a theatrical fiction for the ignorati.
Satie’s ‘musique d’ameublement’ is exciting stuff in comparison:
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=CU2mDkZoYsc
Sorry you didn’t win, John.
Blow me down with an amuse bouche, for once I agree with Boreslap.
Perhaps it’s unfair to judge without sitting through the whole thing, but from snippets, the piece seems rather dull and empty.
For a brief moment I thought it was an arrangement of the Arena theme tune by Brian Eno
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=-GuzqPEcx5Q
Nice to know squeeky gate music is still alive ?
Isn’t the real prize having a piece played regularly for audiences who want to buy tickets to hear the music. In which case, perhaps there have been no prizes since Shostakovich died.