Mason Bates’s spacious studio, just a few steps from his home near San Francisco, has a Steinway piano, a set of turntables and a row of guitars hanging on the back wall. But for the musical point he wanted to demonstrate on this bright California afternoon, Bates needed a synthesizer: He flicked a switch on his Prophet Sequential and a trembling blast filled the room.
“We are making the superhero world,” he said. “I felt like we needed some electronica.”
Bates, 48, was talking about “The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier & Clay,” his Metropolitan Opera debut, which opens the company’s season on Sept. 21. It is based on Michael Chabon’s novel about two Jewish cousins in Brooklyn, one a refugee from Prague, who create a comic book hero to fight the Nazi occupiers there. The opera begins with that synthesizer blast — an electronic invocation of the threat of Nazi Germany, floating on the sounds of a harp, acoustic guitar and piano.
“I call it symphonic electronica,” Bates said. “Something that is beyond the orchestra, to give it that sound of Technicolor, fantasy. And that’s where my background in sound design and DJing became pretty useful.”
Bates is a composer whose music has been performed at symphony halls and opera houses. He is the composer of “The (R) evolution of Steve Jobs,” which premiered at the Santa Fe Opera in 2017. He was the first composer in residence at the Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts.
He is also a DJ who plays bass-heavy techno music for crowded dance floors across San Francisco, under his nom de club, D.J. Masonic.
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