William Mason

WILL MASON is a composer, drummer, and music scholar from Maine, now living in New York City.

His main performance project is the Will Mason Ensemble, a chamber ensemble of voice, oboe, alto sax, two guitars, bass, and drums. The ensemble’s debut album, Beams of the Huge Night, was released on New Amsterdam Records in August 2015. Mason wrote most of the music for the album in a cabin in the woods of northern Maine, away from electricity, the internet, running water, and phone service. He is fascinated by how it feels to be isolated in nature — how everything feels simultaneously beautiful and threatening, and how the elemental and oppressive hugeness of nature can inspire awe or unease. “Beams of the Huge night” is an attempt at capturing those sensations musically.

In addition to writing new music for the ensemble, Mason’s other main project is “Happy Place,” a noise-metal band of two guitars and two drummers inspired by ethnomusicological work on the physical extremes that induce trancing. He also is working on a suite of electroacoustic works for a new improvising quartet, and he works as a sideman with a number of musicians in New York City and elsewhere.

Mason is currently pursuing a PhD in music theory at Columbia University, where his research focuses on contemporary music and music cognition. His dissertation explores affective experience in the electroacoustic music of the French spectral school, suggesting a deeper engagement with corporeal experience than has previously been ascribed to later-20th century modernist music.

Mason is also deeply devoted to pedagogy, and has received a Lead Teaching Fellowship from Columbia’s teaching center. He also founded the graduate student music theory pedagogy group at Columbia, and is a guest lecturer in jazz for the music humanities program. In addition to teaching at Columbia, he has also taught music theory at New York University. In 2015 he was invited to be a featured composer/performer with the Mannes-The New School jazz ensemble. Prior to attending Columbia, he received a BMus in music performance and a BA in political science, both from Oberlin College.

Will Mason Ensemble: Beams of the Huge Night

Read "Beams of the Huge Night" reviewed by Karl Ackermann

by Karl Ackermann
December 6, 2015

New York City resident Will Mason, while pursuing a Ph.D. in music at Columbia University, took the time to submerge himself in the most Spartan and remote conditions of his native Maine for the inspirations of nature that become manifest in Beams of the Huge Night. The drummer and composer assembled an unusually populated septet to give life to a generous sixty-six minutes of sound and music, capturing the volatility and tranquility of true seclusion. Mason, who also ...

"Beauty and dread walk hand in hand, and the mood can turn on a dime, which is exactly the feeling you get on “Finn”, an extraordinary free-form 16-and-a-half-minute composition that forms the heart of the new album Beams of the Huge Night." — PopMatters

"This is the most impressive debut I've heard in years...A dazzling and demanding effort, in a class of its own." — Bruce Gallanter

"How interesting, then, to find “Door 6” waiting for me. The aggressive rush of strings that is meant to seem haphazard and yet is carried out with hungry intent. The slow and haunting vocals that float just beyond the eye of the storm