Christian Mason

And dream me out to blissful vistas ...

This short piece is a dreamscape. Composing it felt like painting, with sounds—like brushstrokes—defining depth and perspective, light and shadow, layer by layer. The "base layer," the canvas upon which all other sounds were composed, was an improvisation recorded on November 17, 2023, on the organ at St. George’s Church in Ernen, Switzerland, where I spent a season in a fairy-tale-like residency. To me, the mysterious flageolet tones of the half-pressed keys sounded like rays of light and ethereal breezes; somewhere beyond the reach of everyday life and consciousness. Later, at the SWR Experimental Studio in Freiburg, with the kind support of Maurice Oeser, I recorded improvised layers of violin, piano, and theremin sounds to complete the picture, to condense and thin out the textures, and to bring out the melodic forms hidden within the organ layer. Once the background (tape) was completed, the live parts for violin and piano were composed over it: two figures in a landscape. The way these protagonists move through the space-time of the tape sounds is not subject to the usual laws of gravity. They fly, they sing, they dance; they float freely like two fairies playing hide-and-seek between worlds, merging with or emerging from the resonances around them. The context for which the piece was created is a CD of Beethoven violin sonatas, recorded by Patricia Kopatchinskaja and Joonas Ahonen, to whom the work is warmly dedicated. There are no musical references to Beethoven, but I sometimes had a half-remembered statement in mind that his Quartet, Op. 131, in C-sharp minor was "composed of various thefts"; in this case, they are fragments of my own improvised material that have been pieced together into a kind of unity. The piece has little to do with Schoenberg, but the title comes from a translation of the penultimate line of the final song (No. 21) from *Pierrot Lunaire*, which I saw performed in December 2023 by Pat Kop and friends at London’s Purcell Room: And dream me out to blissful vistas … O redolence from fairy-tale times! (Christian Mason, October 2025)

Binding: stapled