Will Mason
Associate Professor
Office: Zankel Music Center 210
Phone: 518-580-5320
Email: wmason@skidmore.edu
Bio:
Will Mason is a composer, performer, and music scholar. His musical and scholarly interests include electronic and computer music, audio engineering, improvisation, microtonality, and theories of musical timbre that draw from embodied music cognition. Trained as a jazz drummer, he also performs regularly on electronics in a number of genre-crossing contexts.
The New York Times praised Mason’s music as “experimental yet still catchy,” and wrote that it “succeeds at fusing experimental rock and chamber music.” The Boston Globe wrote that Mason’s compositions “balance improvisation and composition, and are shot through with asymmetrical melodies and grooves, grinding harmonies, and atmospheric bouts of stillness.” His music has been released on New Amsterdam Records, Exit Stencil Records, and New Focus Recordings. Musicians Mason has worked with include Anna Webber, deVon Russell Gray, Daniel Fisher-Lochhead, Matt Mitchell, Ned Rothenberg, Miles Okazaki, Andrew Smiley, Travis Reuter, Dan Lippel, Charlotte Mundy, and Kate Gentile.
Mason is co-editor of, and a contributor to, the Oxford Handbook of Spectral Music, and he also has written for Grove Music Online and the Journal of Music Theory. He is currently at work on a monograph titled Imagination Audible: Metaphors of Construction in the Recording Studio, which theorizes the nexus of technics, embodiment, and the tools of the modern recording studio.
Mason holds a PhD in music theory from Columbia University, a BA in politics from Oberlin College and a BMus in contemporary improvisation from Oberlin Conservatory. His mentors at those schools have included Ellie Hisama, George Lewis, Georg Friedrich Haas, Billy Hart, Wendell Logan, Brian Alegant, Arnie Cox, and Rebecca Leydon. Prior to arriving at Skidmore, Mason was Associate Professor of Music at Wheaton College (MA).
When he’s not busy untangling cables, he also likes to grow flowers and hike with his rescue dog Mabel.