Mason, Christian: And dream me out to blissful vistas ...

This short piece is a dreamscape. Composing it felt like painting, with sounds like brush-strokes as layer upon layer defined depth and perspective, light and shade. The ‘base layer’, the canvas upon which all the other sounds were composed, was an improvisation recorded on November 17th 2023 on the organ of St. George’s Church, Ernen, Switzerland, where I held a fairy-tale residency for a season. The mysterious flageolet tones of half-pressed keys sounded to me like shafts of light and ethereal breezes; somewhere beyond the reach of daily life and consciousness. Later, working at SWR Experimentalstudio Freiburg with the kind help of Maurice Oeser, I recorded improvised layers of violin, piano and theremin sounds to complete the picture, thickening and thinning textures, and elucidating melodic shapes hidden within the organ layer. With the background (tape) complete, the live violin and piano parts was composed upon it: two figures in a landscape. The way in which these protagonists move through the space-time of the tape sounds isn’t subject to the usual laws of gravity. They fly, they sing, they dance, they float free like a pair of fairies playing a game of hide-and-seek between worlds, merging with or emerging from the resonances around them. The context for which the piece was created is a disc 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 did sometimes have in mind a half remembered quote that his Op.131 quartet in C-sharp minor was ‘put together from various pilferings’; in this case bits and pieces of my own improvised material stitched together into a semblance of unity. The piece has nothing much to do with Schoenberg, but the title is taken from a translation of the penultimate line of the last song (number 21) of Pierrot Lunaire, which I saw performed by Pat Kop and friends at London’s Purcell Room in December 2023: Und träum hinaus in selge weiten … O alter Duft – aus Mächenzeit! And dream me out to blissful vistas … O redolence from fairy-tale times! (Christian Mason, October 2025)