Grace-Evangeline Mason (born 1994)
Grace-Evangeline Mason grew up in the West Midlands of England where she learned trombone, clarinet, and piano. She studied composition at the Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester, and at Oxford. She is currently pursuing a doctorate at the Royal Academy of Music in London.
Grace-Evangeline Mason has composed music for orchestras, chamber ensembles, voice, and choruses, sometimes combined with electronics.
Her 2016 chamber opera The Yellow Wallpaper is based on the autobiographical 1892 short story by Charlotte Perkins Gilman. The narrator is a woman with (in her words) “a temporary nervous depression, — a slight hysterical tendency,” but whose physician husband has confined her to a room with grotesque yellow wallpaper that becomes increasingly threatening.
The composer appears at the end of the performance at the far left.
The composer herself introduces Fireworks (2018), a setting of the poem by Amy Lowell, sung by Ann Wilkes:
This is Glass Cathedrals a 2019 composition for solo harp: