A 2015 Composers’ Prize Winner at the Ernst Siemens Music Foundation. Light, of course. Radiance. It comes from – it comes in – British composer, Christian Mason’s music in the same way it comes from and in with reflections of other composers, going back through Gérard Grisey to Guillaume Dufay and the anonymous authors of plainchant (to cite some plausible kinships), by virtue of how the sound is at one with resonance. This is so, even when Mason – like his nearest musical connections, who include Scelsi, Radulescu and Stockhausen as well as Grisey – is dealing with complex, clangorous resonances: the sounds of bells, as it might be, or of wind blowing through a frost-covered tree. Such luminous congruity may derive, in Mason’s case, from an awareness of spectral music, but the stimulus may equally have been a matter more of acoustic fact and personal experience. ‘When you play the violin’, he has remarked, ‘the open E-string seems to ring in the ear’.