2025 Grawemeyer Award in Music Composition

London composer’s installation piece hailed for balancing space and sonic geography
Grawemeyer Award, University of Louisville

For creating Invisible Threads, a work that changes how music is usually experienced by employing a spatially shifting ensemble of 12 musicians and encouraging its audience to roam the performance space throughout its 70 minutes, London-based composer Christian Mason will receive the 2025 Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition, the University of Louisville announced today.

A 2015 recipient of an Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung Composer Prize, Mason has recently held residencies at the SWR Experimetalstudio Freiburg and the Internationales Künstlerhaus Villa Concordia Bamberg. In London he serves as mentor to the LSO Panufnik Young Composers Project and the Philharmonia Composers’ Academy, and he recently mentored the Hong Kong Composers’ Scheme. His winning work, which premiered at the prestigious Wittener Tage für Neue Kammermusik by the world-renowned performers Gareth Davis, Krassimir Sterev, Neue Vocalsolisten Stuttgart and the Arditti String Quartet, uses texts written by the inimitable Paul Griffiths, who has now written texts to three Grawemeyer-Award-winning works.

“In its duration, instrumentation, and musical aesthetic, Invisible Threads challenges its listeners even as it speaks to a broad audience in a musically passionate and artistic way,” said Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition Director Matthew Ertz, music librarian and associate professor at the University of Louisville’s Anderson Music Library. “This ‘performance installation’ invites attendees to choose the way they encounter this work, enabling each to have a different experience, even as all enjoy this breathtaking music anew.”

The Grawemeyer Award for Music Composition has been given annually since 1985. Notable winners to whom Mason feels close include György Ligeti, Harrison Birtwistle, Pierre Boulez, Kaija Saariaho, Unsuk Chin, and Julian Anderson. Birtwistle’s 1987 winning work The Mask of Orpheus is seen as a landmark in opera, and Saariaho won the 2003 Grawemeyer Award with her first opera, L’amour de loin.

“I’m profoundly grateful to join the company of Grawemeyer awardees,” said Mason. “This recognition of Invisible Threads encourages me to dig even more deeply into long-held dreams and visions.”