2025 Grawemeyer music composition award goes to Christian Mason for ‘Invisible Threads’

London composer’s installation piece hailed for balancing space and sonic geography

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. 

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.”

Mason will accept his award at a ceremony in Louisville on April 10.

About the Grawemeyer Awards

Each year the Grawemeyer Awards honor the power of creative ideas to improve our culture via music composition, education, religion, psychology, and world order. Business executive and family man H. Charles Grawemeyer established the awards in 1984 at the University of Louisville in collaboration with Louisville Presbyterian Theological Seminary. Academics and community members choose among nominees from around the world to ensure that each winning idea is relevant to society at large. The University of Louisville announces the winners in December and presents the awards at a ceremony the following April. Each award winner receives $100,000, which they may use, if they choose, to develop and accelerate the spread of their powerful ideas. Learn more at grawemeyer.org.