The air is what transmits the message.
A miracle.
My voice travels to the Indies, which took my daughter weeks to reach on a steamboat.
Nothing is further apart than the straits that separate us.
In this way the world grows closer and closer,
even as we move further apart.

– adapted from Hallo Bandeong, hier Den Jaag! (trans. Jerry Chu), in Mason Bates’ Mass Transmission

Caroline Shaw’s To The Hands, written for our Seven Responses project in 2016, has become the most-often-performed of our nearly 140 commissions. We reunite for a new, substantial work inspired by the writings of Robin Wall Kimmerer and Kem Luther, focused on that self-cultivating friend to the earth’s surface, moss: its intricate communities, at times resembling ours, offering much for us to learn. Mason Bates’ Mass Transmission, with organ (Scott!) and electronics, explores how the advent of radio technology brought us closer yet magnified our distances and loneliness, drawing on radio-wave communications in the 1920s between parents in the Netherlands and their children on Java, sent there to work for the Dutch government. Colorful, innovative, original, and heart-wrenching.