The Imagined Forest

Grace-Evangeline Mason was born in Wolverhampton, West Midlands, England, on October 13, 1994, and is based in London. She wrote The Imagined Forest on commission for BBC Radio 3 and the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic Orchestra, which gave the premiere under Domingo Hindoyan’s direction in London’s Royal Albert Hall during the BBC Proms on September 5, 2021. First BSO performances: November 20-22, 2025, Jonathon Heyward conducting.

The score for The Imagined Forest calls for piccolo, 2 flutes, 3 oboes (3rd doubling English horn), 3 clarinets, 3 bassoons (3rd doubling contrabassoon), 4 horns, 2 trumpets, 2 trombones, bass trombone, tuba, timpani, percussion (3 players: glockenspiel, vibraphone, marimba, tubular bells, suspended cymbal, whip, tom-toms, bass drum), harp, and strings (first and second violins, violas, cellos, and double basses).

Grace-Evangeline Mason composes music of scintillating orchestral color finely attuned to the descriptive potential of sound. Most of her works are pictorial and narrative, their evocative titles placing them in the long tradition of the tone poem of the Romantic era. The inspiration for her music comes from a wide variety of sources in nature, architecture, fine and applied arts, and literature, providing a kernel from which she creates her own musical landscapes and journeys.

Grace-Evangeline Mason grew up in England’s West Midlands, the county of Sir Edward Elgar and the city of Birmingham, which supports one of the most adventurous English ensembles in the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra. (BSO Music Director Andris Nelsons was once its music director.) She learned several instruments, including piano, clarinet, and trombone, and went on to study at the esteemed Royal Northern College of Music in Manchester and the University of Oxford. She later earned her doctorate at London’s Royal College of Music. In 2013, at age 18, she was named BBC Young Composer of the Year, the first, and among the most prestigious, of many accolades for her work. She has more than lived up to that early promise, composing prolifically across many genres with a musical style consistent in its clarity and craft but continually evolving. Along with song, choral, and chamber music, she has written a chamber opera, The Yellow Wallpaper, based on Charlotte Perkins Gilman’s protofeminist novel, and several orchestral works, of which The Imagined Forest is to date the most substantial. Her new song cycle The Hart, for soprano and orchestra, was premiered by the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic, soprano Sophie Bevan, and conductor Ryan Wigglesworth in October 2025. The piece is a companion to The Imagined Forest.

In her works for larger forces, Mason creates gossamer, constantly changing ensemble textures by weaving together highly ornamented, fluid melodic lines in imitation and counterpoint. The flexibility and subtlety of individual parts lends the music a sense of vibrant life evoking the natural world; the composer will also use non-traditional playing styles and ambiguous gestures like glissandi to amplify the naturalness of the sound.

Mason’s The Imagined Forest, although based on works of art by the Berlin-based installation artist and environmentalist Clare Celeste Börsch, also reaches beyond to the artworks’ original inspiration in verdant plant and animal life. In The Imagined Forest, the entire orchestra is engaged in the presentation of a rich, varied melodic narrative the instrumental details of which continually evolve. A line emerging first in the violins might continue in woodwinds or marimba, while meanwhile echoes of the same melody reverberate throughout the brass and resonate in percussion. Lightly accompanied solo passages contrast with full-orchestra surges of energy; the final moments of the piece bring a sense of calm and repose.

The composer’s own comments on the piece appear below.

Robert Kirzinger

Composer and writer Robert Kirzinger is the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Director of Program Publications.

Grace-Evangeline Mason on her The Imagined Forest

The Imagined Forest (2021) for orchestra is a fantastical journey through a space that appears to be a familiar impression of nature, but simultaneously somewhere entirely unknown. The forest, a place rooted in fairy tales, fantasy and folklore, often represents areas of refuge, danger, transformation, and adventure. Recognising the forest as an ethereal and intangible entity, the piece seeks to momentarily transport the listener somewhere intimate and yet, surreal.

The piece is inspired by the work of Clare Celeste Börsch, a Berlin-based artist who uses collage techniques to build imagined worlds filled with foliage and fauna. Bringing together thousands of delicate hand cut paper images, she creates intricate and immersive spaces to transform ordinary rooms into magical forests. The Imagined Forest travels through the musical space by interweaving atmospheric textures and fragmentary melodic lines as a collage of fleeting images, just like the artwork upon which it is inspired. The music follows a voyage through the forest with moments of florid energy marked by tumbling, intervallic passages enacting the liveliness of nature itself, contrasted with large interludes of static stillness embodying expansive clearings. The central musical theme wanders through the piece towards enclosed glades where it pauses, as if it is interspersed with shimmering light from the canopies above and the dreamlike dances from the elements of nature; the orchestra glistens with sparkly interjections. Both music and art are fascinating in that countless people can all be experiencing the same work at once and yet, through the lens of their own influence, encounter a completely different artwork. This piece is therefore not a prescriptive experience but is instead a fictional journey; whether it is blooming with flora, captivated by colour, or an airy garden darkened by storm, it is the forest of your own imagination.

© Grace-Evangeline Mason, 2021