Composer and performer Mason Bates never wanted a double life as an artist. Things were headed that way when he began to work as a club DJ earlier in the decade after studying orchestral composition. But now he hopes to bring those worlds together in a way that can expand both.

"I never thought I would be incorporating electronics," he says on the phone en route to a gig as DJ Masonic in his home base of San Francisco. "It seemed that the orchestra is enough to deal with."

His first piece was for orchestra in high school in Richmond, Va. In the late 1990s, he studied more-or-less traditional composition at the Juilliard School with John Corigliano, David Del Tredici and Samuel Adler.

The 33-year-old composer learned a great deal from these major composers during the day, but at night, he found a different teacher: the underground electronica dance scene.

"I got interested in deejaying in New York, but it [became] a second part of my career when I got out here [the Bay Area] in 2001. The more I deejayed the more I learned about electronica. It differed so much from academic electronic music, [which was] generally computer controlled music," he says.

Mr. Bates displayed a knack for deejaying dance music at parties, raves and clubs, and his career as DJ Masonic took off. He spun records late into the night at venues in San Francisco, Rome, Berlin and more. But he was no more satisfied with living only in this world than being a solely acoustic composer for orchestras.

"The one thing I am doing that most electronica composers are not doing is dealing with the orchestra," he says. "To me the orchestra is the ultimate challenge. I have been an orchestra composer for years and I want to make my mark there. When I first ran into this music I felt there was huge potential in electronica because it is an instrumental genre, you don't have the vocal elements. I thought there would be huge possibilities in concert music."

Mr. Bates knew that the orchestra and electronica had to be incorporated in a profound way. "A lot of times when people incorporate electronica it is cosmetic," he says. "I am looking to create a third world between these two -- classical music and electronica -- not a bridge."

He has taken this approach to some of his compositions, such as "Digital Loom," for organ and electronica, and "From Amber Frozen," for string quartet and electronica. He calls these "narrative pieces -- they are classical music, but the texture is electronica. The two meet in the middle."

He is not the first composer to meld these two worlds in a composition, but his work tackling the institutional aspects of orchestras is pioneering.

"How can we bring what is potentially a sea change into the sound of the orchestra without having to hire the number of people it might seem to take to make it work," asks Mr. Bates. "I feel like I have found a way for electronics to enter the mainstream of orchestral rehearsals and budgets."

His solution is to create music in the studio and process it so that a single performer can express it using portable laptop and drum pad. "I opted a long time ago for re-creating the sound design live," says Mr. Bates. "There is no showing up with six cases of microphones and synthesizers."

Mr. Bates' large-scale plans are ambitious. "I want to put the electronics in the orchestra as a new section. This is not the orchestra backing up the electronics. It has to be about the orchestra; electronics can expand the orchestra."

His approach has had continued success. His work that the PSO will perform this weekend, "Liquid Interface," has had multiple performances, and some even without him. The performer cues in sounds and plays music by striking an electric drum pad.

"It is not improvisational," he says. "It is like a percussion section collapsed down into your laptop section. I am back there like a percussionist following the conductor."

Why not just have everything prerecorded so that someone could just hit "play" when the piece starts? "My primary focus is keeping the electronics in sync with the orchestra, which is so big and complex it doesn't move at the snap of a finger," he says. "There are going to be times when you are going to need someone to help coax that synchronization together."

The sounds and music Mr. Bates cues for "Liquid Interface" are delicate and complex indeed, from sounds of glaciers calving to water dropping to a hurricane. He had been living near Berlin's Wannsee when he got the idea.

"In the course of barely two months, I watched this huge body of water transform itself from an ice sheet thick enough to support sausage vendors to a refreshing swimming spot heavy with humidity. If the play of the waves inspired Debussy, then why not examine the phenomenon of water in its variety of forms?"

"Liquid Interface" starts cold, with recordings of glaciers shearing, warms up with drum 'n' bass to capture water's flow and eventually heads to the ocean and hot climes.

"The melody floats lazily upwards through the humidity and, at the work's end, finally evaporates," Mr. Bates writes in his notes.

But he wants the most innovative aspect of the piece to be subsumed into the whole:

"People will be fascinated by the orchestra being married to the electronic, but it is not the overall point of the piece. A lot of times folks talk about it as bridging audiences and I am happiest when that happens, but I am trying to make really good music that is compelling."

Critics Andrew Druckenbrod and Scott Mervis talk about music on "The Beat," available exclusively at PG+, a members-only web site of the Pittsburgh Post-Gazette. Our introduction to PG+ gives you all the details.