Roger Reynolds was born on 18 July 1934 in Detroit,
Michigan. He was educated in music and science at the
University of Michigan. Reynolds refuses categorization,
responding to the variety of the contemporary world with
a uniquely diversified output, music that ranges from
the purely instrumental and vocal to engagements with
computers, video, dance, and theater. His music is
nourished by the Western tradition, also by those of
Asia (where he lived in Japan for extended periods of
time, supported by the Institute of Current World
Affairs, an organization dedicated to the growth of
international understanding), and by literature and the
visual arts as well. Particularly identified with the
writing of Beckett, Borges, Ashbery, and Kundera,
Reynolds has sometimes responded with songs, as in the
cycle last things, I think, to think about (1994),
written collaboratively with poet John Ashbery. But
there have also been instrumental glosses, including
Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward... (1989) for
solo cello, and a distinctive series of multichannel
electroacoustic compositions collectively entitled
VOICESPACE. About the fourth of the Voicespace series,
Nicholas Kenyon wrote in The New Yorker that "The Palace
is a powerfully atmospheric piece whose form is
perfectly suited to the extraordinary visionary quality
of Borges' poetry..."
Visual art has provoked works as diverse as the 1991-92
Symphony[The Stages of Life] (inspired by self-portraits
of Rembrandt and Picasso), Visions for string quartet,
which responds to the startling range of Bruegel's
imagination, and, more recently, another quartet,
Ariadne's Thread, which is concerned with the character
of line itself, both drawn and sounding. The Strad of
London wrote that, "An incessant, insistent darkness
throbs through the heart of [this quartet] capturing the
neurotic and sublimated sexuality of the Ariadne myth in
a strikingly original way. The result was a truly
astonishing musical voyage."
Myth has emerged as central to another major
undertaking, The Red Act Arias, premièred at the 1997
Proms Festival. Here, a text drawn from Aeschylus probes
the deadly conflict between Agamemnon and Clytemnestra,
using a narrator, choir, and orchestra augmented by a
uniquely conceived 8-channel computer spatialization
concept. Writing in The Sunday Times, Paul Driver called
it "a kind of anthropological brooding; a secular
oratorio in which the theme is the dark forces at the
foundation of civilised society." Work on the planned
opera, The Red Act, is proceeding now in the form of
JUSTICE, for soprano, actress, percussionist, and
computer spatialization, staged for the 1999 Theatre
Olympics in Japan by Tadashi Suzuki.
While still at the University of Michigan, in the early
60s, Reynolds was a co-founder of the ONCE Festivals.
Late in the same decade, he began to incorporate
electronic elements into some of his works. Then, in the
late 70s, his engagement with computers at Stanford
Universitys CCRMA facility began. He completed The
Palace there in 1978-80. Technology continues to
represent for him a natural means of augmenting formal
and coloristic resources (as in two major works written
in Paris for Ircam: Archipelago (1982-83) for chamber
orchestra and computer processed sound and Odyssey
(1989-93), an opera in the mind on a bilingual text by
Beckett). A signature feature of the composer's
involvement with technology has been the gradual
fulfilment of an early desire to confer an expressive
reach upon the spatial aspects of musical sound (perhaps
even one day to discover the roots of the empathic
exclamation "I was moved"). Beginning with the notorious
theater piece The Emperor of Ice Cream (1961-62), he
introduced spatialization through antiphonies of live
musicians, whereas, more recently, his work has involved
the simulation of auditory illusions with computers, as
in Two Voices -- an allegory (1996), commissioned by the
Philadelphia Orchestra. WATERSHED, a pathbreaking
exploration of the new DVD medium featuring his music,
was released by Mode Records in January of 1999.
Writing, in part, about the spatial dimensionality of
the 1984 Transfigured Wind II, Andrew Porter observed
that "Reynolds is at once an explorer and a visionary
composer, whose works can lead listeners to follow him
into new regions of emotion and imagination."
Reynolds's aesthetic outlook was jointly shaped by the
American Experimental tradition (Ives, Varèse and Cage)
and -- through his teachers Ross Lee Finney and Roberto
Gerhard -- also by the Second Viennese School. His
multicontinental career, in Europe, South America, Asia,
and the Nordic countries, as well as in the United
States, centers on composing, but includes writing,
lecturing, organizing musical events, and teaching. In
addition to writing articles for periodicals including
Perspectives of New Music, the Contemporary Music
Review, Polyphone, Inharmoniques, and The Musical
Quarterly, Reynolds has published four books; Mind
Models: New Forms of Musical Experience (1975) is the
earliest, while the most recent, About Form and Method:
The Rothschild Essays, is a detailed treatment of his
compositional approach to be published by Harwood
Academic Publishers.
Reynolds is Professor of Music at the University of
California, San Diego, where, in 1972, he became
founding director of the Center for Music Experiment
(now the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts).
He has also been Visiting Professor at the University of
Illinois, Yale, Amherst, and the City University of New
York. Master classes in settings such as Buenos Aires,
Thessaloniki, Porto Alegre, Ircam, Warsaw, and the
Sibelius Academy in Helsinki complement numerous
American residencies. Reynolds has also been featured
composer at such international festivals as Music Today
and the Suntory International Program in Japan, the
Edinburgh and Proms festivals, the Helsinki and Zagreb
biennales, the Darmstadt Courses, New Music Concerts
(Toronto), Warsaw Autumn, various ISCM festivals, and
the New York Philharmonic's Horizons '84.
Recipient, in 1989, of the prestigious Pulitzer Prize
(which he won for the string orchestra composition
Whispers Out of Time), Reynolds has also been honored by
the National Institute of Arts and Letters and the
National Endowment for the Arts. He has received
commissions from, among others, Lincoln Center, The
Library of Congress, the Koussevitzky, Fromm, Ford, and
Suntory Hall foundations, the BBC, the Los Angeles and
Philadelphia orchestras, the British Arts Council, Radio
France, and Ircam (3). His works are recorded on New
World, Neuma, Mode, Gramavision, Wergo, Lovely, CRI, GM,
and Bridge compact discs. Reynolds is represented by
Broadcast Music, Incorporated, and his compositions are
published in printed editions exclusively by C. F.
Peters Corporation.
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