ROGER REYNOLDS




PREMIÈRE of SEASONS: Cycle 1, 7 March 2010, WASHINGTON, DC National Gallery of Art



National Gallery of Art Seasons Set-Up                                                    Image by Karen R.



STATEMENT BY ROGER REYNOLDS:
Music in the National Gallery of Art: Why do it?

On Sunday evening, 7 March 2010, the final event in Washington, DC's CHANGES: seasons
Festival presents the work of Twentieth-Century pioneers Xenakis and Varèse, as well as
the event's organizers, Steve Antosca and Roger Reynolds.

The instrumentalists will be placed at different positions and elevations in the uniquely
imaginative architecture of I.M. Pei’s East Wing Atrium. The spacing out of the individual
musicians – who nevertheless are performing in close coordination, as chamber music
requires – allows listeners to change their auditory perspective on what is occurring.
It is the same sort of privilege that one exercises while wandering through a gallery show,
constantly reformulating one’s view of the meaning of the whole. Or scanning and
retracing the lines of a poem.

The spatial positioning of the performers, in other words, allows the listener a unique
opportunity to "hear into" the music, to follow their curiosity where it takes them...
This can be accomplished by changing one's position even during the performance itself.

At the same time, live computer transformation snatches from the flow of the live music,
gestures, phrases, and allows them to proliferate, to bloom, as it were.

Or one could think of a moment from the music as a bird that takes flight, soaring and
darting as a flock of such creatures do, with choreographic mobility and eloquence. It is
because of – in this event – the National Gallery architecture, that this can happen.
It gives to music an ultimate freedom and to a listener a release from traditional boundaries as well.

The National Gallery space is in fact an ideal place to hear what magic can be conjured up by
five fine instrumentalists, a twelve-channel sound system, and an expert computer-musician.

Fixed ideas about sound environments (concert halls), about ensemble relationships (how
the musicians ought to sit on stage), about the ”proper” sonority that music should produce –
these prevent us from involving ourselves with new opportunity and experience.

All the elements that shape our lives are expanding their immediacy and interactivity. This
trend increases daily. We live in webs of interrelated threads and forces that are never stable.

I want my work to face this fact and to discover its potential for music. [7 March 2010]




"Passage 2", Talk by Roger Reynolds, 20 May 2010, 6:00-8:00 PM, Calit2 Black Box Theatre, Atkinson Hall,
UCSD, La Jolla, California



"Passage 1", Talk by Roger Reynolds, 1 December 2009, UCSD 204 inFocus Seminar, Experimental Theatre,
Conrad Prebys Music Center, La Jolla, California



REVIEW of Arditti Quartet Witten Tage Festival première of "not forgotten" in Neue Zürcher Zeitung 30.04.10
The power of the string quartet

"...a truly major work for string quartet of the 75-year old American Roger Reynolds:
His 'not forgotten' deals in an intense way with the subject of remembrance."
– Translation by Sven-Ingo Koch



REVIEW of new Mode CD: Whispers Out of Time: Works for Orchestra:

BLOW UP Magazine, Italy
"In addition to the title score, the CD contains two other pieces for large orchestra, 'Symphony [Myths]' and 'Symphony [Vertigo]', to complete a triad of compositions which illuminate the two driving forces of Reynolds's music: on one side, the care for the specific and particular, the insistence on limited timbric coloration; on the other, an impressiveness of sound masses in constant motion which provoke outbursts of noteworthy force and power. Taken together, then, an apparent contradiction capable of evoking surprising results in the music as it is heard. The nearest point of reference here is Xenakis, for the universal and mythic grandeur that one hears, as well, in Reynolds's music. Reynolds, a figure not at all typical of the American scene, after scientific studies participated in Robert Ashley's ONCE group, interesting himself, as well, in electroacoustic and computer music. This is a front-ranking composer, the originality of whose work this intricately-layered Mode recording (three different orchestras and three different conductors, as well) permits one to fully appraise and appreciate."

– Piercarlo Poggio, June 2008, translation from the Italian: Harvey Sollberger

COMPLETE VIDEO: JUSTICE
It is now possible to view a complete performance of Reynolds's multimedia work JUSTICE as presented at the Library of Congress, which commissioned it. Featuring soprano Carmen Pelton, actress Donnah Welby, and percussionist Steven Schick, this performance was directed by Henry Fonte, with sound spatialization by Peter Otto, Harvey Sollberger, musical advisor, Martha Mountain, lighting, and K F. Williams of SiG Productions, management. It was presented on three successive evenings [29, 30 November and 1 December 2001] in the Great Hall of the Jefferson Building just behind the Capitol.



New CD: Whispers Out of Time: Works for Orchestra, Mode Records 183, 2007


PUBLISHER: Peters Music Publishers


ARCHIVES: The Library of Congress



THE VARÈSE WORKING GROUP 2009-2010
Reynolds and UCSD colleague, percussionist/conductor, Steven Schick, along with five graduate students, have formed a Varèse Working Group within the Department of Music. They began to meet in the Fall of 2009, and have just completed the first phase of their collaborative project. During April 2010, the VWG investigated the spatialization of key passages in Varèse's valedictory masterpiece, Déserts. Components were moved independently in space according to their character. In addition, forensic work is proceeding on the electroacoustic Interpolations from Déserts, allowing their relatively constricted but rhetorically forceful content to more closely approximate Varèse's inferred spatial evocations. VWG's project is proceeding in close consultation with the eminent composer, Chou Wen-chung, who was Varèse's assistant during his last decades and is his appointed heir.

Chou was present at UCSD during the week of April 26th, 2010, providing several revelatory seminars, attending rehearsals for, and then enjoying a concert in the Music Department’s new Conrad Prebys Music Center auditorium. The program included Varèse's Intégrales, Dance for Burgess, and Déserts. One of the key issues in fully grasping Varèse's achievement, an element that has remained elusive, is the role of space – both metaphoric and physically instantiated – of space in his music. Varèse spoke and wrote about this dimensionality throughout his career, but was unable to pursue it with suitable technological support. Now, VWG at UCSD has begun exploring his work, both the instrumental and the electro-acoustic, to see what can be made of the relationship between his evocative prose writings and the signal music that he created in response to his vision.



DAVID CURRY detailed site on The Sanctuary Project


NEW: The Reynolds page on the Library of Congress web site now features a "genealogy"
of the electroacoustic portion of the Transfigured Wind series. Hear the entire creative process
from source recordings, through trial signal processing to the final versions of the computer cues
as they sound in differing musical contexts.


Press Release: "Reynolds Named Composer in Residence at High Tech UC San Diego Facility"


  22   with dancer/choreographer Bill T. Jones at Arizona State University's AME Program


Karen Reynolds's original Villa Serbelloni performance and recording of the seminal flute solo,
Ambages. [9.8 MB; 8'37"]


YOUTUBE performance by Paul Bowman of The Behavior of Mirrors, for solo guitar


NEW on Mode Records: Whispers Out of Time [works for orchestra] Whispers Sound Files


NEWEST BOOK: FORM and METHOD: Composing Music [The Rothschild Essays]: Published by Routledge, New York
Search Inside The Book

EARLIEST BOOK (Revised Edition): MIND MODELS, also available at Amazon.com


MONOGRAPH: A SEARCHER'S PATH: A Composer's Ways (not currently available)
Search Inside The Book


JUSTICE as premièred at The Library of Congress


SOUND EXAMPLES


CURRENT ACTIVITY:     Premières:     Elliott.     Sanctuary,     The Image Project,     ILLUSION,     Submerged Memories,     JUSTICE,     WATERSHED: the DVD,     The Red Act Project,     The Angel of Death


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