Roger Reynolds

 




News

Updated 18 March 2024



Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House

"It's an ode to love, to music, to architecture, to our pal, Iannis!”
Sharon Kanach


New Review in TEMPO by Edmund Hunt

... While Xenakis’ approaches to music, architecture and the design of the Reynolds Desert House provide an overarching structure, the [book’s] content is fascinatingly discursive … personal reflections, anecdotes and expressions of feeling serve to underline the touching honesty, even idealism, at the heart of this project. [The] supplementary material suggests that the Reynolds Desert House was not just a plan for a building, but an idea that grew with and from human connections and the exchange of ideas.… the analysis provided is thorough and informative.… the authors invite us to view decades of artistic endeavor and friendship. This book is an affirmative testament to the abundant creativity of lives lived to the full.
Edmund Hunt,
TEMPO, Volume 77, Issue 302, July 2023

Xenakis
Order through Routledge
Order through Amazon


For A Reason

New CD Release
Roger Reynolds: For A Reason

Available on Neuma Records

Reviews:

FANFARE Want List for Robert Carl
Classical Modern Music Review
JAZZ Weekly
New Music Buff
Different Noises 13
Review by Robert Carl for Fanfare Magazine
Fanfare Magazine by Colin Clarke
Review by Huntley Dent for Fanfare Magazine
Editorial Review AMAZON
Classical Modern
Amplified Mag
Pushing The Envelope: Music Decidedly Left Center (Tuesday, Jan 16, 2024)
The Rehearsal Studio
TAKE EFFECT



Soundlines

New CD Release
Weather Systems II: Soundlines: On Language and the Land

Available on
Island Music Records

Reynolds’s Here and There, on a Beckett text, is included in a newly released album set from Islandia Records. Schick writes that “purely instrumental passages — parsed in characteristic Reynolds virtuosity — alternate with unadorned recitations of the text … the ultimate project of the piece [is] — bridging the unspeakable gaps that Beckett proposes: between the mother and the grave, between here and there, now and then. Reynolds creates his own bridges, between the bright clarity of a music of knowing … and the mistiness of a music of longing … music that … is among his most intimate and immediate."


KNOWING / NOT KNOWING

KNOWING / NOT KNOWING will be an approximately 75-minute work for narrator, soprano, tenor, mixed chorus and chamber instrumental ensemble with multi-channel computer processed sound. It involves an extended collaboration between composer Reynolds, conductor Steven Schick, director Robert Castro, producer Lisa Porter, advisor Peter Sellars, and computer musician Jacob Sundstrom. Reynolds has compiled a text in nine sections itself drawn from more than 2-dozen sources stretching from ancient Indian and Persian wisdom, to poetry by Toni Morrison and Amanda Gorman. Its evolution will include a recording of 30 minutes of a cappella choral music realized by the San Diego-based SACRA / PROFANA conducted by Schick, and a complete reading of the text by a group of actors directed by Castro.

World Premiere
March 17, 2024, Sunday at 7pm
UC San Diego Park & Market
1100 Market Street, San Diego

CO-EXISTENCE

CO-EXISTENCE is an 8.5-minute "étude" for instrumental septet and algorithmically- processed instrumental sounds. This work addresses several essential “perceptual issues” arising out of Reynolds’s multi-year engagement with an international consortium of institutions and individuals interested in understanding and utilizing perceptual research to enable fresh musical engagements. It was premiered by the Los Angeles-based wasteLAnd ensemble under the baton of Nicholas Deyoe, with the technological ministrations of Jacob Sundstrom.

        Reynolds gave an extended presentation about the work in the form of a detailed description of his methodologies with periodic extensions and explorations offered by discussants Stephen Mc Adams and Robert Hasegawa (both at McGill University). Reynolds intends to expand this work in the future, essentially doubling its duration.



WISDOM'S SOURCEs

WISDOM’S SOURCEs is an extended duo for acoustic violin and viola, developed as a collaborative engagement between violinist Irvine Arditti and ASQ violist Ralf Ehlers. The original exploration of basic materials (Ancient Greek Tragedy, Buddhism, and the African American Experience) began in the summer of 2020 through a series of an hour and a half-long zoom sessions based on source materials the composer provided for his two instrumentalist collaborators.

        In June of 2023, the collaborators met for three days in London to explore 6 types of sonorous/textural “other-ness” proposed by the composer, resulting in a number of novel behaviors that will now be further explored. The project will culminate in the late Summer of 2024 in San Diego when the collaborators will be joined by filmmaker Kyle Johnson to produce a music-film in the manner of an earlier film of Johnson’s based on Reynolds’s recent PERSISTENCE for solo cello and algorithmic sound processing.


DICKINSON

Roger Reynolds (with Jonathan Nussman). This work (2019-2021) involves intricate vocalization of eight of Emily Dickinson's penetrating poems, responding both to their emotional intensity and to their poetic radiance. In order to allow harmonic and syntactic dimensions, four tuned almglocken are also activated by the performing baritone. The two groups of four poems are entitled Prospect (1 – 4) and Tempest (5 – 8).

        Working in his garage over the Summer of 2020, Jonathan, Jacob Sundstrom, Kyle Johnson, Tiange Zhou and Reynolds worked collaboratively to achieve an audio as well as a staged video realization of this 50-minute work.



NEW: A WORK FOR SPEAKING PERCUSSIONIST: "Here and There"

In the Summer of 2017, Reynolds began a collaboration with percussionist Steven Schick centered on a new work for speaking percussionist that he had requested. Based on a Beckett's Texts for Nothing: IX, the new work was developed and refined by the collaborators over the ensuing 18 months. Here and There was the centerpiece of the inaugural presentation of Schick's “Cross-Wired" initiative, an odd-year series focused on a new composition and featuring coaching, discussion, and performance sessions centered around UC San Diego’s Schick, the in-residence redfishbluefish ensemble, and seven emerging percussionists from the Americas and Europe. 

        The week was intense and productive. Schick and his seven younger colleagues all worked daily, in a wonderfully collaborative spirit, on the challenges and intrigues of the new work. Schick gave it two stunning performances, of the new piece, and quickly followed up with subsequent performances in New York and Omaha. Here and There was featured at the 2021 Percussive Arts Society International.

        In Reynolds’s new creationa concentrated instrumental resource is applied to illuminating and extrapolating into “extra-vocal” dimensions, a performed reading of the Beckett text. The percussionist is faced with a multi-leveled task that involves intricate balancing of vocal utterance and unusual percussion techniques that must join in an interwoven amalgam of articulate sound. The percussionist also moves between two stations, the home base Here and the adjacent There, where a vibraphone awaits.


Mathias Reumert and Watershed V

After percussionist Steve Schick joined UC San Diego's Department of Music in 1991, he, Peter Otto, Miller Puckette and composer Reynolds worked on an elaborate percussion project involving a circular set-up that surrounded Steve. A version for 6-channel spatialization of the live sound was developed. Two and a half decades later, Danish percussionist Mathias Reumert approached Reynolds about the possibility of preparing a version of Watershed involving only a stereo sound system over which he could trigger sound files (It developed that here are 22 of them.) during performance. Reynolds conceived a way of simulating sounds that would have the character of appropriate reverberation but would not require an elaborate microphone and soun dissemination set-up. The idea was to create a "shimmer" by which a timbral signature is prolonged and spatially distributed. Mathias premiered Watershed V in Copenhagen on 1 September 2020, and it is scheduled for release as an audio-visual realization in early 2023.

THE NEW YORK TIMES

FOR THE RECORD, STEVE SMITH, October 9, 2020

"Keeping tabs on new recordings of interest to the new-music community, on CD, vinyl LP, cassette, and digital-only formats—including a handful of impressive new releases from JACK Quartet.

        A recent beneficiary of the JACK touch is Roger Reynolds, a Pulitzer Prize-winning veteran composer long based in San Diego. I first became aware of Reynolds when the trailblazing Arditti Quartet included his supremely evocative Coconino…a shattered landscape on an eponymous album issued by Gramavision in 1989; now, Reynolds benefits from the similarly exacting advocacy of JACK, with whom he created the multimedia epic FLiGHT. An audio-only version of that piece, issued in the first volume of a Mode Records series celebrating Reynolds’s 85th birthday, conveys a strong sense of its expressive power; not forgotten, a concise yet similarly searching reminiscence of music and memory, makes an apt pairing."



The first of a 2-CD release: "ROGER REYNOLDS AT 85, VOL. 1: STRING QUARTETS"

FLiGHT and not forgotten

Performed by the JACK Quartet




"Patterns and Fantasies on the Way to Parnassus: Roger Reynolds's Piano Études Books I and II"


Booklet Program Notes by Thomas May

"Still operating at a creative peak in his 80s, Roger Reynolds completed the second of his two books of études in 2017. This premiere recording of the integral set of 12 études, performed with an ideal balance of poetry and virtuosity by Eric Huebner, documents the composer's significant and original contribution to this curious, if not outright paradoxical, genre. Reynolds, like the august company of earlier practitioners of the étude with whom he engages in intricate conversations throughout, transforms an allegedly pragmatic quest for technical improvement into the vehicle for aesthetic adventure and enlightenment."

Available at: Amazon.com and mode records



The second of the 2-CD release: "ROGER REYNOLDS AT 85, VOL. 2: PIANO ETUDES: BOOKS I and II"

Performed by Eric Heubner

Available at: Amazon.com and mode records



CD "ASPIRATION"

A double CD with four pieces performed by Irvine Arditti, Paul Hembree,
inauthentica and Mark Menzies.

Available at: Kairos and on Amazon.com

The Strad, "Reviews Roger Reynolds: Aspiration", by David Kettle, 20 December 2018

"This demanding but thoroughly rewarding two-disc set serves as the chronicle of a friendship, one that’s both musical and personal, between senior US composer Roger Reynolds and UK violinist Irvine Arditti, dedicatee of all four substantial works here. Taken as a collection, they also highlight contrasting sides to Arditti’s own musical personality, and differing musical roles."
Read More

Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review
"Roger Reynolds, Aspiration, Irvine Arditti"
by Grego Applegate Edwards, October 1, 2018

"When life goes on every day, it sometimes manages to gather forces of entropy to hinder you in the simplest of tasks. This morning the combination of lost reading glasses ("They are somewhere.") and  a broken reading lamp means I absolutely cannot make head nor tail of the CD textual matter. For so many years designers have done their best to disguise all text and render it all unreadable, put that together with the current state of affairs and I am crippled."
Read More


SHARESPACE V: ACTIONS

Over a little more than the past decade, I have been writing a series of duos for a solo instrumentalist and a computer musician (who algorithmically modifies, extends, and spatializes “seeds” from the instrumentalist’s performed materials). The first SHARESPACE work was Dream Mirror (guitar and computer musician, 2010). [About this piece, Washington Post critic Stephen Brookes wrote: “… a work of extraordinary lyricism: the lucid dreaming of a 21st-century poet.”]

        ACTIONS, an extended duo for piano and computer musician, is currently in the final stages of completion. Its world premiere is planned for Mexico City early in 2021, on a festival curated by guitarist Pablo Gómez Cano. In six sections (OBSCURING, FRAGMENTING, FIXATING, ACKNOWLEDGING, ELABORATING, AND RESONATING), the new work explores the implications of actions we all perform each day. Although their sequence is considered, each section is a self-contained statement. This work is a collaborative undertaking between myself, computer musician Jacob Sundstrom, and New York Philharmonic pianist, Eric Huebner. It is notated precisely but leaves improvisatory avenues open to both of the performers so that each realization is new in unanticipated ways – just as our daily behaviors are.

        Plans were in place to premiere ACTIONS at San Francisco State University and UC Santa Cruz in April of 2020. Now Eric, computer musician Jacob Sundstrom and I are working online, preparing a late Fall online "event" featuring ACTIONS.


BOOK RELEASE January 2022

Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House

Roger and Karen had worked for years on the notion that the multifarious materials they had gathered over four decades regarding their collaborative experiences with the legendary Iannis Xenakis could be shape-shifted into a coherent collection of book chapters. The new Routledge publication provides an intimate window into Xenakis’s ways and capacities as the Reynolds had experienced them.

R. and K. Reynolds ... captivate [with] an intellectual clairvoyance that resonates strongly not only in music but also in architecture, painting, food and all other forms of art they choose to describe …  There is so much more information and feeling transmitted in this book that goes far beyond the disciplines of music or architecture alone. [It] will not only benefit students and professionals of music department but will be considered a “must read” for architecture schools for the reasons stated in the following pages.

        Iannis and Françoise came to UC San Diego at the Music Department’s invitation for a 1990 festival in his honor. While they were in Southern California, they visited the land that had been purchased in the Anza-Borrego Desert—a deeply ravined site on which to realize Xenakis’s design that he had offered to them during a dinner at their Paris Chaptal apartment in 1984. 

        Several representative chapters were drafted and submitted to Routledge, whose editor sent them to required external reviewers. A particularly thoughtful remark by one clinched the deal: 

This is a very unique proposal of highest quality on a topic that is greatly underdeveloped: the links between musical, architectural and literary creativity in Xenakis’s work.  … Historical, musical, architectural, aesthetic and creative issues are all interwoven into a fascinating tale that unfolds along many dimensions from the intimately personal to the public, from the creative impulse to compositional/architectural realization, from direct quotes from the main characters to the personal reflections on their meaning and importance ...


A NEW CONCERTO FOR OBOE PREMIERES IN COPPENHAGEN

As a member of the International ACTOR consortium based at McGill University in Montréal, Reynolds became engaged in considering in a more formal way than was normally his practice, the significance and potential of timbre and its manipulation in serving structural purposes rather than simply “coloristic enhancement.” Two creative projects arose out of this circumstantial prompt.

         Oboe virtuoso Jacqueline Leclair commissioned an oboe concerto from the composer, and there followed an extended period of collaborative exploration of the intricacies with which this uniquely idiosyncratic instrument could be made to behave over its full range. Alternate fingerings, multiphonics, and other more rarefied inflections were woven into two extended solos. One begins the resulting work, JOURNEY; the other – a transformed response – closes the piece. As the title suggests, intermediate sections involve the solo instrument encountering and working with varied partners and also in ensemble contexts that reinforce or challenge her presence.

        Leclair will premiere her concerto on 4 May 2023, in Copenhagen, under the baton of music director Mathias Reumert. A commercial recording will be made in Denmark, and further explorations of the work will follow in Montréal under the auspices of ACTOR later in the year.

“PERSISTENCE” PAYS OFF: AN EXPLORATIVE MEDITATION FOR CELLO AND COMPUTER MUSICIAN
(THE NEWEST IN THE “SHARESPACE” SERIES)

The second work engaged with an intricate exploration of instrumental timbre is PERSISTENCE, a half-hour long meditation for cellist and computer musician. (It is a member of the SHARESPACE series of characteristic duos for solo instruments and computer musician.)

         In this work, the solo instrument is asked to manage a quasi-respiratory alternation of successive up- and down-bows, each of which instantiates either a fixed interval or serves to transition to a new stability. The relative calm of this ground of harmonic evolution is disturbed in several ways. First, the consistency of the right-hand alternations is made to create a mobile evolution of sonic character by frequent and extended alterations in bow placement and also the pressure it can deliver as it activates the strings.

         At a more extreme degree, the computer sometimes is involved with recursions, wherein a passage just performed live by the soloist is instantiated again, as an algorithmically re-constituted mirroring. The soloist can respond improvisatorially, deepening and complexifying the harmonic and timbral trajectories of the computer’s reconstruction.

         PERSISTENCE will be given its first set of performances in Poland and Lithuania at the end of November and the beginning of December 2022 by Polish cellist Robert Jędrzejewski and computer musician Jacob Sundstrom, who was my collaborator in this and other recent works involving digital signal processing.




AN EXPLORATIVE “ÉTUDE” COMPOSED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL ACTOR CONSORTIUM

As a further outgrowth of Reynolds’s long record of collaborative interactions with psychologist Stephen McAdams (earlier at Ircam in Paris, and in recent years at the CIRMMT facility in Montréal), the ACTOR initiative encourages the writing of musical works whose purpose, while remaining centrally musical, also engage with perceptual and cognitive issues that, while always contributing to the listener’s experience with any music, rarely come to the fore in purposeful ways. Reynolds is presently engaged in creating an 8-minute section of what will eventually become an extended work for instrumental septet (flute, bass clarinet, trombone, piano, percussion, violin and cello) and integral electronic processing.

        This new work (at his stage still without a title) will be premiered in May of 2023 by Los Angeles-based WasteLAnd under the direction of Nicholas Deyoe.


NEWS RELEASE FROM THE LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, December 2020

The Library of Congress released a series of interviews and conversations with Roger Reynolds that discusses the celebrated composer's use of text, thoughts on sound spatialization, site-specifics works, intermedia, technology in music, his compositional methods, and relationships with other composers (including Iannis Xenakis, Toru Takemitsu, John Cage, and Elliott Carter).

These interviews further enhance the Roger Reynolds Collection that is held at the Library of Congress, containing manuscripts, sketches, correspondence, recordings and other primary source materials related to Reynolds’s life and work.

Descriptions of the videos: Library of Congress
Video interviews: Library of Congress

News release distributed by UC San Diego Division of Arts & Humanities



IN MEMORIAM COMPOSER CHOU WEN-CHENG

The composer Chou Wen-chung and his wife, Yi-an, were longtime and much admired colleagues and friends. When he passed on, it seemed appropriate, indeed necessary, to memorialize the ways in which we had interacted, though mine was necessarily a limited perspective. The range of what he cared about and contributed to culturally, intellectually, musically, administratively would be hard to summarize. My article, “Words About Wen-chung: Concentric Connections: Thoughts after his passing … ” will appear in German and Chinese translations: the former in 
MusikTexte 164, February 2020

the latter in  Journal of Xinghai Conservatory of Music
The English version is available in the Writings area of this site.


UPDATE FOR BRIDGING CHASMS

A heads-up on the third Bridging Chasms "EVENT" to be held in the late Spring or Summer at UC Berkeley's Center for New Music and Audio Technologies, and organized by Director Edmund Campion. Participants will include Berkeley faculty and others associated with Bay Area tech companies. As has been true in the first two EVENTs, Concordia University faculty ethnographer, Kari Zacharias, will be observing and making notes on the evolution of the Bridging Chasms Initiative.

EVENT 2

The Smithsonian Institution’s National Museum of American History presented the second Bridging Chasms EVENT on the 5-7 April 2019 as a part of the 2019 ACCEL Festival. Co-sponsored by Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creativity, Arts, and Technology (ICAT), Benjamin Knapp, Director, it featured Participants from Syracuse University, University of North Carolina, Wake Forest, Boston College, North Carolina State, Virginia Tech, University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Louisville who faced one another in a series of ENCOUNTERS spread over the three-day Encounter.

[See www.bridgingchasms.org]



"Toward Another World: LAMENT"

Collaborating with clarinetist Anthony Burr and computer musician Jacob Sundstrom, Reynolds has completely re-written a much earlier work for solo clarinet, shaping it into the fourth in a series of duos for solo instrument and computer musician. In Toward Another World: LAMENT, “seeds” extracted from Burr’s playing of three movements – Innocence, Awakening, and Resolve – undergo elaborate processing with computer algorithms of Reynolds’s design. The new work was presented in its final form on the “Wednesdays@7:00” series presented at the Conrad Prebys Concert Hall on 27 January 2019.


BRIDGING CHASMS a conference –  the beginning

Bridging Chasms is an initiative two years in the making. It is dedicated to the improvement of cross-disciplinary communications by way of identifying tools and strategies that improve communication and factors that inhibit it. One of the major issues facing our society (and others around the world) is the increasing difficulty in finding ways to both explain our beliefs to others unlike ourselves, but also to listen to those "others"' perspectives. Such difficulties not only occur at a societal level, but also between members of different disciplines, both academic and non-academic.

EVENT 1

The UC San Diego inaugural EVENT took place 21-23 September 2018, and brought together a civil engineer, a choreographer, a former NASA administrator, an historian, an educational innovator, an architect, and computer systems researcher. Over the course of two-and-a-half days, a number of searching exchanges took place and a detailed report by the Bridging chasms ethnographer is posted on the Bridging Chasms Web site. [See www.bridgingchasms.org].

EVENT 2

The Smithsonian Institution’s Museum of American History will present the second EVENT 5-7 April 2019. Co-sponsored by Virginia Tech’s Institute for Creation, Art, and Technology (ICAT), Benjamin Knapp, Director, it features Participants from Syracuse University, University of North Carolina, Wake Forrest, Boston College, North Carolina State, Virginia Tech, University of Pittsburgh, and the University of Louisville who will face one another in a series of ENCOUNTERS spread over three days.



PASSAGE – the book

Reynolds’s ongoing PASSAGE Project has now been realized in a book form, released from Peters Edition Group in September 2017. Printed by Halstan & Co Ltd in London, the result is an “art book” that simulates the interweaving of the read and recorded texts, sound movement, and projected images experienced in an actual PASSAGE performance. The medium is now, however, confined to the printed page. In order to do this, Reynolds, working with Karen and their collaborator Stacie Birky Greene, conceived a presentation in which images and text are melded into a single, balanced visual impression. The letters of text words are individually altered in color, density, and spacing in order to integrate with the content of associated imagery (photos, diagrams, and so on). The outcome is a completely novel mix that lends a constantly altering viscosity to the reading experience. At some moments, it is clear sailing, at others the letters and their associate words have to be “found out” by close examination. So an encounter with the book is, as is the experience of a live PASSAGE presentation, a kind of performative collaboration between artist and audience.



"'O'o" PREMIERES

The quintet 'O'o was sighted and also heard in Toronto (at the final concert of the Toronto Conservatory’s season-ending “21C Festival”) on 27 May 2018, then again at the LAMP Festival on Nova Scotia on 21 June 2018. It is dedicated to Reynolds's longtime friend and colleague Robert Aitken (flutist, composer, conductor) who premiered it with the Iris String Ensemble. The work was commissioned by New Music Concerts and the Lunenburg Academy of Music Performance, with the financial assistance of The Koerner Foundation; The Merryweather Fund; Austin and Beverly Clarkson; Camille Watts; Véronique Lacroix and Paul Taub. Reynolds’s new work for flute and string quartet explores the emergence of the need – universal among animate beings – to call out. Why? Companionship? Recognition?

         Under cover, so to speak, there is also the motivating narrative of the now extinct species of bird (the 'O'o) that had populated Kaua'i in the Hawaiian Islands. By the late 1970s, only a single pair still sang to one another. The male survived 4 years after his mate was heard. Calling … still.



BRILLIANT

Eric Huebner gave two recitals featuring Ligeti's two books of études and Reynolds's first book of études at UC San Diego on 10 January 2018 and at Bowling Green University on 2 December 2017.



2-CD SET OF COLLECTED VIOLIN MUSIC PERFORMED BY IRVINE ARDITTI

Kairos Records in Vienna released a 2-CD set in June. The set includes a searching virtual discussion between Mark Menzies, Reynolds and Arditti, exploring the origins and pathways of their long collaboration, and Arditti's recordings of the new Shifting/Drifting duo (with Paul Hembree), imagE/violin, and imAge/violin, as well as the violin concerto commissioned for him by the Oslo Sinfonietta and Montréal's Nouvel Ensemble Moderne). Arditti is backed by the inauthentica ensemble under conductor Mark Menzies.

New Reviews:

The Strad

"Shifting/Drifting [is} a duet for [violinist] Arditti and Paul Hembree on live computer processing, who manipulates the player's sounds while also mixing in original materials. At times, Arditti plays against an orchestra of himself; at others, he weaves around a ghostly sonic doppelgänger; This is music that demands close attention, but repays it with startlingly abundant invention, delivered with cool authority and captured in close, generous sound." (David Kettle)
pizzicato magazine online

“…listeners into new emotional and inspirational worlds of hearing.” (Uwe Krusch)

Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review

And also that the Kairos CD set “is exploratory and virtuoso in its subtle dash, and it seems tailored to what corresponds nicely to the musical personality of Arditti himself, not showy for its own sake, very much imbued with the urge toward expressive elegance and brilliance of means, and in a harmonically expended High Modernist idiom for which of course Reynolds is a natural master. This is not music as contrived in some arch manner by the composer. It is as natural as speaking and as eloquent as brilliant wordflow.

After a few listens one falls into the spell of it all, the beautiful rightness of Arditti's playing, the perfect thus-ness of accompaniment and the spare profundity of the solo space.

This program is in every way a winner – with excellence of sound and sound staging, performance brilliance and compositional inspiration, together sequencing and smarts.

Aspiration demands your attention and rewards with high complexity-in-continuity. It is a Modern gem for all who want to know where we are today.” (Grego Applegate Edwards)


NEW WORK FOR PIANO AND COMPUTER

Pianist Eric Huebner and Reynolds are engaged in a longterm collaboration with computer musician Jacob Sundstrom. Based on materials drawn from Reynolds's Piano Études: Book II (2016-2017), they have fashioned an extended duo for pianist and computer musician in six parts: OBSCURING, FRAGMENTING, FIXATING, ACKNOWLEDGING, ELABORATING, and RESONATING. The new work is built in the manner of the Shifting/Drifting project (which involved violinist Irvine Arditti and computer musician Paul Hembree). Huebner is Professor at University of Buffalo - SUNY and Anna-Maria and Stephen Kellen Piano Chair of the New York Philharmonic.



THE MONTHS OF JUNE AND JULY 2018

June 2018 proved an active time for Reynolds. Rehearsals in Boston with the wondrous Gabriela Díaz, conductor Gil Rose, and his Boston Modern Orchestra Project; then a Coolidge Auditorium concert featuring Aspiration, as performed for an attentive full house, on a program that included a set of three of Reynolds’s Piano Etudes: Book I stunningly realized by New York Philharmonic pianist, Eric Heubner.

         Back in Boston, the BMOP recorded Aspiration with violinist Díaz. Reynolds then joined this year’s June in Buffalo Festival where he lectured (with illustrations by Huebner and computer musician Paul Hembree), gave masterclasses and coached rehearsals for performances of his Shifting/Drifting (with Irvine Arditti and Hembree), Shadowed Narrative (as performed by the enterprising young New York group, Ensemble Mise-En), and Positings (brilliantly managed by Signal conductor Brad Lubman and soloist Hembree).
[During the 2019-20 season, Reynolds, Arditti, and composer Hilda Paredes will be in residence at the Eastman School as Conductor Brad Lubman conducts his sterling “Signal Ensemble” in a concert featuring their distinctive music making.]

         After a break back in Del Mar, Reynolds set out for Nova Scotia and his second appearance at the LAMP Festival there. Again lecturing, masterclassing and coaching a reprise of 'O'o, the quintet, performed by flutist Aitken and the Iris String Ensemble, as well as working with the excellent baritone Jonathan Nussman in a selection from the collaborative song cycle (with poet John Ashbery), last things, I think, to think about.

         In July, McGill University, under the always inspired leadership of Stephen McAdams, mounted back-to-back conferences, in which Reynolds participated (along with UC San Diego colleague, Miller Puckette). Up first was “Timbre is a Many-Splendored Thing”, which brought researchers from all over the world to contemplate and exchange views on the subject of musical timbre. Then came the second annual meeting of the ACTOR Project (ANALYSIS, CREATION, and TEACHING of ORCHESTRATION), a consortium of 13 North American and European Institutions under McAdams’s direction that will collaborate in an imaginatively structured, seven-year project funded by the  Social Sciences and Humanities Research Council (Canada), Fonds Société et culture - Gouvernement du Québec, Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (Canada), Agence national de la recherche (France).

[Reynolds will also attend the third-year meeting at Ircam in Paris, July 2019.]



THREE COLLABORATIONS in 2017

I. Reynolds’s ongoing PASSAGE Project has now been realized in a book form, released from C. F. Peters in September 2017. Printed by Halstan & Co Ltd in London, the result is an “art book” that simulates the interweaving of the read and recorded texts, sound movement, and projected images experienced in an actual performance. The medium is now, however, confined to the printed page. In order to do this, Reynolds, working with Karen and their collaborator Stacie Birky Greene, conceived a presentation in which images and text are melded, virtually, into a single, balanced visual impression. The letters of text words are individually altered in color, density, and spacing in order to integrate with the content of associated imagery (photos, diagrams, and so on). The outcome is a completely novel mix that lends a constantly altering viscosity to the reading experience. At some moments, it is clear sailing, at others the letters and their associate words have to be “found out” by close examination. So the encounter with the book is, as the experience of a live PASSAGE presentation is, a kind of performative collaboration between artist and audience.

II. Collaborating with clarinetist Anthony Burr, and computer musician Jacob Sundstrom, Reynolds has completely re-written a much earlier work for solo clarinet, shaping it into the fourth in a series of duos for solo instrument and computer musician. In Toward Another World: LAMENT, “seeds” extracted from Burr’s playing of the three movements: Innocence, Awakening, and Resolve, undergo elaborate processing with computer algorithms of Reynolds’s design. The new work was premiered at an International Conference of the Society for Music Perception and Cognition, organized by colleague Sarah Creel in the UCSD Cognitive Science Department. This event, on the conference’s opening night, was held in the auditorium of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technologies on 31 July 2017.

III. In the Summer of 2017, Reynolds also began a collaboration with percussionist Steven Schick centered on a new work for speaking percussionist. Based on a Beckett text (from his Texts for Nothing: IX), the new work will be developed and refined by the collaborators over the coming year (next in late August 2018) and become the centerpiece of an inaugural percussion seminar ("Cross-Wired") in late February 2019, the first in a series to be held on odd-numbered years at UCSD. A very restricted instrumental resource is applied to illuminating and extrapolating into “extra-vocal” dimensions, a performed reading of the text. The performer is faced with a multi-leveled task that involves intricate balancing of vocal utterance and unusual percussion techniques that join in an interwoven amalgam of articulate sound. The percussionist will also move, and repositioning himself/herself precisely, in order to engage with a specified lighting design.




DARMSTADT

Reynolds was invited to the 70th Anniversary session of the International Summer Course for New Music Darmstadt, July 10-August 14, 2016. Among other activities, he performed one of his intermedial PASSAGE lecture events, PASSAGE 11, in a customized "Darmstadt" version. It featured Irvine Arditti, the Arditti Quartet, with Paul Hembree. Reynolds also presented a Workshop/Performance event focused on the new collaboration between him, Irvine Arditti, and Hembree: Shifting/Drifting (for violin and real-time algorithmic transformation). Reynolds's four Darmstadt Lectures included:

1. Impetus and Fuel: beginning a composition and content [discussant Martin Hiendl]
2. Shaping Form by Boundary Conditions: Flexible Opportunity, not Rigid Obligation [discussant Anne Cleare]
3. Technological and Graphic Resource: Numbers, Space, Algorithms and Textural Sketching [discussant Paul Hembree]
4. The large and the small: how can "knowing" improve musical experience [violinist Kier GoGwilt]


          After his Darmstadt residency, Reynolds visited the Sacher Foundation in Basel, working with Angela Benedictis, the musicologist in charge of his materials there. Their sessions were focused on new arrivals: the sketches and drafts for imagE/violin, imAge/violin, and Shifting/Drifting (all composed in 2015).




FULL HOUSE FOR SAN DIEGO JACK QUARTET

FLiGHT took off again from UC San Diego's Conrad Prebys Music Center's Experimental Theater on 30 November 2017. The team included JACK, computer musician Paul Hembree, and Kyle Johnson, who realized the Projection Design created by Ross Karre. FLiGHT was performed four times in October 2016: a pair of preliminary presentations at Atlas Digital Media Center, University of Colorado, Boulder and the premiere performances at Park Avenue Armory in New York on the 30th and 31st.

International online news magazine OZY feature "Provocateurs". Also, Bruce Hodges, in his Musical America review which advises readers that one should "simply sit back, letting [Reynolds's] airborne fantasy race through the mind."




ON VARÈSE

Working at the invitation of the Sacher Foundation in Basel, Reynolds examined the thinking of Edgard Varèse on the subject of musical space (actual and metaphoric). Two extended papers have resulted. Part I was published in Perspectives of New Music (Volume 51, Number 1, Winter 2013): “The Last Word Is Imagination: A Study of the Spatial Aspects of Varèse’s Work”. Part II is published in the print edition of Leonardo, Vol. 50, No. 5, available in the Fall of 2017 from MIT Press.

        The Sacher Foundation acquired in 2017 more than three decades of correspondence between violinist Irvine Arditti and composer Reynolds. Ranging from the negotiation of musical details, through the realization of collaborative enterprizes, wry exchanges, and a mutual fascination with tennis, this collection of thousands of pages provides a rare look into the evolution of a friendship.



REVIEW

Reynolds is the subject of a 2-page editorial by Philip Clark in Gramophone, March 2016:

Excavating layers of myth – as Harrison Birtwistle and Helmut Lachenmann have both discovered in their own music-theater works – can be a useful ground plan for journeying through a piece of music ... george WASHINGTON deals in muddled layers of truth – of purely orchestral sounds against orchestral music transformed electronically, purely musical information mulched into real-time narration, and visual imagery beamed around the hall.... symbolizing how different aspects of Washington's personality and thinking work in unison.

... [Reynolds] is motivated to cultivate long relationships with musicians – whether Steven Schick and, in recent string pieces, Irvine Arditti, composer and instrumentalist stepping into each other's worlds, feeling towards new ways of hearing though mutual listening and discussion.
(Philip Clark)




DUO FOR VIOLIN AND COMPUTER

Shifting/Drifting, a new collaborative duo for violin and real-time algorithmic transformation, received its premiere performances, at UC San Diego's Conrad Prebys Experimental Theater (the season opening ArtPower event) on 25 September 2015; then also at REDCAT CalArts Downtown (an Arditti recital featuring its source solos: imagE/violin & imAge/violin), Los Angeles, 29 September); the new collaboration at Cal Arts' The Beast on 1 October, and at Stanford University's CCRMA on 4 October, and at Darmstadt's 70th Anniversary Festival, 4 August 2016.




NATIONAL GALLERY OF ART AMERICAN MUSIC FESTIVAL

The National Gallery of Art concert previewed FLiGHT on 8 March 2015 in the first of a set of 10 events that comprised the 66th
American Music Festival : Personal Visions, for which Reynolds was the guest curator. The Festival featured composers from Nancarrow, DeLio, Ung, Felder, and Augusta Read Thomas to Sorey, Dresser, Oliveros, Applebaum, and Zorn, as well as performers Claire Chase, JACK Quartet, Gabriela Díaz, Eric Huebner, Third Coast Percussion, and the Mark Dresser Trio. "A gallery's worth of new music, and it's all free" wrote Anne Midgette, in The Washington Post's preview.

Listen to the NGA podcast Panel Discussion between Tyshawn Sorey and Mark Dresser, moderated by Roger Reynolds.



SOUND ICON

Reynolds was the featured composer on the dynamic young group SOUND ICON's season opener, including conductor-music director Jeffrey Mean's performance of Thoughts, Places, Dreaming, with cello soloist Rafi Popper-Kaiser and also a complete, integral performance of his Piano Etudes, Book I, wherein pianists Aaron Likness and Yoko Hagino passed materials back and forth between their two pianos.




TWO ARTICLES

Reynolds has recently contributed to the German publication, MusikTexte (a remembrance of Pauline Oliveros), and to the Contemporary Music Review ("Considering the Roots of JUSTICE", paired with Robert Kirzinger's survey "Text, Language, and the Voice in the Music of Roger Reynolds". Reynolds had earlier written "Thoughts on Enabling Creative Capacity: Provocation, Invitation, Resistance, and Challenge", also for CMR.



TWO NEW DC's

A new CD on innova Recordings appeared in September, featuring the first 6 in Reynolds's longterm imAgE/ Project. Complementary solos (e.g., imagE/cello – an Evocative work – and imAge/cello – an Assertive complement – for flute, piano, guitar, viola, cello, and contrabass are performed by Mark Dresser, Yuji Takajashi, Alexis Descharmes, Rachel Beetz, Mark Menzies, John Pickford Richards, Eric Huebner, and Pablo Gómez Cano.

The Strad, UK, 4 July 2016
Roger Reynolds has often been called the 'American Iannis Xenakis' and the 'American Pierre Boulez', an apparent contradiction that his music rides with ease – suggesting that in reality he's the US Roger Reynolds. imageE-imAge is a set of instrumental pieces, a pair each for unaccompanied piano, double bass, guitar, viola, flute and cello that, as Reynolds's titles imply, offer different takes on the same pool of material. ... Performances emphasise Reynolds's lavish detailing; the recorded soun is intimate and sympathetic. (Philip Clark)

A second CD is now available at Mode Records, mode 277/78, Complete Cello Music. Please visit the Alexis Descharmes YouTube Channel for a complete performance recording at the Conservatoire à Rayonnement Régional de Paris on 15 November 2013.
Reviews:

CLASSICA Magazine, France, March 2014
In a continuity with Elliott Carter and Milton Babbitt, American Roger Reynolds cultivates an aesthetic closer to the European avant-garde than to minimalism or the 'new tonality' that dominate musical production overseas. Resolutely free from the classic tone, his writing is not atonal, nevertheless... It attaches great importance to the points of reference between pitches, to recurrent pitches, echoes, centers of gravity, harmonic attraction, tension / relaxation.... Thoughts, Places, Dreams (2013), a chamber concerto dedicated to the Ensemble Court-circuit, develops the material of the two solo pieces, the imAgEs of 2007. As in the concerto of Ligeti, the soloist does not come off as such – but what wealth of invention! What subtle play between the desks! Three tracks of the CD are dedicated to Reynolds's readings, closely related to some of the pieces from this CD, adding a personal touch to this album and especially the tone, the voice of the Master... (Jeremie Bigorie)

ICON, UK, October 2015
Mellow listening it's not, but it's not especially hostile either. For those with a taste for post-1970 classical (and that includes Zappa's classical works) and a love for edgy usage of the cello, this two-CD set will confound, amaze, and enchant you.




JUNE IN BUFFALO

In June 2015, Reynolds was a featured composer at the 30th anniversary of David Felder's June in Buffalo. Two major works were heard, Kokoro (performed by its commissioner, Irvine Arditti) and the Piano Etudes, Book I (in an integral performance by Eric Huebner, one of its dedicatees). Reynolds also gave master classes on the Etudes (with pianist Huebner), and on four real-time computer algorithms (with computer musician Paul Hembree).




ARDITTI QUARTET AND MUCH MORE

Reynolds's achievements were celebrated on several occasions during early 2015. The UCSD Music Department presented a birthday celebration 3-5 February at the Conrad Prebys Music Center. Events included a Ross Karre- and Josef Kucera-curated installation concentrating on four Reynolds intermedia works spanning four decades (PING, SANCTUARY, MARKed MUSIC, and george WASHINGTON), an international symposium: "The Interaction of Scientific and Artistic Imagination: Perceptual Studies and the Making of Music", featuring Stephen McAdams (McGill), Philippe Lalitte (Bourgogne), and Aniruddh Patel (Tufts), and a concert by the celebrated Arditti Quartet, featuring two commissioned Reynolds works, as well as quartets by Chaya Czernowin and Ben Hackbarth. Katharina Rosenberger was the coordinator for all the celebratory events, and participated with Ross Karre and Reynolds – along with the festival guest speakers – in a panel discussion moderated by Steven Schick.




NEW ENGLAND CONSERVATORY OF MUSIC

In June 2014, Reynolds was composer-in-residence for Stephen Drury's yearly epic at the New England Conservatory of Music: the Summer Institute for Contemporary Performance Practice (SICPP). During his residency, a dozen diverse works of his were rehearsed and performed. The Iditarod marathon on the Festival's final day admirably fulfilled its title's implications: musical vitality, even heroism.




"...A YOUNG EXPLORER."

On 23 February 2014, the Miller Theatre presented a “Portrait Concert” including two performances of Reynolds works commissioned by and for his longtime friend and collaborator, Irvine Arditti, as well as the East Coast premiere of Positings (2012-13) for instrumental ensemble and real-time computer algorithms (with computer musician Paul Hembree). Positings was commissioned by Southwest Chamber Music.

           Paul Griffiths's Miller Theatre program notes observed of Reynolds: “ … this is someone who remains a young explorer. ... looking for new ways in which music can energize space, interlock with electronics, and spill across into drama – or do all of these at once …”




george WASHINGTON  A PREMIERE

This major work for orchestra, three narrators, projected imagery, and 8-channel computer sound received its premiere performances on the season-opening concerts of the National Symphony Orchestra, under the direction of Christoph Eschenbach, October 3, 4, and 5, 2013. Reynolds fashioned the work’s text from Washington’s letters and diaries, and collaborated with videographer Ross Karre, computer musician Jaime Oliver, and recording engineer Josef Kucera, as well as the research staff of the Mount Vernon Ladies’ Association. It was co-commissioned by the National Symphony Orchestra through a grant from the John and June Hechinger Commissioning Fund for New Orchestral Works, the Mount Vernon Ladies' Association, and the University of California.
Please view the brief trailer by Ross Karre.

george WASHINGTON reviews are available here.


HARVARD FROMM PROFESSOR

Reynolds was Fromm Professor at Harvard during the Fall Semester of 2012. While there, he gave two public lectures: “What I Do (with some whys)” and "PASSAGE 8: On Learning, Varèse, Cage, Ashley, Musical Experience, and Intermedia”. He also taught individual composers and conducted a Fromm Seminar on Analysis and the subsequent extrapolation of procedures arising out of the analytic process. Reynolds's music was heard at Harvard in a Portrait Concert by New York's Alarm Will Sound Ensemble. The program included his performance of the PASSAGE 8 intermedia work with computer musician Paul Hembree, as well as the first performance of a revised version of SEASONS: Cycle II, in four movements. UCSD colleague Susan Naruki was the soprano soloist, and Alan Pierson conducted. During the PASSAGE performance, clarinetist Bill Kalinkos performed Toward Another World with Hembree, and John Pickford Richards gave the world premiere of a new work written for him by Reynolds: imagE/viola. While in Cambridge, Reynolds's music was also heard at MIT, Boston University, Tufts University, and on several New England Conservatory of Music concerts, directed by Stephen Drury.




“Transcending Place and Time” A SEMINAR AT UCSD

Contrabassist Mark Dresser (UCSD) and trombonist Michael Dessen (UC Irvine) joined with Reynolds during the Winter of 2013, to offer “Transcending Place and Time”, a pathbreaking exploration of the potential of telepresence and high-resolution multimedia documentation. The seminar met simultaneously with separate groups on two University of California campuses (San Diego and Irvine), using ultra-high speed fiber-optic connectivity that virtually eliminated auditory latency. During lecture/discussion meetings and associated laboratory sessions, a group of two-dozen faculty and graduate students explored the limits, opportunities, and, of course, the frustrations of using state of the art technologies to re-formulate the ancient tradition of performance experience. That tradition’s three components – privileged place, performers, audience – can now be located in different places and times, creating a limitless new set of possibilities … and perils. 




ONCE. MORE. on PBS

"In the 1960s, Ann Arbor was known as a hotbed of radicalism not only in student political and social activism, but in new music. The University of Michigan was a center of change, where composers were in the vanguard of a cultural revolution.
~ Laurel Firant, AnnArbor.com Freelance Writer, October 29, 2010