Updated 12 February 2024

Brief Biography

Roger Reynolds is known for his integration of diverse ideas and resources, and for seamlessly blending traditional musical sounds and those now enabled by technology. His work responds to texts both poetic (Beckett, Borges, Dickinson, Ashbery) and mythological (Aeschylus, Euripides, Heraclitus). He is noted for “wizardry in sending music flying through space: whether vocal, instrumental, or computerized”. In 1969, Reynolds accepted a tenured appointment to UC San Diego and has helped establish its Music Department as a destination program. He won early recognition with Fulbright, Guggenheim, and the National Institute of Arts and Letters Awards, as well as grants from the Rockefeller Foundation and the Institute for Current World Affairs. In 1989, he won the Pulitzer Prize for Music for the string orchestra composition, Whispers Out of Time; in 2016, he received the Revelle Medal from UC San Diego. His over 150 compositions have been exclusively published by Edition Peters New York for over five decades; several dozen CDs and DVDs of his music have been commercially released internationally. 

Reynolds is author of five books and numerous articles, some of them the result of collaborations with American, Canadian, and French scientists. Other collaborators have been choreographers Lucinda Childs and Bill T. Jones, theater directors Tadashi Suzuki, Tina Parker, and Robert Castro, and Karen, his longtime partner. Performer collaborators include Irvine Arditti, Arditti Quartet, Steven Schick, Yuji Takahashi, Alexis Descharmes, Pablo Gómez Cano, Anthony Burr, Eric Huebner, Mathias Reumert, and Jacqueline Leclair. In 2009 Reynolds was appointed University Professor—the first artist to be so honored by the University of California. In 1998, the Library of Congress established a Special Collection of his work. His scores and correspondence are also included in the Paul Sacher Collection in Basel. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2023.

Library of Congress Collection
http://lcweb2.loc.gov/diglib/ihas/html/rreynolds/rreynolds-home.html