"... a 21st-Century secular oratorio, a work that deftly fuses recorded and live media,
alternates chorus and the spoken word, and juxtaposes live drama with instrumentalists
in order to pose probing questions about the nature and range of human knowledge.
...
In a music review ... could not hope to do justice to the depth and complexity of the work’s
extensive catalogue of philosophical theses, but suffice it to say that Reynolds has concisely
distilled them and deftly articulated them without indulging in pat conclusions. His title
clearly shows he can live with ambiguity." Continue reading
March 18, 2024 by Ken Herman
The American composer Pulitzer Prize winner Roger Reynolds, on the threshold of 90 years, shows himself more vital than ever, and comes out with this new double CD, for Neuma Records, which collects three decades of compositions dedicated to contemporary music and the world in which it interacts with the world of listeners. The songs, three of these expertly accompanied on the computer by Paul Hembree, such as DREAM MIRROR, played on guitar by Pablo Gómez Cano, SHIFTING/DRIFTNG with the great Irvine Arditti on violin; HERE AND THERE with the percussionist Steven Schick, unique without the involvement of the computer, SKETCHBOOK with the singer Liz Pearse, show the search for the potential of music to tell, also thanks to the words of Samuel Beckett and Milan Kundera, powerfully embedded in the work, the beauty and the pleasure of revealing new scenarios of meaning and auditory pleasure. To complete the picture, the consideration that this album serves as the soundtrack to the documentary, entitled 'For A Reason' that Kyle Johnson directed about his life and work. February 18, 2024
"A body of work that spans three decades, Roger Reynolds recruits Pablo Gómez Cano, Paul Hembree, Irvine Arditti, Steven Schick and Liz Pearse for two discs of very well thought out electroacoustic sounds.
“Dream Mirror (Sharespace I)” opens the listen with Cano’s varied and cultured guitar playing alongside Hembree’s creative computer manipulation that’s firm, bare and sometimes even mysterious, and “Shifting/Drifting (Sharespace IV)” follows with Arditti’s stirring violin that lends itself to the gripping ambience which quivers, floats and blurs itself in a very cinematic fashion.
The back half of the listen leads with Schick’s speaking percussion that draws us in with its vocals that are used like an instrument amid the thumping and often booming drums, and “Sketchbook (For The Unbearable Lightness Of Being)” exits with Pearse’s low vocals alongside the graceful piano and Hembree’s computer skills for a very expressive and atypical version of contemporary classic sounds.
A 44-page book accompanies the package, as Reynolds and company make for an experimental and intriguing listen that is superbly delivered." Continue Reading January 7, 2024
"[Reynolds] possesses a questing intellect that searches for an understanding of the issues, problems, and challenges that he identifies, and then grapples with them in the music.
One of his good friends, the late Iannis Xenakis, is something of a European analogue. I think of him as existing in a sweet spot between the American traditions of formalist/constructivist composition and experimentalism.
Though Reynolds’s career has had many high points, I still feel this is a milestone. It’s a celebration of many things: of new and ambitious works, of a worldview that is explained in depth in this program (more below), and of a series of creative collaborative friendships that have resulted in not just these pieces, but often multiple works.
Paul Hembree is the technological partner to Pablo Gómez Cano and Irvine Arditti; while I am reading between the lines of the documentation, it appears that his part consists of dozens of pre-recorded “seeds” of each instrument, which are then triggered/mixed/processed in real time to create the fluidly evolving accompaniment. The result is the sort of interaction that one associates with great classical chamber performance.
The entire package is enhanced by a sumptuous program book with a thoughtful and detailed essay by the critic Thomas May. And the album title, For a Reason, comes from a concurrent video documentary about the composer by the filmmaker Kyle Johnson. As far as I can tell, it is not yet available for public viewing, but in the short window that Neuma allowed as part of an extended “release party,” I was able to see it. It’s a remarkably creative and sensitive composer portrait, and I hope that anyone who gets this disc will eventually be able to watch it as well."
"...Neuma has released a two-disc set that celebrates a composer at the height of his career. Roger Reynolds is close to 90, and this program of four solo works (guitar, violin, percussion, and voice) is far more than that. Each piece involves extensive “extensions” of its soloist, whether by computer processing/interaction, simultaneous spoken text, or multiple performance practice (vocalist as pianist). The result is a far more rich and “symphonic” sonic result than you’d expect. The substantive and penetrating program notes delve deep onto the composer’s practice in a manner that leads to a deeper understanding of an artist who deserves it. May all who approach such a threshold be so lucky!"
"WANT LIST FOR ROBERT CARL," Issue 47:2 (Nov/Dec 2023) of FANFARE Magazine
This release feels special, though. I say “feels” as the presentation is immaculate and luxurious: a properly hard case holding a gatefold for the two discs, plus a separate, lavishly illustrated, full-color 42-page booklet (all in English).
The extended booklet essay by Thomas May, a model of its kind—if only they were all like this—opens imperiously and clearly: "Instead of asking merely to be listened to, the music of Roger Reynolds invites complete submergence." And this is true: This is uncompromising but rewarding music, especially in performances as expert as these." Issue 47:2 (Nov/Dec 2023)
"As he turns 90, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Roger Reynolds feels old, new, exploratory, and a historical holdover all at the same time.
...wherever New Music goes, Reynolds has been there from the outset. His style is best signified, as Robert Carl pointed out (Fanfare 32:1), by his omnivorous intellect. “What I mean by this is that Reynolds’s music is saturated with ideas, but not just ones about musical technique. Instead, it plays with concepts and artifacts from such points of departure as non-Western culture, literature, geography, architecture, science, to name a few."
Continue Reading
Huntley Dent, Issue 47:2 (Nov/Dec 2023)
"A Reason to Listen: Roger Reynolds’ Latest, “For a Reason,” new recordings on Neuma Records"
"I first encountered Reynolds’ music when I heard a broadcast of the first commercial recording of his music. The disc, released in 1969 on Nonesuch records documented performances of Frederic Myrow’s “Songs from the Japanese” (1964) paired with Reynolds’ “Quick are the Mouths of the Earth” (1965), a work that actually uses the text of the title to derive the music. I recall that the sound of this music sent chills up my spine and sent me to a record store to purchase a copy. This first encounter was a visceral experience, one of many I would encounter as I heard his subsequent music, and that of his contemporaries."
Continue Reading
August 2023 by Allan J. Cronin
This album is a deep embodiment of the complexity and diversity of Reynolds' musical aspects that merge, recombine, shift and mirror each other. Like the western panorama of Del Mar that stretches outside Reynolds' windows, revealing not only the Pacific Ocean but also his own image and the virtual world to the east. This simultaneous, layered reflection somehow serves as a fitting portrait of the composer's many facets - fused, recombined, mutable, mirrored - they are present both here and there. Roger Reynolds-For A Reason, June 16, 2023
The Rehearsal Studio
Four Works by Roger Reynolds on Two CDs JUNE 10, 2023 by STEPHEN SMOLIAR
What stands out is Reynolds' care in building each sound poetics, so that we look at the finished performed result in its wealth of detail and see the Reynolds we have heard and loved over the years, evolved to hone in on an ever fine grained musical object that each time asserts a sound identity that gives us further entrance into a sonic depth most original, eloquent and effective.
In the end we appreciate Reynolds' long journey toward this Sound Color rhythmically conversational eloquence which is less about notes per se and instead zeroes definitively into a post-Serial independence that nonetheless remains at the pinnacle of the High Modernist project.
... I feel we might all take some time and appreciate just how important Roger Reynolds has become to us as a master artist both original and transcendent. …
June 8, 2023 by Grego Applegate Edwards
The westward panorama from Roger Reynolds’s Del Mar windows comprises not only the Pacific Ocean but also, as the light changes, his own visage and the virtual world in an easterly direction. The simultaneous, layered reflection serves somehow as an apt portrait of the composer’s many aspects – fused, recombined, shifting, mirrored – they are both here and there. And this multiplicity is deeply emblematic of the four remarkable works found in For A Reason.
The works (spanning over three decades) are the result of his intensely collaborative process with artistic friends, who, in this case, also happen to be celebrated performers: Pablo Gómez Cano (guitar), Irvine Arditti (violin), Steven Schick (percussion), and Liz Pearse (voice). The process of composer and performer finding common ground foregrounds what is, perhaps, for Reynolds the most fundamental issue at stake in creating music: “I’m interested in the whole world of how music speaks — not just what it’s saying, but how it’s saying it.”
[Reynolds] is lovingly portrayed as the subject of a forthcoming documentary film by Kyle Johnson, FOR A REASON, and this Neuma double-album showcases the works featured in the film.
Composer Roger Reynolds boasts a wide variety of penmanship in this double disc of music that ranges from classical to ambient. All of the pieces range from 20-32 minutes, so there is a lot of room for atmosphere. Pablo Gomez Cano brings his guitar to team up with computer musician Paul Hembree for a mix of guitar effects, flamenco moods and harrowing spaciousness on the sonic wallpaper of “Dream Mirror”. Modern classical with a dash of Tchaikovsky is displayed by violinist Irvine Arditti teamed up with Hembree for “Shifting/Drifting” that includes some wondrous soloing on the strings. Scratched cymbals, vibes, hand clapping and a voice that speaks and huffs make up the percussive sounds by Steven Schick during the marathon “Here and There” with “Sketchbook” featuring Liz Pearse accompanying herself on the piano and adding electronic processing as her operatic voice has her speaking like Miss Havisham, holding her “s” and “n” in rhythmic enunciation and feeling like you’re in a scene from Great Expectations. An artist searching for new lands.
Continue reading
June 5, 2023 by George W. Harris
Roger Reynolds and Karen Reynolds, Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music:
The Reynolds Desert House, Routledge, 2022
BMOP Violin Music Gramophone
by Jed Distler
July 20, 2022
… staggered glissandos and wispy arpeggios evoke images of rain falling on glass
or paint melting downwards on a canvas. You never know what solo instrument will
sneak out from the opulent yet never cluttered textures: a piccolo shriek, an acerbic
trombone slide or a strategically placed bass drum hit. … Reynolds’s music grips
your attention moment to moment … What lingers forever in one’s memory ... is the
extraordinary virtuosity of violin soloist Gabriela Díaz, the customary point and
precision that Gil Rose elicits from his Boston Modern Orchestra Project musicians
and the scintillating sound world.
Roger Reynolds @ 85 Volume Two: The Piano Etudes
[Mode MOD-CD-329]
Amazon Editorial Review 2021
Reynolds’ Etudes allows the performer to not only choose the number of Etudes to be presented (even repeating them, if desired) as well as their order. … the performer becomes a co-creator with the composer. All 12 Etudes are presented in this recording by Eric Huebner. Each etude inhabits a world distinctly its own. Reynolds dares a remarkable leap from the first to the second book. Rather than merely continue the premises and promises established by the first six etudes, the second six constitute a difference in kind rather than an extension. Their complexity is intensified, their investigations more extreme, even though they make comparable technical demands. The Etudes carry subtle quotations from Reynolds’ own, earlier piano works as well as the traditional literature of piano etudes. The lineup Reynolds has chosen includes Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Debussy, and Ligeti. Yet these allusions are not mere homages, and these quotations range from fleeting to obsessive. Reynolds collaborated with Huebner on the 2009 Mode release, Epigram and Evolution (mode 212/13), an anthology of Reynolds’ piano works to that date. This led the composer to value Huebner’s extraordinary capacity to combine virtuoso technique with Zen-like concentration. Their artistic bond inspired Reynolds to contemplate writing his own brand of etudes.
THE NEW YORK TIMES
"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."
STEVE SMITH, The New York Times, FOR THE RECORD, October 9, 2020
Roger Reynolds at 85, Vol I: String Quartets [Mode 326]
“Two difficult but rewarding works for string quartet by a cutting-edge veteran”
Amazon Reviews
RST
12 November 2020
MODE Records is celebrating the 85th birthday of American composer Roger Reynolds with a series of new recordings … [this disc is devoted to string quartets] …
"FLiGHT" traces the history of humankind's quest to become airborne. The four movements are IMAGINING, PREPARING, EXPERIENCING, and PERSPECTIVE. … This is not program music, and there is nothing about it that, to me, suggests flight, although one can imagine that it has something to do with aspiration, with industry (in the short second movement, which serves as a scherzo), and with the surreal rapture experienced while flying above the Earth … . Churning, agitated passages for all four strings are succeeded by tense and frozen moments, or by keening glissandi. None of this is “easy” listening, but one intuits how it has been animated by Reynolds's talent and creativity. In the words of Thomas Dewar, “Minds are like parachutes—they only function when open.”
"not forgotten" is a series of six tributes … “memories of a person or a place that left particularly vivid memories.” … While "FLiGHT" emphasizes ensemble playing, "not forgotten" offers more opportunities for the musicians to shine by themselves or in pairs. Again, Reynolds does not attempt to mimic Xenakis, Takemitsu, or Carter in their respective movements, although the inspiration provided by those composers certainly informs Reynolds's work overall. If anything, the language in "not forgotten" is tougher than it is in "FLiGHT." In "Ryōanji," for example, the cello sometimes is treated as a percussion instrument, with slashing attacks on the strings and harsh grunts. …
Mode's booklet is an extended dialogue between the composer and the members of JACK in which they question each other about their methods and philosophies. … JACK plays this music with authenticity and passion, and these first recordings were made under the supervision of the composer himself ….
ASPIRATION: Collected Violin Music (Irvine Arditti)
[KAIROS 0015051 (2 CDs)]
DIAPASON magazine
This album retraces Irvine Arditti's long-term companionship with Roger Reynolds. The great consistency of the programme is based as much on the strong stylistic identity of the composer as on the specific playing of the violinist. It is in the solos that one grasps best, without any filter, this brilliant, eruptive and refined virtuosity. … the most spectacular Shifting/Drifting (2015) [opens] this album. Here the British violinist dialogues with his electronic double - real-time algorithmic processing. A space as unreal as it is vast brings a feeling of distance and perspective that is quite dizzying. The overall sonic rendering is striking in its expansion of lyricism and violin virtuosity, which, in a way, is rooted in Bach (the Chaconne from Partita No. 2 makes a concealed appearance) yet endorses romanticism. … group that supports the soloist in Aspiration (2005), and sometimes integrates him as one of its own, occasionally produces a result that is almost electronic. Here again, the multiple cadenzas entrusted to him rely on Arditti's virtuosity, though each one sheds light on a different aspect; the rapid and energetic motives which allow the soloist to slice through the textures of the ensemble, remain the most salient feature of his playing.
ASPIRATION: [KAIROS 0015051KAI]
MusicWeb International
Richard Hanlon
January 2019
I have heard Reynolds’s … pieces for a variety of solos and ensembles. I have always been struck by the richly communicative objectivity, which may at once seem like an oxymoron, but the phrase characterizes a composer whose music is at once characterized by rigorous craftsmanship and palpable humanity.
In fact, it is interesting, because while Arditti’s performance of Kokoro on the new issue is recognizably of the same piece as the one on that Naïve album, it seems to be a very different reading: slower and softer, more holistic and somewhat less fragmentary, lived-in perhaps? … The piece is elegantly conceived, and suffused with perceptible mutual affection between composer and performer and back. Repeated hearings gradually assuage any forbidding elements in the music. The fine recording provides Arditti with space in which his instrument can more expressively breathe … read more
ASPIRATION: [KAIROS 0015051KAI]
The STRAD
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.
In the brightly coloured Aspiration, he’s a concerto soloist, rising to the fantastical lyricism of Reynolds’s multiple cadenzas magnificently while the ensemble Inauthentica provides richly detailed sonic backdrops. In the thoughtful, Zen-inspired Kokoro, Arditti is on his own, in an assertive performance that ruminates on small gestures of musical material, reluctant to come to rest on any of them.
imagE/violin imAge/violincounts as another solo work … and there’s a similar sense of mutual respect, admiration and gentle competition in the way the violinist effortlessly tackles the composer’s mercurial, unconventional demands.
Best of the bunch, however, is Shifting/Drifting, a duet for Arditti and Paul Hembree on live computer processing, who manipulates the player’s sounds while also mixing in original material. 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.
"Roger Reynolds, ASPIRATION: Irvine Arditti"
Gapplegate Classical-Modern Music Review
Grego Applegate Edwards
1 October 2018
On the listening level [this album] is above all a truly unpretentious monument to latter-day Modernist music for solo violin. … it all is very squarely centered on the very idiomatically original modern expressiveness of the violin part. It 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 listen 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.
3 November 2016
Bruce Hodges
Most of the time, the unexpected juxtapositions of words, music, and visuals had a dreamlike affect, the mind was pleasantly awash in free association. One 20ish man said later, “It was more unexpected than I expected.” … the most engrossing moments occurred when all elements were percolating together. The best solution was to simply sit back with Reynolds at the controls, letting his airborne fantasy race through the mind.
[Whispers Out of Time involves]… an impressiveness of sound masses in constant motion which provokes outbursts of noteworthy force and power. … The nearest point of reference here is Xenakis, for the universal and mythic grandeur that one hears … in Reynolds’s music. … This is a front-ranking composer ..."
REYNOLDS Complete Works for Cello
Gramophone 2014
Philip Clark
It began in West Yorkshire … when California-based composer Roger Reynolds heard the Arditti Quartet play Xenakis and fell immediately under the spell of Rohan de Saram, the group’s then cellist. … the piece Reynolds wrote for de Saram, Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward… (1989), was … an immersive séance on words by the poet James Merrill. … Quarter of a century later, as played by Alexis Descharmes, the piece remains fresh-minted but also thrillingly open-ended – a structure that is always bigger than your attempts to contain it. … The long-bowed slumber of the beginning, throbbing tones that imply a harmonic context which Reynolds at first keeps tantalisingly under wraps, gradually gathers pace – the music’s rhythmic life dragging its understated harmonic beginnings along for the ride. read more
MUSIC
AN ECLECTIC ASSORTMENT REVIEWED BY MARK KERESMAN
Roger Reynolds Complete Cello Works [mode 277/78]
October 2018
American composer Roger … Reynolds personally knew and learned from such iconic composers as Edgard Varèse … Nadia Boulanger, John Cage, and Harry Partch. [On this set], the cello is played by Alexis Descharmes and he is brilliant, drawing resounding, warm tones and cathartic bangs, slashes, and squeals from his instrument. … of the American Maverick School … Reynolds can be drolly insolent. Unlike some modern composers, Reynolds has a handle on rhythmic dynamics, never dry or ponderous. The 22-minute “Process and Passion” has some of the warmth of Brahms and Copeland. 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.
DIAPASON MAGAZINE
December 2015
Gérard Condé
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. … 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 attractions, tension / relaxation.
Thus the incantatory design of Focus a Beam (1989) implies foundations that the ear imagines without hearing, as in the Bach Suites. … In A Crimson Path (2002) the relationship … of the cellist and pianist, is tied and untied over the course of the three movements Dialogue - Dream - Travel: antagonism, fusion or complementarity. The vast (yes) fresco for violin, cello and computer, Process and Passion (2002) rises irresistibly into an extraordinary sonic maelstrom.
This anthology is linked to the long-time relationship and interlocking sympathies of Reynolds with one of the most committed of interpreters, one who displays an amazing ease in his virtuosity: always right, never cold, Alexis Descharmes aligns himself here with the dual requirements of this music that must unravel its enigmas …
Thoughts, Places, Dreams (2013), a chamber concerto dedicated to the Ensemble Court-circuit … 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 ...
“New sounds can in themselves be eloquent, and the discovery of new instruments and of new sounds is important. But what matters more is the use that composers make of them. … Reynolds is at once an explorer and a visionary composer, whose works lead listeners to follow him into new regions of emotion and imagination."
Andrew Porter, “Musical Events: Sound-Houses”, The New Yorker, 9 July 1984, Andrew Porter
“… An incessant, insistent darkness throbs through the heart of [Ariadne's Thread] capturing the neurotic and sublimated sexuality of the Ariadne myth in a strikingly original way. The result was a truly astonishing musical voyage.
Paul Cutts, The Strad [London], February 1997
"The Red Act Arias is a kind of anthropological brooding; a secular oratorio in which the theme is the dark forces at the foundation of civilized society … a deep, demanding work.
Paul Driver, "A Festival of Generosity”, The Sunday Times, 10 August 1997
“[Reynolds] uses strong gestures full of rich content and then goes inside them. It sounds like late Beethoven. It doesn’t go into visionary Beethovenian outer space but instead goes deeply into the sound world of a phrase and doesn’t let go. It is strong, gripping music."
Mark Swed, "Arditti Quartet Deftly Turns Carter’s Thoughts Into Deeds”, Los Angeles Times, 25 March 1998
“... a tormented abstract dramaRoger Reynolds @ 85 Volume Two: The Piano Etudes [Mode MOD-CD-329]
Amazon Editorial Reviews
… Reynolds’ Etudes allows the performer to not only choose the number of Etudes to be presented (even repeating them, if desired) as well as their order. … the performer becomes a co-creator with the composer. All 12 Etudes are presented in this recording by Eric Huebner. Each etude inhabits a world distinctly its own. Reynolds dares a remarkable leap from the first to the second book. Rather than merely continue the premises and promises established by the first six etudes, the second six constitute a difference in kind rather than an extension. Their complexity is intensified, their investigations more extreme, even though they make comparable technical demands. The Etudes carry subtle quotations from Reynolds’ own, earlier piano works as well as the traditional literature of piano etudes. The lineup Reynolds has chosen includes Chopin, Mendelssohn, Liszt, Debussy, and Ligeti. Yet these allusions are not mere homages, and these quotations range from fleeting to obsessive. Reynolds collaborated with Huebner on the 2009 Mode release, Epigram and Evolution (mode 212/13), an anthology of Reynolds’ piano works to that date. This led the composer to value Huebner’s extraordinary capacity to combine virtuoso technique with Zen-like concentration. Their artistic bond inspired Reynolds to contemplate writing his own brand of etudes.turgy that alternates subdued and almost plaintive motives with a hyperkinetic flow of thoughts that seem to prelude to a resolute and combative action, arrested at every step by a new closure in self-doubt and questioning; sentimental climates admirably condensed already in the long first movement, and which in the following three are expressed in even sharper and more brutal contrasts between vertiginous ascents and filiform hermeticisms of the soul."
ESTEROS Review of JACK Quartet's FLiGHT, on MODE Records, October 2020
Other Selected Reviews
SHIFTING/DRIFTING
"It is the tape part of his massive ensemble work Kraanerg that Hembree’s extraordinary accompaniment [in Shifting/Drifting] occasionally brings to mind... [This] absorbing collaboration between three master creators, exudes virtuosity, sensitivity and good taste."
THE CD "ASPIRATION"
"This is music that demands close attention, but repays it with startlingly abundant invention..." David Kettle, The Strad, December 2018
2-CD SET OF COLLECTED VIOLIN MUSIC PERFORMED BY IRVINE ARDITTI ON KAIROS
“…listeners into new emotional and inspirational worlds of hearing.”
"And also that the Kairos CD set “It 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.”
"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."
"Roger Reynolds has been going about his art for many decades. By now he is one of the premiere living composers in the United States today. Through recordings he is especially known for chamber orchestra and vocal works. Not much of his more intimate chamber music has become widely available.
The gap has been nicely bridged in part lately by the three-work program on the CD Passion and Process (Pogus 21032-2). The three works are "Kokora" (1992) for violin, "Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward. . . " (1989) for cello, and "Process and Passion" (2002) for violin and cello. Performing the demanding parts are Mark Menzies, violin, and Hugh Livingston, cello."
Continue Reading
April 30, 2013 by Grego Applegate Edwards
"SANCTUARY" IN DC, National Gallery of Art
"… in the vaulting atrium – where Alexander Calder's 76-foot-long mobile famously turns – a strange and almost otherworldly ritual will start to unfold. Grouped around a bizarre-looking piece of metal called the Oracle, a quartet of percussionists will begin to play, passing fragments of sound back and forth, posing 'questions' to the Oracle and responding to its answers. And slowly, gradually, as the percussive clatter begins to cohere, intricate melodies and complex harmonies will emerge – as if song, or maybe even language itself, were first being born."
Stephen Brookes, The Washington Post, 18 November 2007
REYNOLDS & TECHNOLOGY
"Reynolds keeps changing his game, but his influence on music began to build in the 1960s, with a theatrical, musical rendition of Wallace Stevens’ poem “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” in which he moved sound around the stage by passing voices among eight singers. That, perhaps, is the Reynolds signature: pushing the boundaries of sound creation, later with the aid of computer processing, as he incorporated theater, text and visual images. “He’s breaking the barriers of technology and its relationship to music,” explains Harvard University composition professor Chaya Czernowin. Of course, Reynolds puts it differently: It’s using technology to realize the sounds that his mind can imagine – increasingly, these days, with the help of a few friends."
Read more: www.ozy.com
Steven Butler, OZY.COM, an International Online News Magazine, 2015
KYLE GANN
"One can say that, just as Elliott Carter came from neoclassicism and became Europeanized, Reynolds became Europeanized from the direction of experimentalism, perhaps especially after his residencies at Ircam (Pierre Boulez's electronic music institute in Paris) in 1981-1982. ... It is a telling detail of Reynolds's career that he became, in 1989, the first composer since Ives from an experimentalist background to win the normally conservative Pulitzer Prize for music."
Kyle Gann, American Music in the Twentieth Century, Schirmer Books, 1998
ABOUT the 2-CD set by the ARDITTI QUARTET on Montaigne:
"Reynolds projects a particular sort of American artistic idealism: His music has connections to both the 'transcendentalist' tone and imagery of such composers as Cowell, Varèse, and Ruggles, and also has roots in more recent experimentalist movements: While a student at Michigan, he was a part of the legendary ONCE group ...
The composer always anchors his music at any given moment on a note or collection of pitches, which becomes a sort of axis the ear relates to (one hears this very clearly in the 11th piece of Kokoro; there a recurrent tremolo chord in the violin performs this function). In fact, the notes always make sense to me, precisely because of the "gravity" that these harmonic fields exert.
Formally, the works tend to be a collection of precious moments, often miniature in size, strung together jewel-like to make larger structures (this emphasis on the moment seems an aspect of Japanese aesthetic influence upon Reynolds). The composer has certain processes embedded in the music to give it continuity, and, in turn, groups of these short movements coalesce to form larger formal entities.
The solo-cello piece [Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward...] is particularly elegant, and uses the least 'extended effects' of any piece in the collection, so that every pitch counts as a pitch (and de Saram plays with an effortlessness that is perfectly suited to it). Ariadne's Thread is remarkable for its blend of the instruments with the computer generated sound. In addition, it features some of the most strikingly aggressive and ugly electroacoustic sounds I've ever heard (except for Xenakis!), but that is not negative, as they are terrifying in their impact, and as such memorable. ... I find the opening of Ariadne's Thread truly beautiful in its gradual unfolding line, and was sad to see its composure disrupted – at the same time, the dramatic richness of the narrative that follows seems to justify the rupture.
...I have found this music increasingly rewarding over repeated listenings. It has personality, expressive power, and a deeply questing nature."
Robert Carl, Fanfare, January/February 2001
"Reynolds's [Ariadne's Thread] proved the most aurally exciting of the evening. An incessant, insistent darkness throbs through the heart of the work capturing the neurotic and sublimated sexuality of the Ariadne myth in a strikingly original way. The result was a truly astonishing musical voyage."
Paul Cutts, The Strad [London], February 1997
"While the works of many composers have focused on and explored the potential of a single technique, Roger Reynolds has created a body of work that encompasses nearly every major musical development in the 20th century.
As well as incorporating new techniques into his music, Reynolds is responsible for initiating many of the new developments. The theater piece The Emperor of Ice Cream, for instance, became the model for a new genre, and its influence is evident in the numerous imitations it spawned. ...
Reynolds is one of the pioneering composers of his generation, with provocative, expressive work. One can be sure that he will continue to produce interesting works, explore the bounds of human perception, and inspire younger generations of composers."
Ciro G. Scotto, Contemporary Composers, St. James Press, Chicago/London, 1992
"Roger Reynolds is a composer who has remained strongly committed to the experimental spirit ... Symphony[Myths] gave no specific message to the listener, rather one had to use one's imagination. The music, which accumulates an increasing level of activity throughout, makes a listener feel as though he is experiencing the same complicated, multidimensional object from three perspectives in turn. The process is filled with the joy of discovery."
Akimichi Takeda,6 November 1990, The Mainichi Shinbun
