PROGRAM NOTE

Last modified 26 June 2024

Ambages (1965)
(Solo Flute)

by Roger Reynolds

Ambages was written for my partner, flutist Karen Reynolds, during a 1965 residency that we enjoyed at the Rockefeller Foundation’s Villa Serbelloni in Bellagio, Italy. As the title ("circuitous paths” in French) suggests, it was concerned with impermanence, tenuous states of balance, with the ambiguity that a note (or phrase) expresses when it falls or rises to a further level after the expectation of such a change has been lulled. 

Harvey Sollberger has written that "operative overall [in this work] is a musical logic quite different from that which constrains most Western musical discourse, a logic of mood or impulse akin to that of a dream – or, on a smaller scale, that of a word which by its sound and meaning can set us dreaming.” 

Karen’s training included formative experience with the legendary French mentor, Marcel Moyse, with whom she studied in rural Massachusetts during the early 1960s. While we were staying at the Villa, news arrived that Moyse was teaching a master class in Bosvil, Switzerland, and Karen determined that she had to attend. Every Moyse student will know what it means to perform Dance of the Blessed Spirits in class and to have no comment from Moyse, only smiles.

She proposed that I could work in the basement of the church in which the masterclasses were held and to compose something lyrical and compact, such as Debussy’s Syrinx.

Unfortunately, as I am who and what I am, I ended up by composing an intricately proportioned, 9-minute solo that was both technically and expressively demanding. It was, in a sense, a successful failure.

Ambages was premiered by Karen at the Villa during the Fall of 1965. The resident host then, John Marshall, responded by saying that it could serve as music for a ballet, and that I should send the score to Balanchine, Director of the New York City Ballet at the time. I don’t recall if I was so bold as to have done this.