PROGRAM NOTE

Last modified 6 December 2023

Transfigured Wind III (1984)
(or solo flute, chamber orchestra, and quadraphonic, computer processed sound)

by Roger Reynolds

Computers allow the recasting of musical materials, their transformation in ways that can captivate unexpectedly. And in doing so – transforming – one retains that delicious and mysterious sense with which a fine performer imbues a musical line. I began composing Transfigured Wind by writing a four-part solo for flute. It was then recorded by friend and colleague, Harvey Sollberger. All the directed musical intelligence of which he is capable was in play, as well as my composition’s notated pitches, durations, and dynamics. Once digitized, his playing underwent a host of transformations before re-emerging, transfigured, as quadraphonic computer files.

These same solo flute passages, as actually played live in performance, function as proposals, each longer and with a new character. To them, the ensemble responds with its own supportive materials and transformations. The computer contributes for its part a “painterly” montage of the soloist’s lines, providing otherworldly reflections of and upon the soloist's specifics. The essential core of the Transfigured materials was borrowed from my 1965 flute solo, Ambages, and it is in that work that the expressive core of Transfigured Wind resides. The newer, expanded composition, concerns itself with the way in which transformed reoccurrence allows a more subtle and far-reaching parallelism with the flux of our temporal experience as human beings. We anticipate, reflect, recall. We are sometimes absorbed in specifics, at other times adrift in larger, less well-defined worlds of impression. My strategies here allow prefiguration as well as recall, and simultaneous overlays that dimensionalize the temporal aspects of this work’s ongoing fabric.

Transfigured Wind is dedicated to Karen, who was very much at its roots. Richard Boulanger was my musical assistant for this project, and it was premiered at the 1984 Cultural Olympics in Los Angeles. Soloist Harvey Sollberger was accompanied by an ensemble from the California Institute of the Arts, conducted by Jean-Charles François.

  – Roger Reynolds