HISTORY
Roger Reynolds's life was marked from the beginning by an interplay between the imagined and the manifest. As a child he was often more absorbed with internal fancies of sound and movement than with the everyday realities of life. At the same time, he delighted in improvising structures out of wooden packing cases, palettes and orange crates in the backyard of the family's home in residential Detroit. The flexibility of his imaginings contrasted significantly with what he observed in the evenings – the discipline required as his father drafted the meticulous architectural drawings that would guide construction of homes, schools, businesses. Music entered Reynolds's life abruptly – became the essential vehicle for his mind and emotions – after a chance encounter with a Vladimir Horowitz recording of Chopin’s A-flat Polonaise. His world was permanently altered by the dramaturgy and volatile lyricism of this performance. He immediately began piano studies. They absorbed him during high school years but then gave way to the pragmatic attractions of an Engineering Physics program at the University of Michigan. Life as a systems development engineer in California felt incomplete, though, and Reynolds returned to Michigan to study music. Only at the "advanced" age of twenty-five did he understand that composition would be his calling.
Two inspirational teachers guided his studies, American Ross Lee Finney, and Spanish expatriate Roberto Gerhard. Both had studied with Second Viennese masters (Berg and Schoenberg, respectively). But Reynolds also sought out creative perspectives of a less traditional sort, making contact with Varèse, Cage, Partch, and later Nancarrow. While still in Ann Arbor, Reynolds was a co-founder of the maverick ONCE Group. He and his flutist partner, Karen, embarked on seven years of wanderings through Europe (Germany, France, and Italy, with Fulbright, Guggenheim, and Rockefeller support) and Asia (primarily Japan, as a Fellow of the Institute of Current World Affairs). Returning to the US in 1969, Reynolds took up a tenured position at the then fledgling UCSD Department of Music, continuing there the patterns that Karen and he had already established (in Ann Arbor and foreign contexts). The Reynolds have collaboratively undertaken a series of new music presentations: the "Séances de travail" at Paris' American Students and Artists Center, CROSS TALK in Tokyo, The Pacific Ring Festival in La Jolla, Xenakis @ UCSD, and CHANGES:seasons in Washington, D.C., 2010.
Immediately after he settled in La Jolla, Reynolds's entrepreneurial bent asserted itself when he secured funds (in 1971) from the Rockefeller Foundation to launch the Center for Music Experiment at UCSD. Existing international relationships were now woven into his Southern California existence; Xenakis, Cage, Takemitsu, Nancarrow, Feldman, Babbitt and others visited; Partch was already living in San Diego.
The technological thread re-emerged for Reynolds in the late 70s, when John Chowning invited him to Stanford's CCRMA summer courses in computer music. Shortly thereafter, Ircam offered a commission and extended residency. Thus began his decades-long interaction with this Parisian center – dedicated to an integrated engagement with technological and musical innovation. This interaction, in turn, spurred the integration of computational faculty and resources into UCSD’s Music Department.
Reynolds's work has frequently addressed distinctive architecture (Arata Isozaki's Art Tower Mito, Louis I. Kahn's Salk Institute, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, Christian de Portzamparc's Cité de la musique, and Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall), and has involved, as well, collaboration with conductors Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Robertson, Seiji Ozawa, Ralph Shapey, Gunther Schuller, and Leonard Slatkin, among others, with groups such as Ensemble InterContemporain, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Ensemble Recherche, Alarm Will Sound, Court-Circuit, The Paul Dresher Ensemble, the Group for Contemporary Music, The New York New Music Ensemble, choreographers Lucinda Childs and Bill T. Jones, and a career-long relationship with Irvine Arditti and his String Quartet (Reynolds has completed a fourth string quartet for this ensemble: not forgotten, 2010.). A review of an earlier quartet, Ariadne’s Thread, noted that
Reynolds’s [Ariadne’s Thread] proved the most aurally exciting of the evening. An incessant, insistent darkness throbs through the heart of [this quartet] 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]Reynolds's life has also involved collaborations with poets, among them John Ashbery (Whispers Out of Time, a string orchestra work inspired by an Ashbery poem garnered him the 1989 Pulitzer Prize.) and inventor-philosopher, Buckminster Fuller. He has set texts by Beckett, Borges, Aeschylus, Euripides, Kundera, and W.G. Sebald, drawn upon the art of Leonardo, Rembrandt, Breughel, Picasso, and video pioneer Ed Emshwiller in carrying forward the wealth of literary, artistic, cinematic, theatrical, and dance engagements that have marked his career.
Reynolds has been a sought-after mentor for decades, presenting master classes not only at the major North American universities, but also at the National Conservatory in Beijing, the Sibelius Academy, the Paris Conservatoire, in Porto Alegre, Thessaloniki, Taipei, at Ircam and Darmstadt, as well as other institutions and festivals the world around.
C.F. Peters, New York, publishes Reynolds's music exclusively and it is also widely represented on record labels in North America and abroad. The Library of Congress established The Roger Reynolds Special Collection in 1998 and supports an extensive web page detailing his work. He is the author of Mind Models: New Forms of Music Experience (1975; 2nd edition, 2000 ) and Form and Method: Composing Music (2002). Writing about the première of his ILLUSION at Walt Disney Concert Hall, Los Angeles Times critic Mark Swed described him as "an all-around sonic visionary". The Washington Post termed the National Gallery of Art’s presentation of his Sanctuary in 2007, a "once in a lifetime experience".
This page last modified on 8 August 2010.