In the news, Jōji Yuasa, Karen Reynolds, Roger Reynolds in Tōkyō during early CROSS TALK planning days. Sankei Newspaper, 5 September 1967.
REVIEW EXCERPTS
"American composer Roger Reynolds is an artist of rare imagination and conviction.
This powerful new disc of his music is almost overwhelming in its intensity, but rewards concentrated listening." – Kate Wakeling
"He does not just write notes on paper but analyses why those notes, and not others, should be there. Post-composition, he also has an amazingly clear idea of how the music should be interpreted. Roger’s great intellect allows him to incorporate many other thoughts and connections to other art forms into his compositions.Roger’s great intellect allows him to incorporate many other thoughts and connections to other art forms into his compositions." The Strad
"I remain convinced that Roger Reynolds is one of our most under-reconginzed composers, one of America's finest alongside Elliott Carter and Morton Feldman" – Amazon editorial review for "The Paris Pieces"
"... 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."
– Ken Hermanexcerpt
"... 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."
– Ken Hermanexcerpt
... "While Xenakis’ approaches to music, architecture and the design of the
Reynolds Desert House provide an overarching structure, the [book’s] content is fascinatingly discursive … personal reflections, anecdotes and expressions of feeling serve to underline the touching honesty, even idealism, at the heart of this project. [The] supplementary material suggests that the Reynolds Desert House was not just a plan for a building, but an idea that grew with and from human connections and the exchange of ideas.… the analysis provided is thorough and informative.…
the authors invite us to view decades of artistic endeavor and friendship. This book is an affirmative testament to the abundant creativity of lives lived to the full.""
excerpt Edmund Hunt TEMPO, Volume 77, Issue 302, July 2023
"In 1984, almost as an aside, the composer/architect Iannis Xenakis suggested designing a house for his long-standing musician friends Roger and Karen Reynolds, having worked on a similar project for the French composer Françoise-Bernard Mâche. What subsequently unfolded was the design of the Reynolds Desert House, to be built in Southern California’s Anzo-Borrego desert, a project that forms the underlying thread throughout this book. The gradual development of the design, documented in detail here, forms a valuable insight into Xenakis’s creative thought processes in respect both to his music and his architecture, which are authoritatively aligned throughout. To date the house has yet to be realized due to excessive costs beyond what was initially predicted"
excerpt Rodger Redgate Music & Letters, Volumne 106, Issue 1, February 2025, Pg 153-155
For more informationclick here
PASSAGE ... THE BOOK is a collaborative project realized by composer-author Reynolds with artist Stacie Birky Greene and editors Robert Kirzinger and Karen Reynolds. Through graphic manipulations, it melds texts written by Reynolds with images he selected such that a metaphoric “viscosity” arises, and the reader/apprehender’s experience is constantly modulated. Reynolds has performed intermedia PASSAGE events in La Jolla, at Darmstadt, in New York, Cambridge, and Ann Arbor.
Extended review of passage by Harvey Sollberger: "To enter this book is to enter a world in which its author, the composer Roger Reynolds, weaves together the strands of a life lived in music into a unique and personal mandala of memories, thoughts, dreams, images, and stories...."Read more
