Roger Reynolds
Roger Lee Reynolds is an American composer. He is known for his capacity to integrate diverse ideas and resources, and for the seamless blending of traditional musical sounds with those newly enabled by technology. Beyond composition, his contributions to musical life include mentorship, algorithmic design, engagement with psychoacoustics, writing books and articles, and festival organization.
During his early career, Reynolds worked in Europe and Asia, returning to the US in 1969 to accept an appointment in the music department at the University of California, San Diego. His leadership there established it as a state of the art facility – in parallel with Stanford, IRCAM, and MIT – a center for composition and computer music exploration. Reynolds won early recognition with Fulbright, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Institute of Arts and Letters awards. In 1989, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a string orchestra composition, Whispers Out of Time, an extended work responding to John Ashbery’s ambitious Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Reynolds is principal or co-author of five books and numerous journal articles and book chapters. In 2009 he was appointed University Professor, the first artist so honored by University of California. The Library of Congress established a Special Collection of his work in 1998.
His nearly 150 compositions to date are published exclusively by the C. F. Peters Corporation, and several dozen CDs and DVDs of his work have been commercially released in the US and Europe. Performances by the Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego Symphonies, among others, preceded the most recent large-scale work, george WASHINGTON, written in honor of America's first president. This work knits together Reynolds's career-long interest in orchestra, text, extended musical forms, intermedia, and computer spatialization of sound.
Reynolds's work embodies an American artistic idealism reflecting the influence of Varèse and Cage, as well as Xenakis, and has also been compared with that of Boulez and Scelsi. Reynolds lives with his partner of 59 years, Karen, in Del Mar, California, overlooking the Pacific.
Life and work
Beginnings and education (1934–1962)
Early influences: piano studies with Kenneth Aiken (1934–1952)
The seeds for Reynolds's focus on music were planted almost by accident when his father, an architect, recommended that he purchase some phonograph records. These recordings, including a Vladimir Horowitz performance of Frédéric Chopin's Polonaise in A-flat Major, Op. 53, spurred Reynolds to take up piano lessons with Kenneth Aiken. Aiken demanded that his students delve into the cultural context behind the works of classic keyboard literature they played. Around the time that Reynolds graduated from high school in 1952, he performed a solo recital in Detroit that consisted of the Johannes Brahms Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5, some Intermezzi, the Franz Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, as well as works by Claude Debussy, and Chopin. Reynolds remembers:I don't recall public performance as being a particularly enjoyable experience. It served to bring what I cared about in music much closer than did mere phonographic idylls, but I did not, could not, feel that what was happening as I played was actually mine. It was not the applause that interested me, but the experience of the music itself.
University of Michigan: Engineering Physics (1952–1957)
Reynolds was uncertain about his prospects as a professional pianist, and entered the University of Michigan to study engineering physics, in line with his father's expectations. During what would be his first stint at the University of Michigan, he stayed connected to music and the arts because of the "virtual melting pot of disciplinary aspirations that then engaged him." Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man both left marks upon his perception of music and the arts. "I... consumed hungrily, stayed in my dormitory room for weeks, feverish over the allure of its issues, not attending classes and only narrowly escaping academic disaster...". Reynolds received a B.S.E. in physics from the University of Michigan in 1957.Systems Development Engineer and Military Policeman
After completing his undergraduate studies, he went to work in the missile industry for Marquardt Corporation. He moved to the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, and worked as a systems development engineer. However, he quickly found that he was spending an inordinate amount of time practicing piano, and decided to go back to school to study music, with the goal of becoming a small liberal arts college teacher.But prior to returning to school, Reynolds had a one-year obligation as a reservist in the military, which he fulfilled after his short time at Marquardt. As he recalls:
Knowing that I was an engineer, I presumed I would have been an Army engineer. But in fact my MSOs were either light-truck driver or military policeman. So I chose military policeman, and I learned how to disable people and how to be extraordinarily brutal. It was a rather strange experience.
Return to University of Michigan: encounter with Ross Lee Finney
Reynolds returned to Ann Arbor in 1957, prepared to commit himself to life as a pianist. He was quickly diverted from this path upon encountering resident composer Ross Lee Finney, who introduced Reynolds to composition. Reynolds took a composition for non-composers class with Finney. At the end of the semester, Reynolds' string trio was performed for the class. According to Reynolds,Finney just decimated it.... I mean, everything about it, he destroyed. The sounds, the time, the pitches, the form, everything was wrong. I was chastened.
Despite the harsh introduction, Finney pulled Reynolds aside after the performance and recommended that he study composition with him over the summer. These summer lessons proved to be brutal. But when Reynolds was nearly ready to quit, at the end of the summer, Finney responded positively to what he brought in. Reynolds was engrossed by composing music, but he was still unsure what it meant to be a composer in America. He recalls that summer:
Although the process was by no means a smooth or an immediately encouraging one, by the time regular classes resumed in the fall of 1960 I was twenty-six, and I knew that I would do everything I could to become a composer. What did that actually mean? I have no recollection now of having had the slightest sense of what the life of a composer in America might involve.
Finney was particularly generous to Reynolds, programming three of his pieces on a Midwest Composers Symposium, something "unheard of" for student works. At these Midwest Composers Symposia, Reynolds also first encountered Harvey Sollberger, who would become a lifelong colleague and friend. From Finney, Reynolds learned of "the primacy of 'gesture,' which took to be a composite of rhythm, contour, and physical energy: the empathic resonances that musical ideas could arouseat root, perhaps, an American tendency to value sensation over analysis."
Composition studies with Roberto Gerhard
Subsequently, when the Spanish expatriate composer Roberto Gerhard came to Ann Arbor, Reynolds gravitated towards him:I was captivated by the uncommon dimensionality of this man. Not only was he a superb musician and an inventive, even commanding composer of uncluttered, poised, and original music, but he was also both deeply intelligent and emotionally vulnerable. His susceptibility to injury, the outrage he displayed at ethical injustices, the touching warmth he offered from behind a vestigial Spanish crustiness these made an irresistible combination.
From Gerhard, Reynolds absorbed the idea that composition took "the whole man... you must put everything that you have and everything that you are into every musical act. And so where I live, who I interact with, what I hear, what the weather’s like, what my granddaughter says to me, and so on, they all affect the music."
Other early encounters; degrees conferred
During the later part of his composition studies at the University of Michigan, Reynolds also sought out encounters with other prominent musical personalities, including Milton Babbitt, Edgard Varèse, Nadia Boulanger, John Cage, and Harry Partch. Reynolds sought these composers outside of his academic studies:It was outside class that I came upon and dug into the implications of Ives, Cage, Varèse and Partch. I sought out the last three and had personal contact with them. Perhaps it was the feeling of, if not exactly forbidden, then, certainly, "not favored" fruit that caused them to loom so large for me.
Reynolds met with Partch in 1958 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, at Antioch College, where he encountered a characteristic Antioch commandment: "'Examine your basic assumptions.'" Reynolds notes that such examination did not imply abandoning those assumptions.
During 1960, Reynolds met with both Varèse and Cage in New York, with Babbitt in Ann Arbor in 1960, and with Nadia Boulanger in Ann Arbor in 1961.
During this time, Reynolds also composed The Emperor of Ice Cream, which combined aspects of music and theater, and contained many of the features of his later music. It was composed for the ONCE festivals, but was actually premiered later, in 1965, in Rome.
Reynolds received a second bachelor's degree in music in 1960 and an M.Mus. in composition in 1961.
ONCE Festivals 1961–1963
Reynolds co-founded the ONCE Group in Ann Arbor with Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma, and was active in the first three festivals in 1961 to 1963. Other important figures in these festivals included George Cacioppo, Donald Scavarda, Bruce Wise, filmmaker George Manupelli, and later, "Blue" Gene Tyranny. The ONCE Festival was probably the most significant nexus of avant-garde performance art and music in the Midwest in the early 1960s, with programs consisting of both American Experimentalism and European Modernism. Reynolds recalls:I think the primary force in the beginning was Bob and Mary Ashley. Bob had been studying at the University of Michigan with Ross Finney.... had been at the Manhattan School of Music; he was a pianist at that time. He was very intense and very rebellious in some regards. Mumma had been at Michigan but had dropped out and was working in some kind of research dealing with seismographic measurement... The two of them had become involved with a art professor named Milton Cohen, who had what he called a Space Theatre where he had taken canvas and stretched it to make a circular, tent-like situation... in the middle there were projectors and mirrors which flashed imagery on the screens. Bob and Gordon had been involved in making electronic music in relation to Cohen’s ....they realized that if they started a festival, they were going to need resources... I think that I came into the picture partly in that way.... So there was a confluence of capacity, differential abilities, and common interest.
In 1963, C.F. Peters offered to publish Reynolds's work, a relationship which has been exclusive since that day.