A toast to the luminously imaginative composer and musical thinker Roger Reynolds, who celebrates his 90th birthday today — and is still going strong. Within this year alone, the Pulitzer Prize-winning composer has presented his latest opus, KNOWING / NOT KNOWING, described by Ken Herman as “a 21st-century secular oratorio … 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.” (Here’s a vimeo link to an excerpt from KNOWING/NOT KNOWING.)
As Roger Reynolds continues into his tenth decade, the urge to extend the limits of musical perception and meaning beyond those previously known remains as powerful a motivation as ever.
In March, the Center for New Music and Associated Technologies (CNMAT) and the Department of Music at the University of California, Berkeley, presented a colloquium and concert celebrating this milestone birthday year. The Center describes Reynolds, who has also been an influential mentor at UC San Diego for more than half a century, as “a composer, writer, producer, and mentor, pioneer in sound spatialization, intermedia, and algorithmic concepts … [and] an inveterate synthesizer of diverse capacities and perspectives. … [His] projects with individual performers and ensembles, theater directors, choreographers, and scientists involve challenging interpersonal collaborations.” He has been, for decades, a sought-after mentor at UC San Diego.”
Some (by no means all!) other recent projects include his latest “sharespace” work, Persistence (for cello and computer musician), the ongoing Passage series, and Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House, a collaborative book exploring the evolution of a house design by the Greek composer/architect for him and his partner Karen. Reynolds is also a member of the international, Montréal-based consortium ACTOR, and the originator of the Bridging Chasms initiative, which seeks to improve cross-disciplinary communications. He was inducted into the American Academy of Arts and Letters in 2023.
Reynolds has also been collaborating with the Danish percussionist, and conductor, and producer Mathias Reumert on the release of no fewer than four new albums. The first two these, Wind Concertos and Watershed V, have already been released on Reumert’s Ekkozone label; still to be released later in the year are The Promises of Darkness and Watershed V/’O’o.
Here’s a link to the booklet essay I wrote for the extraordinary two-CD set For a Reason, which appeared last year on neuma records. (The neuma label, which prizes itself on offering “food for the mind’s ear,” has an extensive catalogue of music by Reynolds.) For a Reason includes examples of Reynolds’s longstanding collaborations with violinist Irvine Arditti (whose own eponymous string quartet celebrates its 50th anniversary this year) and percussionist Steven Schick.
from Watershed V:
Filed under: music news, new music, Roger Reynolds
MEMETERIA by Thomas May 