On July 18, 2024, the Pulitzer Prizewinning American composer Roger Reynolds turns 90.
For well over a half century, Roger Reynolds has been an innovator in music and a conduit between a myriad of other disciplines. Frequently working with soloists, ensembles, theater directors, choreographers, and scientists, Reynolds is also known as a sought-after mentor at UC San Diego. Long friendships with John Cage, Conlon Nancarrow, Toru Takemitsu and Iannis Xenakis inform his outlook in procedural and personal ways. Reynolds’ work embodies a principled weaving together of threads from traditions, with novel provocations often originating outside music. He conceives of composition as “a process of illumination,” a path toward occasional clarity in turbulent times.
Edition Peters and the Wise Music Group are pleased to present an overview of recent work by Roger Reynolds.
Concerto Albums
Wind Concertos features the World Premiere recording of Reynolds’ oboe concerto, Journey, combined with his landmark electroacoustic flute concerto, Transfigured Wind III. It was released by by Divine Art Records in April 2024, featuring the Esbjerg Ensemble, conductor Mathias Reumert, oboist Jacqueline Leclair, and flutist Kerstin Thiele.
2022 saw the release of Roger Reynolds: Violin Works, on the esteemed BMOP/sound label, with Gil Rose conducting the Boston Modern Orchestra Project and featuring violinist Gabriela Díaz.
Knowing Not Knowing
On March 17, 2024, Reynolds oversaw the world premiere of Knowing / Not Knowing, a secular oratorio set to text by James Baldwin, Albert Camus, Wallace Stevens, and Toni Morrison among many others. An excerpt from the composer’s program note follows.
What can I as an individual know? What seems out of reach? In fact, how does “knowing” come about? In everyday life, one faces such questions constantly. One is perplexed by events, by the opinions of others, with deciding how to act in circumstances with immediate or more long-term implications. In contrast, other moments can feel immediately “right.” There’s no friction. Living in this world of disrupted comfort, we seek perspective.
Knowing / Not Knowing is an 80-minute musical work for narrator, recorded actors, live and filmed performers, projected imagery, San Diego’s SACRA / PROFANA Chorus, and 8-channel sound movement. The work’s text has nine sections spanning Infancy and Individuation through Communality and Knowledge. Although their perspectives span time and arise from the living of contrasted lives, the composite weave feels natural: many voices speaking as one about the lives we all lead. “Trust implies a willingness to depend upon another.” … “Compassion is a miracle more astonishing than walking on water.” … “Make yourself into an agent – consistent, unified and whole.” … “Every human being is a miracle.” - Roger Reynolds
Steven Schick, a longtime Reynolds collaborator, conducted the world premiere of Knowing / Not Knowing. Schick was also recently featured in an excerpted performance of Here and There, a Reynolds composition for speaking percussionist, featuring text by Samuel Beckett.
For A Reason
Here and There is among four works featured on Reynolds 2023 album For a Reason, released by Neuma records.
An excerpt from the album’s liner notes by Thomas May:
The westward panorama from Roger Reynolds’s Del Mar windows comprises not only the Pacific Ocean but also, as the light changes, his own visage and the virtual world in an easterly direction. The simultaneous, layered reflection serves somehow as an apt portrait of the composer’s many aspects – fused, recombined, shifting, mirrored – they are both here and there. And this multiplicity is deeply emblematic of the four remarkable works found in For A Reason.
The works (spanning over three decades) are the result of his intensely collaborative process with artistic friends, who, in this case, also happen to be celebrated performers: Pablo Gómez Cano (guitar), Irvine Arditti (violin), Steven Schick (percussion), and Liz Pearse (voice). The process of composer and performer finding common ground foregrounds what is, perhaps, for Reynolds the most fundamental issue at stake in creating music: “I’m interested in the whole world of how music speaks — not just what it’s saying, but how it’s saying it.” Incorporating texts by Samuel Beckett and Milan Kundera, Reynolds’s aim is not to mimic the sense of the text but to be informed by his analysis of what the writer is seeking and how they construct it.
The composer (who recalls from his Detroit childhood being awestruck by his father’s intricate architectural drawings) employs a fresh notebook for each composition, using each one to imagine, plan, flesh out, add to, keep pushing, going beyond, and ultimately to bring a logic to the work. Perhaps the ‘reasons’ are embedded within, but the physical album, For A Reason, pays tribute to these intimate, handsome artifacts; a 44-page book (with illuminating essay by Thomas May), encased together with a double CD. Although it barely contains Reynolds’s boundless imaginings, it is certain to set some previously-unimagined, creative ideas into motion for the curious listener while serving as a major illumination of the composer and his work.
For a Reason was celebrated last year in an online release event, which can be viewed on YouTube.
For more information, please contact your local Wise Music Promotion Team; Contact Us.
