A Portrait of Vanzetti (1962)

During 1963, I was in Koln as a Fulbright Fellow, working under the generous guidance of Gottfried-Michael Koenig. I completed the electro-acoustic component of a work for narrator, ensemble, and tape. "A Portrait of Vanzetti Vanzetti" was premiered at the 1963 ONCE Festival, in Ann Arbor, where I had studied with Roberto Gerhard and Ross Lee Finney. It was the first work I completed after leaving the University of Michigan. Although one now badly faded score has survived, along with a recording subsequently issued in the New World Record's 5-CD set documenting the first five years of the ONCE Festivals, the tape part was lost along with most of the text.

In 2009, I set out to resurrect this work, in part because of the response to the recording, and in part because the story of the Italian immigrant anarchists, Nicola Sacco and Bartolomeo Vanzetti, along with the social, political, and judicial turmoil that their trial and subsequent appeals aroused, still touches me today. I reconstructed the text and have recreated an approximation of the electro-acoustic component, now using Score multi-channel sound, and adding spatialization of the narrator's voice.

(Roger Reynolds)