April 20, 2005

Library Of Congress Celebrates Composer Roger Reynolds

By Inga Kiderra and Dirk Sutro

The Library of Congress is launching a major new project devoted to the work of composer Roger Reynolds, professor of music at UCSD. The project will be introduced and discussed at a special Library event on April 25.

Roger Reynolds at the Mayan ruin of Uxmal in Yucatan, Mexico, Dec. 2000. Photo by Karen Reynolds

The centerpiece of the project is a multimedia web site, http://loc.gov/rogerreynolds. Mixing sound files, musical scores, interviews, photos, diagrams, sketches and other materials, the site gives an unusually detailed look inside the composer’s creative process, through many of his nearly 100 compositions.

For Reynolds, the installation is the culmination of several years of archiving, in partnership with his wife, Karen, the artifacts of his own creative process.

“Few artists have the privilege of working directly with such a venerable institution in assuring that the products of one’s creative life – in my case, of a partnership with my wife, Karen – are reliably and coherently preserved, and don’t end up in an attic or garage,” Reynolds said.

Reynolds’ music incorporates elements of theater, digital signal processing, dance, video and real-time computer spatialization that moves counterpoints of sound around the listener. His work with spatialization of sounds began in 1962 with his music-theater piece “The Emperor of Ice Cream.”

In 1972, he founded the Center for Music Experiment (now the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts) at UC San Diego, where he has been a professor of music since 1969. “Justice,” his piece for soprano, actress, percussionist, and real-time spatialization based on texts by Aeschylus, was commissioned by the Library of Congress and composed specifically for the Great Hall there. The piece premiered in 2001.

Before beginning his career as a composer, Reynolds, 70, studied music and engineering physics at the University of Michigan. He was among the first American composers to make significant use of science and new technology.

More recently, Reynolds’ work at the intersection of science and art has included an extended collaboration with psychologists, where Reynolds created a piece, “Angel of Death,” that was the subject of psychological-perceptual experiments. The entire Winter 2004 issue of the UC Press journal Music Perception was devoted to documenting the project.

“Angel of Death” and aesthetic perception are also the subjects of an article by Reynolds titled “The Evolution of Sensibility,” in a recent, special edition of Nature magazine. Additionally, Reynolds produced a new CD-ROM, “Perception and Creation of a Musical Work,” published by IRCAM (Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique) in Paris.

The interweaving of art and science is also the focus of Reynolds’ two-year collaborative project with dancer Bill T. Jones and visual artists and researchers at Arizona State University’s Arts, Media and Engineering Program. Under the auspices of the motione project, an elaborate motion-capture system tracks the dancer and sends detailed information to computer music and computer graphics teams, allowing a rich interactivity between three complementary media: dance, music and imagery.

“This spring has been a particularly satisfying time for me, as a number of creative threads have intersected fortuitously,” said Reynolds, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1989 for his piece “Whispers Out of Time.”

Reynolds is currently working on three new pieces: a violin concerto, “Aspiration,” for the Ultima Festival in Oslo; “Submerged Memories” for the Paul Dresher Ensemble (on a text by German writer W.G. Sebald); and a theatrical work for Esa-Pekka Salonen and the Los Angeles Philharmonic’s Walt Disney Concert Hall.

For more information about the April 25 event at the Library of Congress honoring Reynolds, visit http://www.loc.gov/today/pr/2005/05-084.html.

Media Contacts: Inga Kiderra, (858) 822-0661 or Dirk Sutro, (858) 534-4830