Library of Congress Celebrates Roger Reynolds

By Inga Kiderra and Dirk Sutro I May 2, 2005

The Reynolds Collection at the Library of Congress has a new worldwide address: http://loc.gov/rogerreynolds.

Devoted to the work of composer and UCSD music professor Roger Reynolds, the multimedia website was inaugurated with a special Library event, held in Washington, D.C., on April 25.

Reynolds was joined in a discussion of his music in the Library's Thomas Jefferson building by Jon Newsom, chief of its Music Division, and Stephen Soderberg, senior specialist for contemporary music, as well as guest researchers and others.

The multimedia web site - an ongoing Library project - gives an intimate look into the Reynolds's life and creative process with sound files, musical scores, interviews, photos, diagrams, sketches and other materials.

The site is unusual and important, noted Newsom, for providing users with access not only to the composer's finished work but also to stages of its evolution.

For Reynolds, who won the Pulitzer Prize in Music in 1989 for his string orchestra piece "Whispers Out of Time," the installation culminates many years of archiving (guided by his wife, Karen) the artifacts of his nearly 100 compositions.

"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 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 (where counterpoints of sound move around the listener).

Preserving the signature, "electro-acoustic" components of his work presents unique challenges, Reynolds said, and, in part, motivates his collaborative efforts at documentation with UCSD senior recording engineer Josef Kucera.

"In a standard orchestral composition, nobody asks how the strings are supposed to sound or how the horn section is supposed to work," Reynolds said. "But there's no tradition to rely on in electro-acoustic music. I have to document that I mean one thing to be a dreamy background that's barely noticed and another to sound like the wrath of God, blotting out the live players."

Reynolds, who studied both music and engineering physics at the University of Michigan, was among the first American composers to make significant use of science and new technology. 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 UCSD, where he has been a professor of music since 1969.

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

"The Angel of Death" and aesthetic perception are also the subjects of an article by Reynolds in a recent, special edition of Nature magazine. Additionally, Reynolds has 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.

"This spring has been a particularly satisfying time for me, as a number of creative threads have intersected fortuitously," said Reynolds. He 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.