Roger Reynolds

Roger Lee Reynolds (born July 18, 1934) is an American composer.

He is known for his capacity to integrate diverse ideas and resources, and for the seamless blending of traditional musical sounds with those newly enabled by technology.

Beyond composition, his contributions to musical life include mentorship, algorithmic design, engagement with psychoacoustics, writing books and articles, and festival organization.

Around the time that Reynolds graduated from high school in 1952, he performed a solo recital in Detroit that consisted of the Johannes Brahms Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5, some Intermezzi, the Franz Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, as well as works by Claude Debussy, and Chopin.

Reynolds remembers:

"I don't recall public performance as being a particularly enjoyable experience. It served to bring what I cared about in music much closer than did mere phonographic idylls, but I did not, could not, feel that what was happening as I played was actually mine. It was not the applause that interested me, but the experience of the music itself."

Reynolds was uncertain about his prospects as a professional pianist, and entered the University of Michigan to study engineering physics, in line with his father's expectations.

During what would be his first stint at the University of Michigan, he stayed connected to music and the arts because of the "virtual melting pot of disciplinary aspirations that then engaged him."

Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man both left marks upon his perception of music and the arts.

"I ... consumed [Joyce's Portrait] hungrily, stayed in my dormitory room for weeks, feverish over the allure of its issues, not attending classes and only narrowly escaping academic disaster...".

Reynolds received a B.S.E. in physics from the University of Michigan in 1957.

After completing his undergraduate studies, he went to work in the missile industry for Marquardt Corporation.

He moved to the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, and worked as a systems development engineer.

However, he quickly found that he was spending an inordinate amount of time practicing piano, and decided to go back to school to study music, with the goal of becoming a small liberal arts college teacher.

But prior to returning to school, Reynolds had a one-year obligation as a reservist in the military, which he fulfilled after his short time at Marquardt.

As he recalls:

"Knowing that I was an engineer, I presumed I would have been an Army engineer. But in fact my MSOs (military service obligations) were either light-truck driver or military policeman. So I chose military policeman, and I learned how to disable people and how to be extraordinarily brutal. It was a rather strange experience."

Reynolds returned to Ann Arbor in 1957, prepared to commit himself to life as a pianist.

He was quickly diverted from this path upon encountering resident composer Ross Lee Finney, who introduced Reynolds to composition.

Reynolds took a composition for non-composers class with Finney.

At the end of the semester, Reynolds' string trio was performed for the class.

According to Reynolds,

"Finney just decimated it. ... I mean, everything about it, he destroyed. The sounds, the time, the pitches, the form, everything was wrong. I was chastened."

Despite the harsh introduction, Finney pulled Reynolds aside after the performance and recommended that he study composition with him over the summer.

These summer lessons proved to be brutal.

During his early career, Reynolds worked in Europe and Asia, returning to the US in 1969 to accept an appointment in the music department at the University of California, San Diego.

His leadership there established it as a state of the art facility – in parallel with Stanford, IRCAM, and MIT – a center for composition and computer music exploration.

Reynolds won early recognition with Fulbright, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Institute of Arts and Letters awards.

In 1989, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a string orchestra composition, Whispers Out of Time, an extended work responding to John Ashbery’s ambitious Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.

Reynolds is principal or co-author of five books and numerous journal articles and book chapters.

The Library of Congress established a Special Collection of his work in 1998.

His nearly 150 compositions to date are published exclusively by the C. F. Peters Corporation, and several dozen CDs and DVDs of his work have been commercially released in the US and Europe.

Performances by the Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego Symphonies, among others, preceded the most recent large-scale work, george WASHINGTON, written in honor of America's first president.

This work knits together the Reynolds's career-long interest in orchestra, text, extended musical forms, intermedia, and computer spatialization of sound.

Reynolds's work embodies an American artistic idealism reflecting the influence of Varèse and Cage, as well as Xenakis, and has also been compared with that of Boulez and Scelsi.

Reynolds lives with his partner of 59 years, Karen, in Del Mar, California, overlooking the Pacific.

The seeds for Reynolds's focus on music were planted almost by accident when his father, an architect, recommended that he purchase some phonograph records.

These recordings, including a Vladimir Horowitz performance of Frédéric Chopin's Polonaise in A-flat Major, Op. 53, spurred Reynolds to take up piano lessons with Kenneth Aiken.

Aiken demanded that his students delve into the cultural context behind the works of classic keyboard literature they played.

In 2009 he was appointed University Professor, the first artist so honored by University of California.