An Interview with Roger Reynolds

Home | Part 1 - Beginnings | Part 2 - Importance of an Overall Plan to Composition | Part 3 - Transfigured Wind: A Guide | Part 4 - The Work of a Composer

Notes for Part 1 - Beginnings

Institute of Current World Affairs (ICWA) - ICWA was founded in the 30s by Charles R. Crane, an heir to the Crane plumbing fortune in Chicago. The Institute focuses on providing a small number of extended Fellowships by means of which younger men and women are able to live and work in areas of the world about which Crane felt the American intellectual, educational, and political community was insufficiently well-informed. Fellows are expected to write substantial newsletters reporting upon their observations on a monthly basis. The Reynolds lived in Japan under ICWA sponsorship from 1966-69.

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UCSD Department of Music - In the 60s, those who planned the University of California, San Diego, made the unprecedented decision (for an ambitious research university) that its arts departments would be established by practicing artists, rather than historians. Composers Wilbur Ogdon and Robert Erickson were recruited to build the program. Faculty composers have included Kenneth Gaburo, Pauline Oliveros, Keith Humble, Joji Yuasa, Bernard Rands, Brian Ferneyhough, Rand Steiger, Harvey Sollberger, George Lewis, Chinary Ung, Anthony Davis, Chaya Czernowin, and Philippe Manoury, as well as Reynolds. The Department includes, also, innovative programs in Performance, Technology, and Critical Studies/Experimental Practices.

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Center for Music Experiment and Related Research - After settling in California in 1969, Reynolds planned and found funding for an experimental Organized Research Unit at the University of California. In 1971, the Rockefeller Foundation's arts officer, Howard Klein, arranged for an award of $400,000 which UCSD's Chancellor matched with a promise of building space and faculty positions. In the 1980s, CME metamorphosed into the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), now housed in the facilities of California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology, CAL-(IT)².

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Mind Models: New Forms of Musical Experience - Based upon a series of lectures first presented at the University of Illinois while Reynolds was George Miller Visiting Professor there, this book was originally published by Praeger in 1975. It treats not only issues central to musical innovation at that time (sound, time, notation, and morphology), but also speculation on the social contexts effecting artists and audiences. It was published in a revised edition by Routledge 2005.
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A Searcher's Path, A Composer's Ways - In 1985-86, Reynolds was appointed Senior Research Fellow at the Institute for Studies in American Music (ISAM) at Brooklyn College. During this period, he delivered a series of illustrated lectures in Brooklyn and at the Graduate School of CUNY in Manhattan. These were later combined in a 1987 ISAM monograph, edited by H. Wiley Hitchcock.

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Form and Method: Composing Music - In 1992-93, Reynolds gave a series of lectures while the Rothschild Guest Composer at the Peabody Conservatory of The Johns Hopkins University in Baltimore. Over the next few years, he elaborated and honed these talks, formulating a detailed picture of his attitudes and methodologies in relation both to large scale form and to local procedures. Form and Method, edited by Stephen McAdams, includes over 100 examples.

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Sollberger, Harvey - A composer, flutist, and conductor active first in New York, where he collaborated with Charles Wuorinen in forming the influential Group for Contemporary Music. Sollberger has continued, at Indiana University and then the University of California, San Diego, to be a powerful and eloquent champion of contemporary music of widely varying stylistic profile. His performances and compositions are notable for their precision and musicality. (b. 1938)

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Tone Row - In the early 1920s, Arnold Schoenberg was searching for a source of authority in shaping music that would no longer be dependent upon the tonal conventions that had dominated the European tradition. His proposal was to select a privileged order for the 12 equal-tempered pitches of the octave and, along with various transformations (retrograde, mirror, mirror-retrograde) and transpositions, to use it to control the choice of pitch material in his compositions. Such a privileged ordering is sometimes termed a "tone row".

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Schoenberg, Arnold - One of the major figures of the Twentieth Century, Schoenberg (1874-1951) was, at once, a staunch traditionalist (cf., his book, The Structural Functions of Harmony) and a significant innovator. In the early 20s, he began using what has become known as the serial method of composing, relying on a privileged ordering (a tone row) of the twelve tones of the equal-tempered scale. Schoenberg's music began in an extended tonal language, moved through an enormously fruitful atonal period to full-fledged serialism, but began to refer to tonal ideals again during his last years.

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Finney, Ross Lee - Finney (1906-1997) was a musician and teacher possessed by an unusually affirmative energy. A student of Sessions and Berg, he was also of the generation of American composers who sought instruction from Nadia Boulanger in France before World War II. His extensive catalog reflects an American spirit, but also the influence of Berg, who interwove serial and tonal influences in his music, and of Bartók's vivid use of gesture. Finney taught primarily at the University of Michigan, where his students included George Crumb and Robert Ashley as well as Reynolds.

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Berg, Alban - Berg (1895-1935) was one of two remarkable disciples of the Twentieth Century innovator, Arnold Schoenberg. His music, while incorporating his teacher's "method of composing with twelve tones each related only to the others," still remained strongly responsive to a lush, expressive, tonally colored harmonic world. His work stands in contrast to the more severe and miniaturist music of Anton Webern, Schoenberg's other primary disciple.

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Webern, Anton - Webern (1883-1945), one of Arnold Schoenberg's two renowned students (the other is Alban Berg), was of particular importance to the European avante garde after World War II. His mature music, largely canonic and rigorously serial, was seen as having the advantages of admirable restraint and fresh intellectual foundations. While remaining, in its very concentrated language, deeply expressive, Webern's work avoids the trappings of the Romantic German heritage.

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Gerhard, Roberto - Gerhard (1896-1970) was at student first of Granados and Pedrell in Spain, later of Schoenberg in Vienna. A reclusive and brilliant craftsman, he wove Spanish elements into a widely varied catalog of works. Serial strategies, even electroacoustic experimentation, drove him towards an increasingly lucid and spare idiom in maturity.

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Vienna Circle - During the first decades of the Twentieth Century, Vienna was a crucible for innovative thinking and productivity while remaining, nonetheless, strongly traditional in its taste. Schoenberg and his primary disciples Webern and Berg, allied with painters (Kandinsky and Klee) and to a degree writers (Trakl and Heym), formed an enclave of like-minded radicals: experimental in outlook but aware of their heritage. During these years, and in response to the inter-disciplinary resonances he found in Vienna, Schoenberg also painted. In 1918, he initiated a Society for the Private Performance of Music as a response to the disheartening gap between the Viennese public and its resident artists.

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Wuorinen, Charles - Wuorinen (b. 1938) is an unusually articulate and strong-willed composer whose activity as a conductor and pianist in the service of his own and others' music has been a continuing feature of his career. Centered in New York, and co-founder, along with Harvey Sollberger, of the famed Group for Contemporary Music there, Wuorinen has been an outspoken and notably successful advocate for new music and elevated standards.

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Bartók, Bela - The Hungarian master, Bartók (1881-1945), was deeply effected by his study of Magyar folk music which emerged in his compositions as irregular metric structure and an iconic characterization of motive that allowed unusually flexible forms of development. Bartók was an accomplished pianist, and his music evolved over the course of his career from an uncompromisingly virtuosic, personal, and biting severity to an almost neo-classical warmth and eloquence during his final years.

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Barber, Samuel - Barber (1910-1981) possessed an elegant and frequently eloquent musical voice, particularly suited to lyrical works. His Adagio for Strings became an icon of deeply expressive, though conventionally-based, American music which won particular favor in Britain. His opera, Vanessa, has attained repertoire status.

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Ives, Charles - Ives (1874-1954) is the undisputed father of the American Experimental Tradition. Strongly influenced by the New England Transcendentalists, he produced - mainly during the first two decades of the Twentieth Century - a music that wove into complex and evocative forms (whether in song, chamber, or massive orchestral contexts) both invented and quoted materials. His iconoclastic and uniquely atmospheric creations served as seminal indicators of the potential power of musical collage.

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Hitchcock, H. Wiley - Hitchcock (b. 1923) is an eminent musicologist, co-editor of the New Grove Dictionary of American Music, past president of the American Musicological Society. He has published primarily on Charpentier, Ives, and American music.

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Institute for Studies in American Music - ISAM was founded within the Music School of Brooklyn College by musicologist H. Wiley Hitchcock in 1971, and he remained its director until 1992. In addition to co-sponsoring a number of substantive conferences, the Institute offered regular residencies (to its Senior Fellows), published a Newsletter and a series of monographs. Reynolds' A Searcher's Path, A Composer's Ways, is one of them.

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Forte, Allen - An influential theorist at the Yale University School of Music, Forte (b. 1926) has published extensive, systematic analyses of both tonal and atonal music - notably that of Webern, Messiaen, and Stravinsky - using Schenkerian as well as other strategies. His concept of aggregates as a basis of consistency in harmonic language is noteworthy.

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Scales - Most known music involves an underlying pitch resource in which the continuously variable dimension of pitch is quantized into an agreed upon set of "steps". The distance, for example, between a particular pitch and its frequency double (known as the octave), is managed, in the case of the equal-tempered music of the Western period since Bach, by a series of 12 equidistant steps (C, C-sharp, D, E flat, E, ...). But a scale is not only the collection of identified pitch steps available within a particular tuning system, but a specific sub-group selection from such a set. (The Western chromatic gamut of 12 pitches, for example, can be divided into major or minor scale sub-groups, each with seven members.)

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Arpeggiated Figures - When the notes of a chord are played not as a simultaneity but rather as a sequence of individual notes, usually in sequence from low to high and back, and especially when this pattern is repeated multiple times, the resulting figure is called an arpeggio. As with scales, once this texture is established, the normative behavior is for it to continue. If it is interrupted, or if the regularity of its appearance is disturbed in some way, the listener is apt to feel a deviation from that normative.

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Appoggiatura - An harmonic progression may occasionally begin with a non-conforming pitch in the primary, melodic voice. Although the tension accompanying this more poignant sonority is quickly resolved as the line moves into harmonic conformity, it can produce powerful expressive effect.

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Passing tone - In tonal music, the progress of individual voices in harmonic successions is considered so that the pitches in each conform to desired chord successions while still contributing to a characteristic smoothness of contour. A passing tone, while non-harmonic, aids in maintaining smoothness in the progress from one harmonic moment to the next.

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Babbitt, Milton - Babbitt (b. 1916) has been a powerful force in American music since World War II: arguing for the significance of intellect, the place of mathematics, and the importance of service to the profession. His large catalog displays not only the extensions of the serial concept that he has promulgated as a Professor at Princeton, but his legendary ear, and the Johnsonian range of his knowledge - of popular music, jazz, even baseball statistics.

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String Trio, Op. 45 - Schoenberg suffered a heart attack in 1945, and, upon recovering, composed this work in just eighteen days. The Trio returns to the more expressionistic and timbrally inventive world of the composer's atonal period, but now -- towards the end of his life -- employing serial strategies that are more flexible than those used during his rather doctrinaire middle period. Its rhythmic lilt and sonorous sumptuousness are remarkable.

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Lachenmann, Helmut - Lachenmann (b. 1935-) has been an advocate of the particular value in challenging conventional assumptions about the nature of both "musical sound" and traditional musical functions. He has evolved and applied in his work an extensive, inventive, and radical rethinking of the place and potential of non-standard modes of sound production.

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Ferneyhough, Brian - English composer Ferneyhough (b. 1943) has been the standard bearer of the "complexicist" movement. His scores project a formidably dense and detailed notational world which aims to provoke unusual dedication and sonic results from the performers that it engages. A teacher long identified with the Darmstadt Summer Courses and the Hochschule für Musik in Freiburg, he moved to the US in the 1980s, taking up positions first at UCSD and then Stanford University.

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Five Orchestral Pieces, Op. 16 - In 1909, Schoenberg was seeking new approaches to the task of creating musical forms of substantial duration without relying upon tonal conventions. While texts (e.g. Pierrot Lunaire) provided a primary source of plausible structuring for him during the period before he developed serialism in the early 20s, he also concatenated collections of smaller movements to achieve scale. The Op. 16 set is, perhaps, the most provocatively inventive of all early Twentieth Century works in that each of its movements can be seen to predict a possible stylistic/methodological future.

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The Rite of Spring - In 1913, Igor Stravinsky became - as he later claimed - the "vessel" though which came into existence an unprecedented ballet in two parts. Immediately received with literally riotous intensity, Le Sacre was a product of the composer's crucial interaction with Serge Diaghilev and his Russian Ballet. Stravinsky posited in this work a rhythmic flexibility and power that, almost 100 years later, is still the dominant musical influence in this musical dimension.

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Varèse, Edgard - Varèse (1883-1965) was the exemplar of the Twentieth Century experimentalist. While his origins were in the French Conservatory system, he quickly formed alliances with radical colleagues and, moving to the United States in 1915, he became a magnet for and primary example of radical thinking about music. Under the influence of science and philosophy, he rethought the premises of music. His small but influential catalog of works included, by the end, several pathbreaking incorporations of electroacoustic materials.

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Takemitsu, Toru - Takemitsu (1930-1996) became the first Asian composer to achieve broad international recognition and was a central influence in the post-World War II artistic scene in Japan. The composer not only of many chamber and solo works, but of a large catalog of sumptuous and expressive orchestral pieces, he was also sustained by frequent involvements as a film composer. Wry, eloquent, subtle, and occasionally imperious, Takemitsu organized concerts and wrote searching texts as well as composing in a luminously evocative language.

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Xenakis, Iannis - The music and writings (especially Formalized Music) of Xenakis (1922-2001) reflect the circumstances of his formative experiences. Educated not only in the tradition of Greek philosophy and drama, but also by the Polytechnic in Athens, he was a political activist and brought to his composition a dynamic mix of scientific references and emotional force. As an explorer of non-traditional musical textures and unprecedentedly virtuosic instrumental and vocal writing, he created a unique body of influential work.

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Cage, John - While Cage (1912-1992) became notorious as the progenitor of "chance procedures" and "indeterminacy", he was nevertheless a highly disciplined and demanding artist. He advocated, in his most disruptive moments, the ideal of a music free of composerly intention, as well as the perspective that music could exist even without the presence of sound (time being music's most fundamental element). The composer of an enormous and varied catalog of works, Cage was also an author with wide influence on not only the musical world (cf., his seminal book, Silence).

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Feldman, Morton - Feldman (1926-1987), a colleague of prominent painters and writers in New York, as well as of composer John Cage, Feldman's early music, invariably hushed and sparse, was notable for the generality of the freedoms it reflected. His later work, however, engaged both extreme scale (1- to 6-hour lengths) and diabolic precision in the notation of subtly changing patterns.

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Philips Pavilion - This structure was purportedly the work of master architect Le Corbusier, but was, in fact, conceived by his then assistant, Iannis Xenakis. Sponsored by the Philips electronics company, for the Brussels 1957 World's Fair, it was conceived as what Xenakis later came to call a "polytope" design, and was especially intended to project, from several hundred individual loudspeakers embedded in its walls, Varèse's Poème Electronique.
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Formalized Music - In the 1950s and 60s, Iannis Xenakis set out the possible mathematical foundations of a music that would look for its authority not towards the formative principles of the Western tradition (either at the local or global levels) but to mathematics and physics. He wrote articles for Herman Scherchen's Gravesaner Blätter and these were collected along with newer materials in the (originally) French language book: Musiques Formelles.

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Stochastic Processes - In forging his compositional methods, Iannis Xenakis often appealed to mathematical processes for guidance, particularly to those that were thought to model complex natural phenomena such as rain or hail. In this vein, the behavior of gasses served as a model for musical textures. Patterns of statistical distribution for gas molecules that could be described as stochastic were emulated by the instruments of an orchestra, creating mass effects of vitality and power.

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Yuasa, Joji - Yuasa (b. 1929 -) was, along with composers Toru Takemitsu and Toshi Ichiyanagi, a founding member of the Jikken Kobo (Experimental Workshop) in Tokyo during the early 60s. His innovative and masterful work includes electroacoustic, vocal, and instrumental music in all dimensions, as well as film, radio, and television scores. He taught for a period of time at the University of California, San Diego.

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Suntory Hall - Constructed in 1986 with funds from the Suntory brewing company in the Akasaka area of Tokyo, this elegant and acoustically smooth hall sponsored a set of programs curated by composer Toru Takemitsu: The Suntory International Series. For it, invited composers were commissioned and asked to propose an accompanying program that reflected both their origins and expectations for the musical future.

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Shinto - A primary religious movement associated with Japan and strongly animistic in its emphasis upon nature. A particular feature of those buildings and sites associated with Shinto is the torii [gate], a characteristic structure involving two concave beams placed atop round supporting columns. These are normally red.

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Archipelago's Overall Plan - This work is comprised of a very complex, but principled mosaic of fifteen themes and their variations. The overall plan shown in the accompanying examples allows one to see how the work's component elements are positioned relative to one another, acting at first to introduce and later to allow culmination of the larger work.

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"Domestic Symphony" - Composer Richard Straus (1864-1949) was, at various stages of his life, either a radical or a conservative. He was particularly noted for his success in "program music", wherein a large-scale musical work was devised so as to parallel events in an underlying story that was, in a sense, "illustrated" by the music. Simphonia Domestica, Op. 53, was such a composition with specific, quotidian references throughout.

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Common Practice Period - In striking contradistinction to our own period, certain eras in Western music history - notably that around the beginning of the 19th century - were marked by a widespread and generally unchallenged consistency of compositional practice: this with regard to harmonic, rhythmic, and melodic norms, as well as to the existence of a number of formal patterns that, while inflected by individual composers, nevertheless offered a ready-made shape for works of certain sorts (concertos, sonatas, symphonies).

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Precomposition - In discussing the increasingly "abstract" post-World War II new music, commentators as well as composers began to describe what was done preparatory to the actual writing down of specific pitches and rhythms as "precomposition". The inference was that the actual writing of the notes should be taken as the "real" composition phase, whereas anything that occurred before the commitment to specific musical notation was, somehow, not to be considered composition. Reynolds rejects this perspective, maintaining that everything a composer does to delimit and provoke his or her detailed musical decision-making is an integral part of the composition processes.

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Fermata - A sign normally involving a single, horizontally-placed, concave parenthesis arc above a dot. This indicates a pause for emphasis or the dissipation of energy, and is freely observed by the performer. This sign alters by ad libitum extension, the duration of the designated note or chord.

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Comma - Normally, a comma inserted into a musical line, just above the staff, recognizes the need for or desirability of a brief "breath-like" breaking of the otherwise expected continuity.

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Tempo Change - Most traditional Western music is notated in such a way that the durations of its component events are precisely described in proportion to one another. What is still required in order to project these relationships during performance is the clock function of a tempo. This provides a - normally - unchanging temporal unit or "beat" for realizing the specified proportions.

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Accelerate / Ritard - The normal base rate or tempo, of pulses controlling the flow of rhythmic values in music creates a sense of unanimity in relation to the various components of a musical experience. On occasion, in order to modify the listener's sense of urgency or to release tension, the tempo is gradually increased (accelerando) or decreased (ritardando).

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