An Interview with Roger Reynolds

Notes for Part 4 - The Work of a Composer

1. Overall Plan - Over decades of compositional experience, Reynolds has evolved a strategy to aid in imagining, planning, and later realizing the overall form of his musical works. A proportional plan or diagrammatic representation of the large shape of a proposed work is made, becoming a provocation to thought and a repository for an evolving level of clarity about how to proceed and why.
   
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2. The Psychology of Time - The eminent French psychologist, Paul Fraisse, wrote this, for its time (1963), definitive study of the experimental work in time perception. Reynolds came upon an English translation in a Hong Kong bookshop in 1966, and it effected his attitudes towards musical structure and rhythmic practice. Fraisse proposed, in this book, the concept of the "perceptual present," a duration (usually less that 7 seconds) during which an individual can remain unaware of the past and not anticipate the future.
   
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3. Fibonacci Series - Composers have long been interested in numerical games as organizational stimulants (one thinks of elaborate canonic reversals and of Mozart's dice-tossing). As the largely duple and triple rhythmic conventions of Western music (controlling not only local metrical and rhythmic behaviors but also the larger phrase structurings) began to be questioned, composers found irregular, sometimes geometric sources of numerical authority interesting. Primary among them has been the Fibonacci series (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...), in which each number is the product of the preceding two.
   
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4. Logarithmic Series - Number series provide a basis for grouping and ordering elements in music. In many traditions these are simple (2, 4, 8, 16, ...). In more recent times, the Fibonacci series (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...) has attracted artists. Logarithmic series can vary widely in their specifics, but are used by Reynolds, in integer approximations, to create the effect of accelerating or ritarding formal shapes.
   
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5. Cunningham, Merce - In the 1940s, Cage encountered choreographer Cunningham (b. 1922) at the Cornish School in Washington State, and this began their lifelong partnership. Cunningham's ideas about dance (He had been a principal with the fabled Martha Graham Company.) were especially radical structurally, allowing the fruitful co-existence of Cage's music with his sometimes chance-determined dances. Cunningham himself was an idiosyncratically flexible and mesmerizing performer.
   
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6. Mumma, Gordon - Mumma (b. 1939) was one of the co-organizers of the ONCE Festivals in Ann Arbor, Michigan during the 60s. An early innovator in relation to the custom design and imaginative real-time use of electronics, Mumma then became one of the musicians of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company, and was a longtime collaborator of John Cage in this capacity. He continued his explorations while Professor at the University of California, Santa Cruz.
   
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7. Ashley, Robert - A co-founder of the Ann Arbor ONCE Festivals during the 60s, Ashley (b. 1930) became an activist educator at Mills College in Oakland, then settled into the New York scene, where he concentrated on video and theater. His unique sensibility is characteristically exercised through original, witty, and elegant texts and by an experimental, eclectic, and pop-influenced musical perspective. His work is widely recorded (both music and media compositions) and published (cf., his book, Music with Roots in the Aether).
   
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8. Ring Modulation - In the 1960s, as the electronic manipulation of synthesized sounds and those captured with microphones increased in interest and frequency, a variety of convenient and attractive strategies were developed. Favored means were likely to be both easy to accomplish and broadly applicable. Filtering and modulation were among them. Modulation involves the systematic and continuous influence of one stream of sounds over the way that we hear another. Ring modulation, in particular, combines two sounds so that the signal and the carrier together create a new family of "sideband" sounds by the addition and subtraction of their component frequencies. As ring modulation involves the proliferation of products, it is the case that simpler inputs will result in more easily characterized and useable results.
   
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9. Filtering - When sound materials are electronically represented, the frequency response of the recorded form is an important feature of its fidelity. Ideally, a recording represents the full range of frequencies associated with the source. When one listens to orchestral music over a small portable radio, however, one notices that, although the source is recognizable, there is a marked change in the character of the sound itself (far less strength in the low frequencies, somewhat less in the higher frequencies). Filtering is the process by which one can alter the nature of a sound by removing specified bands of frequencies from the composite present in the original.
   
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10. Synthesis - In the 50s and 60s, as interest in composition with electroacoustic means increased, there were two schools of thought in Europe. The French subscribed to musique concrète, which took natural recorded sound as its source and concentrated on modes of alteration and montaging. The Germans, however, were interested in music comprised of artificially generated, or "synthesized" sounds built up of individual simple (or sine) tones. Later, particularly at Stanford's CCRMA, more complex "physical models" were proposed as a result of the mathematical analyses of real musical instruments. In any case, the aim of synthesis is to create interesting musical materials that are not directly dependent upon the actual behavior of physical systems, and are, in that sense, "synthetic."
    
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11. Decay Time - The advent of musical applications for electronic devices in the 50s and 60s, involved the need to describe musical sounds in objective terms. As a shorthand approximation, tones were said to have an initial transient phase, a steady-state period, and a decay time -- roughly corresponding to the initial attack, the portion of the sound during which the pitch and timbral character were established, and then a phase when the sound died. In describing the phenomenon of acoustical reverberation, the "decay time" of a performance space refers to the duration in time, after the cessation of a sound source, that it will typically persist through the medium of reflected energy.
    
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12. Phase Vocoding Analysis and Resynthesis - As computer processing of sound became more common, it was discovered that even very complex sounds can be adequately represented by a sufficiently large number of "bands" that described the fluctuation over time of all the frequencies involved, as well as their time-varying intensities. Once this information has been analytically derived from a sound, it may be re-synthesized, now altered in various ways (length, pitch, etc.). These changes can be dramatic and (within limits) without appreciable effect on the other apparent characteristics of the source sound.
    
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