The Roger Reynolds Reader

[snyprrr]

Roger Reynolds inhabits the same universe as Xenakis and Aperghis/Mache and IRCAM. All I can offer you at the moment is the 2cd set by the Ardittis, certainly one of their high watermarks, which highlights an SQ with Electronics named Ariadne's Web.

Again, it is late, and I'm retiring. Hopefully when I return, this Thread will have been saved from certain doom!

[snyprrr]

Really?

Someone regale me...

[Scion7]

How did you pass up "Roger Reynolds (W)rap" ??   

[snyprrr]

How did you pass up "Roger Reynolds (W)rap" ??   

that's good!

Love Barb too...

Do you have any RR, any word?... you see this Thread was dormant for FIVE YEARS!!!

[Scion7]

Never 'eard of 'im.

[Scion7]

Ok, looked him up in The New Grove:


(b Detroit, 18 July 1934). American composer. A student of science and music at the University of Michigan, he studied composition with Finney and Gerhard (BM 1960, MM 1961). He was a co-founder (with Ashley and Mumma) of the ONCE group in Ann Arbor, and was active in the organization of the first three festivals (1961–3). After living in Europe (1962–6) he accepted a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs which took him to Japan for the next three years . . . In its sweep and ambition Reynolds's music represents a continuation of the idealism and imaginative vitality of the 1960s carried forward to the present day. While planned, complex and demanding, its real accomplishment lies in its mode of addressing the connections that exist between works, people, things and ideas through a sonic art that is both generously scaled and infinitely nuanced.

orchestral

Threshold, 1968; Fiery Wind, 1977; Transfigured Wind II, fl, orch, cptr, 1984; The Dream of the Infinite Rooms, vc, orch, cptr, 1986; Symphony [Vertigo], orch, cptr, 1987; Whispers Out of Time, str, 1988; Symphony [Myths], 1990; Symphony [The Stages of Life], 1991–2; Dreaming, orch, cptr, 1992; Elegy – for Toru Takemitsu, fl, perc, str, 1996; Two Voices – an allegory, orch, cptr, 1996

chamber and solo instrumental

Fantasy for Pianist, pf, 1964; Quick are the Mouths of Earth, chbr ens, 1964–5; Ambages, fl, 1965; ... from behind the unreasoning mask, trbn, perc, elecs, 1974–5; ... the serpent-snapping eye, tpt, pf, perc, tape, 1978; Archipelago, chbr ens, cptr, 1982–3; Aether, vn, pf, 1983; Summer Island (Islands from Archipelago: I), ob, cptr, 1984; Transfigured Wind IV, fl, cptr, 1984; Coconino ... a shattered landscape, str qt, 1985, rev. 1993; Mistral, hpd, chbr ens, 1985; Autumn Island (Islands from Archipelago: II), mar, 1986; The Behavior of Mirrors, gui, 1986; Variation, pf, 1988; Dionysus, chbr ens, 1990; Personae, vn, chbr ens, cptr, 1990; Visions, str qt, 1991; Kokoro, vn, 1992; Ariadne's Thread, str qt, cptr, 1994; Watershed I, perc, 1995; Watershed III, perc, chbr ens, cptr, 1995; Watershed IV, perc, cptr, 1995

[Scion7]

Checked his stuff out on YT.

No, no, no.

Take it away, Mum - it hurts.

PASS.

[snyprrr]

Checked his stuff out on YT.

No, no, no.

Take it away, Mum - it hurts.

PASS.

LOL-- YOU AGAIN???!!!! Well, that was random hilarity....

Now, I NEED some Reynolds...

[Mandryka]

The first quartet on this recording, called Flight,  is precisely the sort of music I like. When I first heard it I thought it was utterly confusing, but some radar deep inside my brain indicated that something special was going on. Subsequent listening revealed that it is great music, whatever that word means, jam packed with memorable moments quite unlike anything else, and deeply expressive. Anyway, I think this is what people mean when they call a performance of something rewarding.

I'll just mention in passing that I had exactly the same experience a few weeks ago with another Reynolds work for orchestra with electronics called Myths, on this CD

[Mandryka]

This is taken from the above CD with myths, and it describes pretty well what I experience listening to his music

Roger Reynolds has written that, "rather than being suddenly revealed whole, a musical work is achieved gradually over time in a manner that doubtless varies for each composer: part discovery, part construc-tion, even, admittedly, part contrivance (and, if the poet John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror is to be believed, also part sheer undirected bumbling)." What Reynolds seems to be describing here—the process of creating a piece of music—applies just as well, I submit, to the apprehension, the listen-ing-to of the created work, that is, the listener's experience. And while Reynolds's music is analyzable in many dimensions, it is primarily music to hear (or in Joyce's words, "it's on account of the sounds it is"). As heard, Reynolds's music presents a particular paradox: on the level of detail it is intimate, while on a broader scale it is epic. And it is its epic quality, in the sense of evoking scale and dimension -broad expanses of time and the vast depths and reaches of space evoked metaphorically through music—that sets him apart from such colleagues as Mario Davidovsky with his intri-cate, teeming, miniature Synchronisms and Franco Donatoni who spoke of his music as "toys for children." Reynolds is, rather, in the company of his friends, lannis Xenakis and Toru Takemitsu, each of whom had his own particular way of going for the jugular. In Reynolds's case, the "epic" quality emerges in the music's signifying processes and ideas that are to some degree abstract but that, as well, reflect ways of thinking about and encounter-ing the world, ideas often alchemized and transferred to music by him from a variety of other sources— physical processes, literature, other music, painting. The result is invariably a "big statement"—even in his works for a sin-gle instrument—where the music is both the very considerable experience itself and a gate-way to evoking and connecting sensations, intuitions, myths, patterns, impulses, ideas and processes in what might be likened to a series of criss-crossing paths and maze-like passage-ways. The pleasure of Reynolds's music, the jouissance in it, I would hazard, lies in its invitation to tread, explore and inhabit these passages and chambers, these vivid worlds crafted in and through sound which often circle back on themselves while, paradoxically —that word again! —going on farther. Into those great epic spaces.

https://archive.org/details/cd_roger-reynolds-whispers-out-of-time-works_various-artists-cleveland-chamber-symphony

[Mandryka]

I have to say, Gabriela Diaz gives a particularly introspective and beautifully nuanced performance of Kokoro. It really does efface the memory of Irvin Arditti's performances, and Mark Menzies', and I don't know that it's not the one I like the most. Well recorded to boot, this is a CD worth exploring.

[Mandryka]

New release of concertos due in a couple of weeks. The booklet is here now.

https://d2ajug1vehh95s.cloudfront.net/Ekkozone04booklet.pdf

https://www.prestomusic.com/classical/products/9608195--roger-reynolds-wind-concertos