Technology Institute at UC San Diego Names Composer in Residence--Pulitzer Prize Winner Roger Reynolds

San Diego, CA, June 29, 2007 -- Underscoring its interdisciplinary interest in technology and the arts, a high-tech research institute at the University of California, San Diego has selected a Pulitzer Prize winner to be its first Composer in Residence.

Roger Reynolds at Calit2
To watch streaming video of Reynolds:
1. On composing in technology and other non-traditional environments, click here. Length: 5:51
2. On merging his interests as an engineer and composer; click here. Length: 5:19
3. On preparing to premiere his current work Sanctuary; click here. Length: 3:15
[Real player and broadband connection required ]

The UCSD Division of the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (Calit2) appointed Roger Reynolds to the new position for an initial two-year term, effective July 1. He is a professor in the UCSD Department of Music, where he has taught for nearly 40 years. Funding for the new position comes from Calit2, the music department, and the Division of Arts & Humanities.

"Roger has produced works that are so diverse and interdisciplinary that they have redefined what it means to be a composer," said Ramesh Rao, director of Calit2 at UC San Diego. "He is an experimentalist who will have the freedom to experiment with Calit2 technologies and facilities. We anticipate that he will bring a fresh intellectual and cultural dimension to Calit2 while exciting engineers and scientists about the potential for developing new hardware and software to expand musical capabilities."

Reynolds, 72, says he plans to spend one or two days per week in Atkinson Hall, where he will absorb some of the new ideas being explored within Calit2. He will also use the building's specialized facilities--including a state-of-the-art audio spatialization lab and the 100-seat, reconfigurable Calit2 theater, which Reynolds will have one full month each year to showcase his collaborative work.

"What can you do here that you cannot do elsewhere?" asked Reynolds. "I can make music anywhere. But here one can develop new capacities, and that's why I really welcome this interaction."

As a visiting professor at Amherst in 1986, Reynolds was taken with poet John Ashbery's Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. The ensuing piece, Whispers Out of Time, has six movements scored for 23 strings. It earned the composer a Pulitzer Prize in 1989.

Reynolds was only the second experimentalist to win the Pulitzer Prize in Music. (The first was Charles Ives in 1947.) He took home the award in 1989 for Whispers Out of Time , a composition for string orchestra commissioned by Amherst College.

Spending time in a high-tech environment is nothing new to this composer. He earned an undergraduate degree in engineering physics from the University of Michigan, and worked briefly as a systems development engineer in the defense industry.

An accomplished pianist, Reynolds returned to the same university's School of Music. After earning his Master's degree in musical composition in 1962, and writing his first theater piece (The Emperor of Ice Cream ), Reynolds and wife Karen began a 7-year migration through international hotbeds of experimental music--Germany, France, Italy and, finally, Japan.

In 1969, he was lured from Tokyo to a tenured position on the fledgling UC San Diego faculty. Two years later, Reynolds became the founding director of what today is called the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts (CRCA), located on the first floor of Atkinson Hall. [Coincidentally, the current CRCA director, Sheldon Brown, is Calit2's first Artist in Residence, and last year the institute appointed UCSD film professor Jean-Pierre Gorin to be its first Filmmaker in Residence.]

Reynolds' oeuvre is both vast and variegated, and few composers have been more willing to experiment with new technologies and methodologies. This prolific composer often integrates other art forms into his composition-dance, theater, video, literary texts-along with computer hardware and software as well as the perspectives of experimental psychology. He is a pioneer among composers using multichannel sound, and pushes the boundaries of spatialized audio. Reynolds' Watershed , released in 1998, was the first DVD in Dolby Digital 5.1 with music "composed expressly for a multichannel medium," i.e., five independent channels of audio.

Soprano Carmen Pelton (left) and actress Donnah Welby portray different aspects of Clytemnestra's character in the 2000 premiere of Roger Reynolds' JUSTICE.
[Photo by Larica Perry]

Throughout his career, Reynolds has experimented with eclectic mixes of musical forms to produce some of his most memorable pieces. One example is JUSTICE, which features a soprano, an actress and a percussionist; text adapted by Reynolds from Aeschylus and Euripides; a full, theatrical production; as well as computer sound and real-time spatial audio designed specifically for the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, which commissioned the work for its bicentennial in 2000.

"We have agreed that I will present at least two public events a year--the first preliminary and explanatory in nature, and the second a culmination involving performance," said Reynolds. "Calit2 is committing significant resources, including substantial stretches when I will be able to evolve my work in the black-box space on a daily basis, without interruption."

Over the next 12 months, that work will focus on the ongoing development of an evening-long, three-movement piece titled Sanctuary. Reynolds and his colleagues will use facilities at Calit2 and UCSD's music department to refine the motion capture, machine intelligence, spatialization, and digital signal processing elements that are a part of the work. Called Chatter/Clatter , the first section is an extended solo for UCSD music professor and percussionist Steven Schick. It is an entirely new sound world evolving not just from novel instruments, but also from new ways of using the performer's hand motion. As captured by piezo-electric sensors and pattern recognition algorithms, the motion patterns of Schick's fingers themselves add a rich new layer of computerized audio to the acoustic dimension.

"He's learning to do things with his hands that he's never done before," explained Reynolds. The project began development last fall at UCSD and McGill University's CRIMMT facility, and also involves Ian Saxton, a graduate student in computer music research and member of CRCA's Music Information Processing Interest Group.

Sanctuary's second section, titled Oracle , was written in 2004, and has been performed in various national venues since then. It also incorporates percussion, specially constructed instruments, lighting design, as well as real-time computer processed and spatialized sound.

Roger Reynolds
Finding a "Sanctuary" in Calit2

Over the summer Reynolds is composing Sanctuary's third and final section, and plans to begin rehearsing it in Atkinson Hall this fall with the resident UCSD graduate-student percussion ensemble red fish blue fish .

Chatter/Clatter will be showcased this fall in the Calit2 theater, prior to the official première of the full, three-movement Sanctuary in the atrium of I.M. Pei's East Wing of the National Gallery of Art, which co-commissioned the work. Performances by Schick, the red fish blue fish ensemble, grad student Saxton and music department senior recording engineer Josef Kucera will take place Nov. 16 and 18 in Washington, D.C.

"Especially in the West, the model has been that the composer creates material and the performer instantiates or manifests it. For the last couple of centuries, it's been that way," explained Reynolds. "Because of percussion's unique variability-the contemporary percussionist never plays the same geometry twice-we are able to take uniquely interesting and challenging risks, allowing the piece to evolve and rediscovering how the performer can contribute to the creation of new work. With its facilities, Calit2 will help us push this experiment further-and people at Calit2 will get to see the work evolve over time."

According to Reynolds, the black-box theater at Calit2 is important primarily if it is used to mount what he calls "dangerous enterprises." "You have to give artists the time to show whether they'll fail or succeed," said Reynolds. "Normally in the arts there is never enough time, so we always can say we failed because we didn't have enough time." To make sure that is not the case, Calit2 will block out two full weeks in the fall and again in the spring, so Reynolds and his colleagues have plenty of time to practice the work in the location where it will be performed.

The venue itself could become part of the experiment. "What's the ideal relationship between a performance and an audience?" asked Reynolds. "How big should the audience be, and how will the performance change as the audience size varies? We are interested in tackling this as an issue."

Reynolds is already looking beyond the National Gallery premiere of Sanctuary, to next spring. In his role as Composer in Residence, he will bring together most of the people involved in the Sanctuary project to refine further the technology and inter-medial aspects, and to bring together audio and video materials from previous performances.

"It is our plan that the Sanctuary project will continue to evolve, carrying with it, as part of new presentations, aspects of prior instantiations," said Reynolds. "In the spring we are planning an informal workshop performance of the entire Sanctuary, and separately a formal presentation of the technological and performative issues in the project."

Reynolds has never been only a composer. He is also a prolific teacher and writer. His first of four books, Mind Models, was written while hew was a George A. Miller Visiting Professor at the University of Illinois. The composer's latest book, Form and Method: Composing Music , was published in 2002 and resulted from a year during which he was a guest composer at The Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University in the early 1990s.

As one reviewer summed up Reynolds' career to date: "For over 40 years, Roger Reynolds has produced an extraordinary body of original, thought-provoking and inspiring compositions." Now some of that work will also originate in Calit2's high-tech facility on the UC San Diego campus.

Media Contacts

Doug Ramsey, 858-822-5825, dramsey@ucsd.edu

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Technology Institute at UC San Diego Names Composer in Residence--Pulitzer Prize Winner Roger Reynolds