June in Buffalo is delighted to welcome back Roger
Reynolds, University Professor at the University of California-San Diego.
Reynolds is a major figure in American music, having pioneered numerous
possibilities now embraced widely within contemporary art music: sound
spatialization, intermedia, algorithms, live electronics, graphic notation, new
approaches to music and text, and more. For this, his work has been widely
recognized, for instance with a Pulitzer Prize and commissions from the
Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, BBC, and National Symphony Orchestras,
and the UK Arts Council, French Ministry of Culture, IRCAM, and the Fromm,
Rockefeller, and Koussevitzky Foundations. Also highly respected as a
pedagogue, Reynolds’s students include Center for 21st Century Music
artistic director David Felder, as well as other composers in top faculty
positions across the US, at Harvard (Chaya Czernowin), University of Michigan
(Michael Daugherty), University of Florida (Paul Koonce), and University of
North Texas (Andrew May).
Reynolds has a long-standing relationship with UB and
the Center for 21st Century Music. Reynolds has appeared regularly
senior composer at June in Buffalo since the mid-1980s, acting as mentor to
participant composers and working with resident ensembles on performances of
his music. In addition to numerous appearances in the 1990s and early 2000s,
Reynolds has appeared at the Center four times since its 2006 creation. In
addition to a visit on the Center’s guest artist series in 2014, Reynolds has been
invited as senior composer at June in Buffalo in 2007, 2010, and 2015. During
these festivals, June in Buffalo has been able to present a wide cross section
of his work: violin soloist extraordinaire Irvine Arditti presented solo violin
works, while the Arditti Quartet (led by Irvine Arditti himself) performed
works for string quartet, UB Piano Professor Eric Huebner interpreted Reynold’s
Piano Etudes, Book I, and the
percussion ensemble red fish blue fish
realized the composer’s ambitious Sanctuary
for percussion and live electronics. Significantly, all of these performers are
long-term collaborators with Reynolds—Irvine Arditti and the Arditti Quartet
for decades—resulting in ideal performance circumstances for this challenging
work.
This year’s festival presents a similarly wide range
of Reynolds works. Irvine Arditti returns to this year’s festival to perform Shifting/Drifting, a work for solo
violin and real time algorithmic transformation. The work will be performed on
Thursday, June 7 at 7:30pm in Baird Hall, with technical assistance from
another regular Reynolds collaborator, electronic musician Paul Hembree.
The festival is also delighted to be facilitating
collaborations between Reynolds and ensembles who are newer to his work. On
Friday, June 8 at 7:30pm in Slee Hall, Ensemble Mise-En will perform Shadowed Narrative for clarinet, piano,
violin, and cello, and Signal Ensemble will present Positings for flute, horn, violin, cello, piano, and real time
sound spatialization.
In addition to performances of his music, Reynolds
will also give a public talk, on Wednesday June 6 at 10am in Baird Hall.
Reynolds is renowned for his writing
and his lecture
curation, so the talk will undoubtedly provide unique insight
into the creative process driving his decades-long career.
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