MISSILES INTO MUSIC
By Anthony Asiaghi

Few young engineers have taken a career path to success as unusual as Roger Reynolds’s.

The son of an architect, he attended the University of Michigan and earned a degree in engineering physics. Upon graduation, he moved to California, where in the mid-1950s he joined the nascent missile systems industry, working for Marquardt Ramjet, a defense contractor in Los Angeles.

For relaxation, Reynolds practiced piano at a local Unitarian church, which led to a personal epiphany: he discovered that music engaged him at a deeper level than did his engineering job.

His new plan was to become a music teacher at a small liberal arts college. He returned to the University of Michigan, now enrolling in its Music School, for studies in musical composition.

But Reynolds’s engineering background provided the vital difference that distinguished him from others in his field. As he lacked any specific childhood background in music, his musical education was conscious, planned, deliberate—and most of all, it came late.

He respected foresight and explicit planning—unlike the prevailing academic sentiment of the 1960s, which valued chance and spontaneity. While others advocated only limited pre-set guidelines or rules, Reynolds composed with a scientific mindset—adopting formulas, testing, and checking results.

He found it useful to prepare an architectural schematic for each of his pieces. “The idea that a musical product would benefit from thorough planning came about in very natural ways out of my environment,” he said.


Roger Reynolds 
_{PHOTO BY MALCOLM CROWTHERS, LONDON}

In 1971, Reynolds founded the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research (now the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at the California Institute for Information Technologies and Telecommunications, where he is composer in residence). He began asking the questions that would propel his career in music.

Reynolds committed to studying the kinds of processing operations that a computer could perform on a sound. For example: the compositional or editorial algorithm can take an initial sound, theme, or motive, cut it into pieces, then rearrange the pieces in a particular, principled way.

Using such algorithms, Reynolds could automate ways of treating natural sounds such that they serve formal purposes—the musical equivalent of light in a kaleidoscope. “What comes out is a proliferation of parts, but organized in a certain way. It’s strange and fragmented and broken—but disturbingly orderly in a way that you can’t quite grasp,” he said.

Reynolds also studied spatialization, the use of illusory acoustic space to move and reposition sounds so that they are mobile, as in real life. Reynolds’s pioneering exploration of the spatial dimensions of music is a hallmark of his work.

He is especially interested in the idea of temporal stretching. “When you slow a sound down, you hear all of the ‘choreography’ of the physical system changing as the vibratory mode changes. You hear the tension of the string changing, the ‘aspiration’ of the low sound for a higher place. It’s very moving.”

Perplexed by a John Ashbery poem, he responded by composing “Whispers Out of Time,” which was awarded the Pulitzer Prize in Musical Composition in 1989. The piece is scored for a live string orchestra and uses “quotations” from Beethoven and Mahler which have been “stretched” slower.

But once you compose within the controlled environment of a university research center, how do you transport your score’s effects reliably to audiences in a concert hall, where the hardware and software conditions can’t be replicated?

Reynolds makes the re-creation of his compositions possible through a “technical score.” It describes each of his sonic effects generically, its purpose, what it adds, when it should begin and end. He does not explain how to make the sound, since hardware and software specifications quickly become outdated.

The technical score explains his aspirations for his piece. It lets technically informed musicians use their instruments, expertise, and insights plus electronics to emulate his result.

According to Reynolds, “We have to treat technology as a medium, explain how we want it to work, and then assume that sensitive, competent people will rise to the challenge. We’ll then have a situation in which technology is used as a medium interpretatively—like lighting in a theater.”      

Editor’s note: The composer’s Web site, www.rogerreynolds.com, has a clip from one of his works, based on a quote from Aeschylus, and contains links to more recordings available online.