The Unique Aesthetic Character of the Music of Roger Reynolds Philippe

When we consider the amount of music Reynolds has created since the middle of the Sixties, we can only admire the vast and fascinating musical landscape that unfolds before us. The diversity of the genres — music for soloists, chamber music, orchestral music, with or without electronics, music for solo voices or for choir, electroacoustic music, live electronics, computer music, musical theatre, stage music, mixed media, dance, video, DVD's, etc., and above all the way in which they have been tackled: these all demonstrate a hunger for exploring new modes of sonic expression, of going "beyond the edge of known orders1". For Reynolds, musical composition is above all experimentation (from the standpoint of objectives, hypotheses, research, conceptualization and assessment) which means that risk taking is inevitable, since the reception of music is first and foremost experience (sensory, cognitive, emotional, aesthetic, and philosophical). An approach of this sort demands of the composer that he create his own methods and his own tools in order to achieve his aesthetic goals. On the part of the listener, it requires active listening and an open mind. According to Reynolds, the contemporary artist must use the materials and methods of his time. This means that the composer will have made his own the heritage of serialism and experimental music while at the same time maintaining the necessary critical state of mind needed if he is to be genuinely original. Reynolds' aesthetics are rooted in a double origin: European, because his teachers are Ross Lee Finney (a pupil of Berg) and Roberto Gerhard (a pupil of Schoenberg), and American because of his commitment to experimental musical movements in the Sixties. In addition to this double musical citizenship, mention must be made of his fascination with Japanese culture, in which he has discovered a particular form of consciousness as regards the duration and flow of time, as well as a sense of ritual readiness (an essential quality for the tea ceremony, sumo wrestling or calligraphy) all qualities that are absent in Western culture. His double training — musical and scientific — has led him to use models from mathematics or from the chaos theory, and has also meant that he very early on acquired mastery of computer skills and technology, whether for sound synthesis, sound processing, reordering of temporal relations or spatialization of sound. Reynolds is certainly one of the composers of his generation who has done the most to put his thought and aesthetics into formal shape in numerous published texts in book form (Mind Models, 1975; A Searcher's Path: A Composer's Way, 1987; Form and Method, 2002) or articles (It(')s time, 1968; Thoughts on sound movement and meaning, 1978; A perspective on form and experience, 1987; Par-delà les dimensions connues, [Beyond the edge of known orders] 1991, etc.). The great diversity of his fields of research concern not only aesthetic and historical problems, but also more methodological issues regarding form and time in music, or electronic music practice (synthesis, time processing, spatialization, etc). Nevertheless, the main — and constant — thread running through his writings is concerned with musical perception. The Angel