An Interview with Roger Reynolds
Home | Part 1 - Beginnings | Part 2 - Importance of an Overall Plan to Composition | Part 3 - Transfigured Wind: A Guide | Part 4 - The Work of a Composer
Notes for Part 2 - The Importance of an Overall Plan to Composition
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Logarithmic Series - Number series provide a basis for grouping and ordering elements in music. In many traditions these are simple (2, 4, 8, 16, ...). In more recent times, the Fibonacci series (0, 1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, 21, ...) has attracted artists. Logarithmic series can vary widely in their specifics, but are used by Reynolds, in integer approximations, to create the effect of accelerating or ritarding formal shapes.
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Ircam - a research and production facility founded by Pierre Boulez in the mid-1970s, is located at the Pompidou Center in Paris. It has carried on a unique program whereby innovative music is composed often directly involving either musical experimentation requiring substantial scientific consul, or tools which are in some regard indebted to scientific developments.
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June in Buffalo - Initiated by composer David Felder, it has continued, at the Music Department of SUNY Buffalo, for over 25 years. It has been an important meeting ground for young composers who, through it, come into contact with older colleagues and also hear their own music well-prepared and presented in a collegial atmosphere.
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Editorial Algorithms: SPLITZ and SPIRLZ - While working at Ircam towards the realization of Archipelago, in the early 80s, Reynolds conceptualized two complementary algorithms at the suggestion of David Wessel. The composer terms these "editorial" processes because they confine themselves to the principled proliferation and recombination of fragments derived from a given source or input. They may be automatically applied to digital sound files directly, or employed "by hand" in a compositional (rather than computational) mode. SPIRLZ produces continuous, cyclical and monophonic results whereas SPLITZ is discontinuous and polyphonic.
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Ligeti, György - Ligeti (b. 1923) has been one of the major iconoclasts of post-World War II European composition. After escaping the constraints of a Communist-controlled Hungary in 1956, he concentrated at first on very dense, atmospheric textures that employed his noted "micro-polyphony". Ligeti's music later became more lean, wry, and virtuosic. He responded to the canonic writing of Conlon Nancarrow and contemporary studies of Central African music by Simah Arom, the effects of which can be heard in his piano etudes and in subsequent concertos.
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Stockhausen, Karlheinz - Stockhausen (b. 1928) was an early advocate of utilizing an awareness of physics and psychology to inform experimental thinking about music. A central figure in the origins of electronic music and the Darmstadt Summer Courses, Stockhausen became, in latter years, more influenced by mystical and notably grandiose enterprises. He has been working on a week-long opera, Licht, for the last several decades.
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Boulez, Pierre- Boulez (b. 1925) is a polymath, a major force in the evolution and practice of music since the Second World War. Originally active as a pianist and composer, he began what has become a major conducting career in connection with the seminal Domaine Musical series in Paris and also at the Darmstadt Summer Courses. Boulez is a prolific writer and founded, in the mid-1970s, the Ircam music research facility at the Pompidou Center in Paris.
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Nono, Luigi - Nono (1924-1990) was at first a strict serialist, independently minded, and strongly influenced by political beliefs. Over time, his work became more phenomenological, concentrating on subtle modulations of sonority often evolving at extremely slow rates. In his later years, Nono worked extensively with electroacoustic elements, both pre-recorded and, eventually, with the real-time modification of performed sound. (1924-1990)
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Variation
- This 1988 work is one in a series written during the same period in which Reynolds utilized the editorial algorithm SPLITZ as a primary methodological strategy. Three thematic elements (linear, chordal, and figurative) are algorithmically transformed in relation to a pre-existent overall plan, and the composite of the computer's algorithmic output is then "mediated" by the composer so as arrive at a final text.
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