Pulitzer-winning composer Reynolds’ works to be performed

The music of Pulitzer-winning American composer Roger Reynolds is the subject of a concert at Harvard’s John Knowles Paine Concert Hall on Thursday, Dec. 6, at 8 p.m. Reynolds is the Fromm Visiting Professor in the University’s music department, where he teaches composition (Reynolds is a professor of composition at the University of California, San Diego). Two of Reynolds’ works will be performed: “Passage,” a set of multimedia presentations utilizing Harvard’s 40-loudspeaker orchestra, HYDRA; and “Seasons Cycle II,” performed by members of Alarm Will Sound, Alan Pierson, conductor, and Grammy Award-winning soprano Susan Narucki. The concert is free and open to all; no tickets are required (first-come, first-seated).

Reynolds has worked with Esa-Pekka Salonen, David Robertson, Seiji Ozawa, Gunther Schuller, and Leonard Slatkin, with the Ensemble InterContemporain, Le Nouvel Ensemble Moderne, Ensemble Recherche, Alarm Will Sound, Court-Circuit, choreographers Lucinda Childs and Bill T. Jones, and particularly with Irvine Arditti’s String Quartet. He has collaborated with John Ashbery (“Whispers Out of Time,” a string orchestra work arising out of an Ashbery poem, garnered him the 1989 Pulitzer Prize.) as well as inventor-philosopher Buckminster Fuller. His extensive orchestral catalog includes commissions from the Philadelphia, Los Angeles, and BBC Orchestras. Reynolds’ writing, beginning with the influential book, Mind Models (1975), has appeared widely in Asian, American and European journals, while his music, recorded on Auvidis / Montaigne, Mode, New World, and Neuma, among others, is published exclusively by C.F. Peters. In 1998, the Library of Congress established the Roger Reynolds Special Collection.