The year 2009 has been bookended by major music festivals celebranting the eclecticism of composers based in California. In Nudity nuary,j the Juilc iard School monted a week-long festival devoted to 100 years of music from our most populous state. And we're currently in the midst of the Los Angeles Philharmonic's West Coast, Left Coast, an unprecedented three-week celebration that offers an extremely broad range of Californian music-making. So for our final cover of 2009, we're featuring a composer who has been based in San Diego for over 40 years, Roger Reynolds.

But although he is nominally a West Coaster, Reynolds's Midwest upbringing and formative experiences in both Europe and Asia have given him a world view that knows no boundaries. While his music incorporates ideas from many of the stylistic paradigms that have defined the music of last half century—serialism, conceptualism, and even neo-romanticism—it is somehow not beholden to any of them. When Roger Reynolds was awarded the Pulitzer Prize twenty years ago for his string orchestra composition Whispers Out of Time, Kyle Gann quipped that it was the first time this honor had been bestowed on a composer from the experimental tradition since Charles Ives was so honored in 1947. And while experimental is perhaps the best word that can be used to describe Reynolds's overall approach to composition, it is only part of the picture.

For an experimentalist, Reynolds can come across as downright practical:

[M]ost pieces get about six hours of attention from the musicians who are going to premiere them. I don't remember exactly when this hit me, but I realized one day as a composer I can decide how my six hours are going to be used. I can decide that they're going to be used figuring out what the notation means, on learning how to communicate with each other, etc., or it can be used in playing music and in being musical. You don't have both things in most situations. The music which has been heard for a long time and the musicians who write now in a way that is resonant with those traditional ways have an incomparable advantage over people who don't write that way because it's "in the ear" of the performers.

That said, most of Roger Reynolds's music sounds nothing like music which has been heard for a long time. From his early works for the legendary ONCE festival to elaborate multimedia works and pioneering electroacoustic manipulations of performative information, Roger Reynolds is constantly redefining what music can be and how it can be used. Even when he is tackling tradition-bound genres such as the song cycle, the string quartet, or the symphony, Reynolds is inevitably pushing the boundaries of what is possible. In fact, many of the works he has created extend well beyond music and are nearly impossible to convey on sound recordings, although over the years there have been some remarkable documentations attempted on Neuma, New World, and most significantly Mode which issued the very first Classical DVD custom-designed for 5.1 Surround-Sound featuring some of Reynolds's otherwise undocumentable creations. But no matter how far out his music is, he's completely down to earth about it:

I've done a lot of pieces that others have told me may count as "projects," so I started naming a lot of works "projects," because if that's what they are, then let's call them that.

Roger Reynolds's unique combination of pragmatism and inquisitiveness extends well beyond his own creative work. Over the course of two hours, we talked about a wide variety of topics spanning poetry, teaching and being taught, technology, societal rewards, and even the military, although it inevitably always came back to music. It was a heavy conversation—I'm still processing it more than six months later—and it is by no means a quick or easy read. But Reynolds's highly individual take on the world around him should be required reading for anyone interested in the state of contemporary music today and where it might be going.

—FJO

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Frank J. Oteri: You're a difficult person to pigeonhole. Somehow you seemed to have escaped all the "ism" wars that everyone else in your generation was fighting over so passionately. Your music incorporates ideas from a lot of stylistic proclivities, but it is somehow not beholden to any of them.

Roger Reynolds: I think that's very true and it's very deliberate. I had an unusual background. I came to music much later than most of my peers. I heard Horowitz on recordings when I was 14, and it opened a door. I hadn't realized that room was there. It was a very galvanizing moment even though there were a lot of detours along the way; I didn't start actually composing until I was 25. I had been at the University of Michigan for nine years. I went through an engineering physics degree and then through an undergraduate and master's degree in music, and my mentor at that point, Ross Finney, said, "What do you think about the Ph.D.?" And I said, "No way! I've been here long enough." And he said, "I understand." The idea was to get out and to have the time to do the kind of growing that I thought I needed to do, because I had composed very few pieces by the time I had graduated from the University of Michigan. So at that time, although it seems odd now, going to Europe was a way of living cheaply. I lived in Europe for almost three years on nothing and with nothing, and that time was spent trying to find myself and my voice. It was very clear that there were dangers in becoming part of any clique. I knew Cage. I knew Babbitt. I knew various people as a student before I left the country. But I didn't want to be part of any particularly defined group. You pay a price for that, of course. If you are not easily categorized, you tend to be—by definition—marginalized. You can't be in the middle if you don't belong to anything.

I was out of the country for seven years. [My wife] Karen [Reynolds] and I were living in Japan at the time, and we had a child. And we realized that many of the expatriate children looked like hothouse plants. They were pale and thin and seemingly lifeless, and we didn't want our daughter to grow up that way. So we decided to come back to this country. We thought that the most dynamic social scene at that point—this was the late '60s—was California, and so that's where we went. But there was not much in San Diego at that time. It was primarily a Navy town. There was a fledgling unit of the University of California, but it was only four or five years old and it had no profile yet. But it was an open playing field, so the possibility of doing things was very great.

FJO: It's interesting that you said that you were attracted to California's social scene, but you went to a part of California that didn't really have a scene at that point.

RR: Most of the dynamic music scene at that point was happening in the Bay Area. But by the time I went there, Partch was in San Diego. That wasn't a reason to go there, but it was certainly an attraction after we got there. When I was at the University of Michigan, I was the editor of the arts magazine there, and Tom Hayden was the editor of the Michigan Daily at the same time, and Carl Oglesby was my drama editor. So I knew these guys. And here we are living in Japan seven years after I'd been in Ann Arbor and I see them on TV literally leading marches and having a very dynamic relationship to social issues. Of course, there was also a lot of that going on in Japan at the same time. So maybe it was less that so much was going on in California as that California represented a kind of horizon that had more malleability, more flexibility, and more potential.

FJO: To backtrack a bit, there seems to be quite a leap from hearing Horowitz to having Ross Finney as a mentor at the University of Michigan, and then to being in Europe and Japan. You also had a military career.

RR: Briefly. I was a military policeman, of all things. I had graduated with an engineering and physics degree from the University of Michigan and I wasn't drafted into the Regular Army, but I had a two year obligation as a reservist. I think that the Army was particularly perverse at that point. Knowing that I was an engineer, I presumed I would have been an Army engineer. But in fact my MSOs [military service obligations] were either light-truck driver or military policeman. So I chose military policeman, and I learned how to disable people and how to be extraordinarily brutal. It was a rather weird experience.

FJO: That's a very different world from being a composer, for the most part.

RR: I should say! It didn't come in handy.

FJO: