In 1989, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a string orchestra composition, Whispers Out of Time, an extended work responding to John Ashbery’s ambitious Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror.
"I ... consumed [Joyce's Portrait] hungrily, stayed in my dormitory room for weeks, feverish over the allure of its issues, not attending classes and only narrowly escaping academic disaster...".
However, he quickly found that he was spending an inordinate amount of time practicing piano, and decided to go back to school to study music, with the goal of becoming a small liberal arts college teacher.
"[2] During the later part of his composition studies at the University of Michigan, Reynolds also sought out encounters with other prominent musical personalities, including Milton Babbitt, Edgard Varèse, Nadia Boulanger, John Cage, and Harry Partch.
The two of them had become involved with a [visual] art professor named Milton Cohen, who had what he called a Space Theatre where he had taken canvas and stretched it to make a circular, tent-like situation ... in the middle there were projectors and mirrors which flashed imagery on the [surrounding] screens.
He also met and became friends with composers Toru Takemitsu, Joji Yuasa, pianist Yūji Takahashi, electronics specialist Junosuke Okuyama, critic Kuniharu Akiyama, painter Keiji Usami and theatre director Tadashi Suzuki.
[11][6] Reynolds' most significant work from his time in Japan was probably PING (1968), a multimedia composition for piano, flute, percussion, harmonium, live electronic sound, film, and visual effects, based on a text by Samuel Beckett.
[11] When he first went to IRCAM, he made the choice to utilize technologically expert assistants to create software or hardware solutions to specific musical ideas inherent in his compositions.
With fifteen themes and their own variations, distributed unevenly over sub-groups of a thirty-two member chamber orchestra, Reynolds needed technology to transform both the timbres and the intricate fragmentation and reordering of the sounds in ways that live performers could not.
"[17] His last work at IRCAM, The Angel of Death (1998–2001), for solo piano, chamber orchestra, and 6-channel computer processed sound, was written with a substantial number of perceptual psychologists assisting and analyzing both the planning and the end results.
The end results included a special issue of the journal Music Perception, edited by Daniel Levitin, an audio CD / CDROM publication by IRCAM, along with a day-long conference in Sydney, Australia.
[26] A composer-in-residence appointment at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (at UCSD) allowed Reynolds to finish his SANCTUARY project: an evening-length, four-movement piece for percussion quartet and real-time computer transformations.
The DVD that arose from this project was intended to alter the way contemporary classical music is received, because of the intimacy with which the performers knew the work and the audio-visual complexity with which it was presented.
As his interest in algorithmic transformation migrated towards real-time performance interaction, Reynolds produced a series of extended compositions using the materials of a solo pair as his thematic resource.
When composing Shifting/Drifting, Reynolds worked closely with his frequent violin collaborator Irvine Arditti on the acoustic material, and computer musician Paul Hembree on the electronic sound.
Le rendu sonore global frappe par l’expansion du lyrisme et d’une virtuosité violonistique qui prend en quelque sorte racine chez Bach (la Chaconne de la Partita no 2 fait d’ailleurs une apparition masquée)... (English: A space as artificial as it is vast brings a rather dizzying sensation of distance and perspective.
Since the mid-1970s he has been engaged with the use of language as sound, "the ways in which a vocalist's manner of utterance – whether spoken, declaimed, sung, or indebted to some uncommon mode of production" affect the experience of the ideas that the text carries.
[17] Reynolds was stimulated by his UCSD colleagues Kenneth Gaburo and baritone Philip Larson, deploying extended vocal techniques, such as "vocal-fry" in the VOICESPACE works (quadraphonic tape compositions): Still (1975), A Merciful Coincidence (1976), Eclipse (1979), and The Palace (1980).
Visual art has provided Reynolds with inspiration for several works, such as the Symphony [The Stages of Life] (1991–92), which drew from self-portraits by Rembrandt and Picasso, and Visions (1991), a string quartet that responded to Bruegel.
[11] A later project involving visual art was The Image Machine (2005), which arose from rather elaborate interdisciplinary collaboration called 22, headed by Thanassis Rikakis, then at Arizona State University.
[24]Reynolds worked with choreographer Bill T. Jones, clarinetist Anthony Burr, and percussionist Steven Schick on the project, along with audio software designers Pei Xiang and Peter Otto, and visual rendering artists Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar, and Marc Downie.
So, in the case of [Wallace] Stevens's line "And spread it so as to cover her face," the eight singers, arrayed across the front of the stage, pass the phonemes of the associated melodic phrase back and forth by fading in and out successively.
[17] More recently, Reynolds's Mode Records Watershed (1998) DVD was the first such disc to feature music conceived specifically for discrete multichannel presentation in Dolby Digital 5.1.
As he notes, "'Space' can signify a physical framework by means of which we comprehend the conditions of the 'real world' around us, but it can also become a referential tool that helps us to place into relative and often revelatory relationships other less objectively characterizable data.
"[17] In addition to the auditory effects of spatial location and metaphoric notions of space, Reynolds has responded to various architectural spaces, creating works explicitly for performance in various buildings, including Arata Isozaki's Art Tower Mito and also his Gran Ship, Kenzō Tange's Olympic Gymnasium in Tokyo, Louis I. Kahn's Salk Institute, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, Christian de Portzamparc's Cité de la Musique, Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, I.M.
Rather than attempting to position sounds precisely on perceivable paths around the hall, I concentrated on broad, sweeping gestures that surged across or around the performance space in unmistakable fashion.
[11] In addition to his compositional activities, Reynolds's academic career has taken him to Europe, the Nordic countries, South America, Asia, Mexico and the United States, where he has lectured, organized events, and taught.
At the time that Mind Models first appeared in print, no one else had attempted to rigorously define the issues raised by those composers who broke most deliberately with traditional European practice.
... Reynolds was the first to clearly identify and consolidate into a single framework the vast array of forces (cultural, political, perceptual, and technical) shaping this heterogeneous body of work.
[34] In addition to visiting positions, Reynolds has also given master classes around the world, in places such as Buenos Aires, Thessaloniki, Porto Alegre, IRCAM, Warsaw, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing.