The Sloan Interview with Roger Reynolds
©Peter Sloan 2018
Peter Sloan
MUS 291/501
November 16, 2018
Interview project report
In my own practice, or practices, which range from composing and improvising to
community organizing and journalism, I have an uneasy relationship with distinction. Planning a
protest and promoting a concert only appear different until you do them, at which point you
realize that everybody’s on Facebook and no one can find parking. Ensemble improvisations
and grassroots coalition meetings may sound different on the surface, but if you listen deeply to
either you hear voices being balanced and resolutions being sought (and sometimes, tentatively
achieved). And so on.
So my interest was piqued by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer and UCSD professor
Roger Reynolds’s newest project, Bridging Chasms (BC), which he describes as a
communications project. Through BC, Reynolds curates conversations between experts in
different fields. But he’s not interested in the content of their expertise, but rather in the ways in
which they communicate—or fail to—across the disciplinary divide. Reynolds personally
assembled the team of participants, drawn mostly but not exclusively from academic institutions,
and coaches them in advance of carefully structured weekend-long sessions, which he calls
Events and are documented by an ethnographer. And while BC is currently small in scale, with
just over a dozen participants and only one Event to date (with two more planned), Reynolds
describes his motivation for starting the project as nothing less than society-wide catastrophe.
He says the initial idea came to him in with a sense of urgency amidst the aftermath of the 2016
presidential election.
When I learned these things, I wondered what it was about some composers that made
us also interested in politics, culture, and communications. And I wanted to know what
connections, if any, Roger Reynolds saw—in method, product, or social outcome—between BC
and his compositional work. I sought an interview with Reynolds for the purpose of
understanding his motivations for undertaking the BC project, the circumstances that informed
its structure, and his view of its relationship to his other work, as well as his broader thoughts on
the role of the university composer in a rapidly changing world, with the ultimate goal of better
supporting engaged social action via my own work.
As described in Patricia Leavy’s Oral History: Understanding Qualitative Research
(Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2011), I was seeking community or experiential knowledge—if
interdisciplinary composers constitute a community. And an oral history method was appropriate
for my goal. In particular I was seeking a comprehensive understanding of Reynolds’s process,
to bear witness to his personal experience of what he described as an “unthinkable” political
event, to contextualize and situate his decisions, and to draw connections between his personal
scale of experiences and the social and political environment that structured them.
I wrote the following questions, annotated below, and sent them to Dr. Reynolds the day
before our meeting, with the understanding that they would serve as a guide to an open-ended
conversation, that we would likely not get to all of them, and that we might move freely around
and outside them.
1. You said you conceived of Bridging Chasms following the 2016 election. Why?
What role did failure play? Can you describe your decision-making process?
-I wanted to start with the political impetus and personal choice that began the
project.
2. You told the San Diego Tribune you reached out first to Ram Ramanathan,
because you both received the Revelle Medal? Did you have a personal
relationship prior to both receiving that award? What was your first conversation
like?
-Organizing is built on personal relationships, and I’m particularly interested in
how those relationships cohere into coalitions around a program.
3. How did you assemble the initial group of participants? Did you have personal
relationships with each participant? Professional connections?
4. Why does BC focus on process rather than content? What motivated this
perspective?
-I thought this might offer Dr. Reynolds room to situate his methodological
perspective.
5. Were you thinking of other communications projects that you saw as
precursors to BC, or were you drawing from any particular methodology when
designing BC?
-I also wondered about the origins of the project’s design.
6. Does BC relate to your compositional method or your research in algorithmic
real-time environmental sound processing? If so, how?
-It seems like it does, on some level, to me, but I wondered how explicitly Dr.
Reynolds made those kinds of connections.
7. Is Bridging Chasms a musical work? Is it community organizing? Is it
research? Is it experimental academic praxis?
8. Why do you think we are failing? What’s behind our failure to communicate?
What’s (materially) driving the (epistemological) systems that are (ethically)
driving us apart?
-I wondered what insights Dr. Reynolds may have gleaned or speculations he
might hold.
9. Did you read the August 1, 2018 New York Times Magazine feature, “Losing
Earth”? Are we losing Earth, and what does that mean for moral action going
forward? What if we continue failing?
-I wanted to gauge Dr. Reynold’s sense of the severity of the stakes of the
prognosis of the societal communication disease he has diagnosed.
10. What conceptual architecture are we lacking? What institutional structures do
we need? What social practices do we need? Is the problem economic, and what
does that mean?
-I wanted solutions.
11. Who is the composer in the Anthropocene?
-I wonder what we are doing.
12. What is the University in the Anthropocene?
-And why we’re doing it here.
13. What is humanity’s relationship (epistemological, ethical, existential) to nature
in the Anthropocene?
-I’m operating under the practical assumption that no one has good answers to
this yet.
While I can’t recount everything I’d like to about our 75-minute conversation, I can
identify a few successes and failures. My initial questions allowed Dr. Reynolds to expound at
length about the political circumstances and personal motivations surrounding the conception of
his project. I learned that over the course of election day in November 2016, the prospect of a
Donald Trump presidency morphed from “unthinkable” in Reynolds’s mind to “a major event” to
which he felt morally compelled to respond. I came to glimpse his pragmatic scaling of his
ambition to his capacity and modulating of his message to his position as a speaker. He asked,
“if I were to act as though I were actually trying to accomplish something, what would that look
like?”, and “What’s my standing? Why should anyone listen to me?” And my hunch that these
things tend to begin with persons, not with programs, panned out. Reynolds described “delight”
and “pleasure” at meeting his first collaborator on the project, Dr. Ram Ramanathan of UCSD’s
Scripps Institute of Oceanography. Initially, BC was simply a series of casual lunches among
colleagues with a shared sense of concern and didn’t too much mind spending time together.
“Why did we hit it off? Who knows, we just did,” said Reynolds. And I learned about some key
predecessors to BC from Reynolds’s past, one an interdisciplinary panel hosted by the
Japanese publisher Iwanami Shoten in the 1960s, and his time serving on the formative
committee of the MacArthur “Genius” Fellowship program in Chicago in the early 1980s. And
most importantly, by the end of our conversation we had unearthed a fascinating contradiction.
Reynolds flatly says “no” when I ask whether BC is a “music project,” but then immediately goes
on to say, “but of course I’m doing the same thing—curation of materials, curation of structures,
making sure the voices are appropriate and diverse, focusing on process. . . Everything I do in
my life is a composition, on some level.” This was really what I wanted to get to, and it came
only as we were already 15 minutes over time. It would obviously be the place to start for our
next session.
In the future, I think I could plan an initial set of questions more closely tailored to my
participants’ experience and less oriented towards broadly abstract themes—spending more
time with description before jumping to analysis. Dr. Reynolds stopped me between my second
and third questions—“There was a whole two years between the two!”—and most of our
conversation ended up being on the initial work not of conceiving or designing the project or
assembling the team or situating the methodology or anything like that, but of doggedly
navigating institutional bureaucracy and appealing to administrators for funding—and exposing
himself to financial risk in the event that institutional funding did not materialize. And we never
made it to the back half of the list, so as such I didn’t learn much about “the composer” or “the
university” in “the Anthropocene.” But I learned about Roger Reynolds in 2018 at UCSD, which,
not unlike Reynolds’s BC project, is a scale on which I can actually engage.
Roger Reynolds is interested in the kinds of dialogues that emerge out of carefully
considered configurations of parties. As such, the presentation of findings from our time together
should be equally carefully considered. The most salient feature of our conversation was the
amount of work Dr. Reynolds did to secure administrative support and funding for BC. A map of
that organizational structure, of Deans and Vice Presidents and Chancellors and Provosts,
plotted according to the circuitous route Reynolds had to walk for two years, would be
illustrative, especially as those interactions with funders and administrators informed or
constrained the project. In other words, we would be interested not only in the political
circumstances and personal choices that led to BC, but also the institutional structure of
implementation that filtered the concept and condensed it into the material world. As for the
documentation of BC events themselves, Reynolds has an ethnographer on hand to produce a
comprehensive report, and he’s promoting the project on the web as well. But with all the work
he’s put in to curating and positioning voices, purposefully structuring open interactions, and
analyzing the tangled intersection of form, content and tone—to say nothing of the emails, the
reimbursement requests, and the parking passes—I just hope he turns it into a piece of music.