Roger Reynolds: WISDOM’s Sources/‘O’o

Ekkozone Records is thrilled to release WISDOM’s Sources/’O’o, a ground-breaking new album from Pulitzer Prize-winning US composer Roger Reynolds, which continues his visionary collaboration with producer Mathias Reumert, and features all premiere recordings. The album shows Reynolds’ experimental fervor remains undimmed. Each work discovers in sound, and in the case of WISDOM’s Sources, in imagery as well – a way of thinking through the conditions of being alive in the 21st century. Together, they testify to the depth of Reynolds’s friendships and the range of his imagination, with both works growing out of collaborations with performers long entwined with Reynolds’s creative life.

Cast for flute and strings, ‘O’o was written for and is performed by the eminent Canadian flutist Robert Aitken, a friend and collaborator with Reynolds since the 1960s. The work also features the award-winning and distinguished Canadian violinists Yolanda Bruno and Mark Lee, violist Rory McLeod, and cellist Leana Rutt. Similarly, WISDOM’s Sources, a duo for violin and viola, was composed for the legendary violinist Irvine Arditti and illustrious violist Ralf Ehlers during a visit to San Diego in the summer of 2024.

In Reynolds’s words, a creative project “burns fuel of some sort.” That fuel may be emotional, philosophical, experiential, even technical. Each rooted in the exploration of timbre, ‘O’o and WISDOM’s Sources represent two distinct stories, one involving the haunting tale of an extinct Hawaiian bird, the other the search for wisdom across cultures—and each burns its way toward revelation.

In ‘O’o, the novel sonic chemistry of juxtaposing the harmonic capacity of multiple strings with the melodic character of the flute provides a sonic environment within which outlines of calling and responding gradually emerge; evolving into the identities of the players as well as the last male and female pair of the now-vanished songbirds.

In WISDOM’s Sources, “one of the most adventuresome pieces I’ve ever attempted”, the spark of collaboration becomes the fire itself, an exploration of ‘wisdom’ conceived through Reynolds’ creative bond with Irvine Arditti during the COVID pandemic. The close alignment of friendship, musical sensibility, and shared ways of thinking is echoed in the sonorous match of the viola and violin.

From the outset, Reynolds envisioned WISDOM’s Sources as a multimedial creation, and his longtime associate, filmmaker, and video artist Kyle Johnson created an independent visual composition that unfolds in parallel to the music. The work represents a new mode of multidimensional creation that Reynolds is determined to pursue.

Imagination unspent and curiosity as keen as ever, Roger Reynolds continues to write music that explores how sound can reflect, question, and transform experience.