Brief excerpt from The Emperor of Ice Cream (1961-62) 
LP: America Sings/The Gregg Smith Singers
Label: Turnabout TV 34759
Copyright © 2000 Roger Reynolds

The Emperor Of Ice Cream

Movement VI, "The Portrait's Will To Endure"

Whispers Out Of Time, Movement VI

Roger Reynolds: composer, writer, producer and mentor, pioneer in sound spatialization, intermedia and also algorithmic concepts, an inveterate synthesizer of diverse capacities and perspectives. His notorious (1961) composition, “The Emperor of Ice Cream,” which uses graphic notation to depict performer location on a stage, was widely imitated. In it, eight singers and a jazz trio gloss, while musically manifesting, a Wallace Stevens poem. In fact, Reynolds’s work often arises out of text. One of his Ircam commissions, “Odyssey” (1989-93) sets a bilingual Beckett text; his Pulitzer prize-winning composition, “Whispers Out of Time,” for string orchestra, muses over a poem by John Ashbery. The FLiGHT project arose out of a collection of texts that stretches from Plato to astronaut Michael Collins. This body of work demonstrates how seamlessly text, electroacoustic resources, and novel presentation strategies can be melded with live instrumental and vocal performance.

The Emperor Of Ice Cream

Roger Reynolds

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