Sony G90 Surrounded, Roger Reynolds Watershed Mode 70, DVD, Jargon, Experiment in a New Medium

Surrounded!

Roger Reynolds: Watershed (Mode 70, DVD)

. . . . . . . . .

Jargon

ere we have a first that needs

attention – “the first music DVD

[the package says] designed to

totally utilize the medium’s full 5-channel

capability.”

I just wish it were better, and less pre-

tentious. The composer, Roger Reynolds,

is (as he probably won’t forgive me for

saying) one of the earnest, gray mod-

ernists of a past generation, a specialist in electronic music

who teaches at the University of California in San Diego.

One problem with modernist composers is (I’m tempted to

say “was,” but they’re still with us, even if their influence

has waned) that they over-intellectualize. They tend to over-

value things in music that can objectively be analyzed, and

then they turn around and insist that

everything in music can or should be ana-

lyzable. One mistake they make is to

think that music is a language – not

metaphorically (as when someone tells

us “music is the universal language”), but

literally. They think musical sounds are

or should be connected by grammatical

rules, like words in a sentence. That’s an

academic preoccupation, if anything is.

On this DVD are extensive conversa-

tions with Reynolds, with Steven Schick, a

percussionist who plays the longest piece on the disc, and

with Peter Otto, a computer sound specialist who’s responsi-

ble for (jargon alert) the “spatialization” of sounds in one of

Reynolds’ works. Now, we could argue over whether there’s

too much conversation, and whether it ought to be sand-

wiched around the actual compositions, as it is on the DVD,

or placed in its separate section, for

G R E G S A N D O W

Experiment in a New Medium		the visual image in favor of the hemisphere of sound projected
Because I’ve been exposed to far too much featureless mod -		far beyond the walls, stretching into the distance all around –
ernistic music, and might be jaded coming anywhere near
what looked to be new example of it, I thought I’d ask Barry		The performance you experience
Rawlinson to listen to this, too. A non-professional ear’s
reaction would be worthwhile, I thought, especially since		will be defined by which sounds
music like this shouldn’t just appeal to specialists. Maybe
Barry would hear something in it that I didn’t. We heard and		you choose to listen to, and your
watched the DVD together, both of us for the first time. We		choice can vary from moment to
didn’t discuss our reactions. Here are his, refreshingly more
evocative than mine. GS		moment, implying that you can
first played Watershed IV, in which the listener is placed at		never experience the same
the center of a circle of percussion instruments. I found		performance twice…
the “Raindrops” section a particularly engrossing piece as
the surrounding forest of percussion is chaotically stimulated
Ito reveal an imaginary landscape radiating outward into far		full immersion. The larger drums seem to ripple the floor as
darkness. I soon discovered that a mild elevation of rear-chan-
nel levels centered this sonic landscape			percussive wave fronts pass, smaller
in my room, at which point I ignored	B A R R Y R A W L I N S O N		sources hang in space around you,