Things we like: Kory Reeder

To date, my exposure to Kory Reeder's music had been in improvising contexts, so after experiencing his Deep Listening workshop and collaboration with James Talambas at Dallas' New Media Contemporary last week, it seemed a good time to explore his catalog of composed works (over 100 to date). He's been posting compilations from his ten hours of archives on his Bandcamp page for free download monthly since July 2023. This quick overview will focus on commercially released recordings. 

(Random thoughts: Watching Talambas playing Ellen Fullman's Long String Instrument reminded me of the Extreme Slow Walk exercise from Pauline Oliveros' book Deep Listening: A Composer's Sound Practice. When Reeder spoke of how living in the urban sound environment has caused changes in animal behavior, I thought of how, when I worked in a grocery store, it seemed to me that human infants' cries are higher pitched than those I remember -- perhaps because they have to compete for attention with cellphone alerts?)

To begin with, the cassette if the thought evaporates was released in January 2024 on Andrew Weathers' Full Spectrum label. The piece involves both improvisation and electronics. Reeder provides the players with brief, open-ended instructions, then uses a software patch with intelligent oscillators that manipulate the sounds they generate. The first side contains duo (flute and viola) and trio (flute, viola, and cello) versions, while the second contains three different septet versions (for flute, bass clarinet, violas, cello, and double basses). 

Snow is another January 2024 release, available on CD or cassette on Reeder's own Sawyer Editions label. It's a 30-minute piece for an ensemble of violin, cello, percussion, and piano. In the first part, the piano plays a simple melody with the occasional discordant note, while the strings comment. In the second, the piano and strings seem to shift roles, from foreground to background and vice versa. The overall effect is captured in the epigraph from the poet Louise Gluck -- the feeling of moving through a spectral landscape, with only fleeting and remote human contact.

Released in 2022 on the UK-based Another Timbre label, the 72-minute, nine-movement Codex Vivere is a commission for the avant-garde/experimental ensemble Apartment House. It has the widest tonal palette (piano, violins, viola, cello, bass clarinet, and bass flute) and is the most thematically developed work in this batch, evocative of wide open spaces and broad horizons. Three of the movements, including violin and piano concertos, exceed ten minutes in length. It's notable how sometimes, Reeder's acoustic winds and strings take on the timbres of electronic instruments.

Last under the microscope here is the earliest release: love songs/duets, from 2019, on the German label Edition Wandelweiser (a favorite of Reeder's). The length and leisurely pace of the pieces (shortest: 14 minutes, longest: 25) allow the listener to attend with extreme focus to the timbral qualities of the instruments (two bass clarinets; saxophone and bass trombone; two flutes; violin and piano) as they conjoin their sounds. This might be the best entry point for the uninitiated listener into Reeder's sound world.

Reeder's serene and spacious music, with its employment of skeletal melody and overlapping long tones, is highly conducive to Deep Listening: noticing the tones (and their overtones) when they start and end, hearing the spaces between them, shifting from focal to global attention, being aware of the spatial relationship between the listener and the sound source. It's a practice worth developing.