All in Good Time : Music: Roger Reynolds’ Pulitzer Prize has pushed him into the spotlight. This week, the composer gets belated recognition from the San Diego Symphony when it performs his ‘Whispers Out of Time.’

When Roger Reynolds was awarded the 1989 Pulitzer Prize for music, it was not as if the UC San Diego composer had been retrieved from total obscurity. In the 1980s, the respected innovator in electronic music composition and regular participant in European and North American contemporary music festivals, heard his more traditionally scored works performed by orchestras in New York and San Francisco. Critics such as the New Yorker’s Andrew Porter hailed his orchestral and electronic melanges as visionary. But with the Pulitzer, the composer-educator’s equanimity has been overrun with a plethora of composing opportunities he cannot hope to accept.

“The change is breathtaking--and a little disturbing,” Reynolds confessed, “because of course you are exactly the same person, writing exactly the same type and quality of music as before the award. At this stage, there are enough things on the various burners in my creative kitchen, that there’s no telling whether they’ll boil over or burn, or even if I’ll finish them on time.”

Reynolds’ upcoming projects include a piece for the Los Angeles Philharmonic, a string quartet for Great Britain’s Arditti Quartet (his second for the group), and a collaborative stage work with Japanese avant-garde director Tadashi Suzuki underwritten by the Suntory Foundation.

“I’d had for some time a Koussevizky commission to write an orchestral work for which I didn’t have an interesting venue, so I had not written it. Now Esa-Pekka Salonen is going to do it with the Los Angeles Philharmonic on the first or second program he will conduct in 1992.”

Although Reynolds is contemplating projects that will take him far from the confines of the UCSD campus, he is also anticipating Thursday’s Mandeville Auditorium concert by the San Diego Symphony, a program featuring “Whispers Out of Time,” the composition that landed Reynolds his Pulitzer. The program also includes his earlier opus for orchestra and prepared tape, “Transfigured Wind II.” This concert is notable because it will give “Whispers,” scored for string orchestra and four string soloists, its first American professional performance. Premiered by the Amherst College student orchestra in December, 1988, its only other performance was given by the London Chamber Symphony in London last November.

It took the Pulitzer Prize, however, to interest the San Diego Symphony in the 55-year-old Reynolds. Ironically, only days before Reynolds received his award in March, 1989, the local orchestra had announced a new series of three concerts at UCSD’s Mandeville Auditorium devoted to contemporary American composers. Once Reynolds’ name was buzzing on the news wire services as the latest Pulitzer composer, the symphony, which had never played a Reynolds composition, belatedly revised its programming to remedy this longstanding oversight.

“The concert with the symphony was very quickly established, and since then they have been exemplary in their interaction,” explained Reynolds in his usual diplomatic tone and even-handed manner. But plans to record both pieces for New World Records using symphony musicians have run into the complexity and high costs of union regulations, a factor which bothers the composer.

“For example, a friend of mine in New York who operates a foundation told me without any doubt, a recording that would cost $100,000 to make here would cost about $1,000 in Czechoslovakia and maybe $30,000 in London,” said the Detroit-born composer. “There’s no question that, over time, large works will not be recorded in this country at all because the union situation has become so hostile, particularly in the case of demanding repertory, where you cannot anticipate the sales of a Mahler First or a Beethoven Fifth.”

Thursday’s San Diego Symphony concert will bring to the podium flutist-conductor Harvey Sollberger, a member of the Indiana University music faculty. Sollberger not only led the first performance of “Whispers,” but also was the flute soloist in the 1984 premiere of Reynolds’ “Transfigured Wind II” at the New York Philharmonic’s 1984 new-music festival.

When Reynolds’ former UCSD colleague, Bernard Rands, won the Pulitzer Prize for music in 1984, the British composer decamped Southern California a year later for a teaching post in Boston, and has subsequently become the Philadelphia Orchestra’s composer in residence. When asked if he might follow Rands’ example, Reynolds laughed.

“The question is rather like the one asked Lech Walesa when he was here. Everybody wanted to know if he would like to become president of Poland, and he said, ‘Oh Lord, I would just like to be a carpenter again.’ More responsibility is not what I’m looking for right now. I’ve put a great deal of energy into the university here, and I still feel that it is without any doubt the most appropriate and rewarding environment for me to work in. Things could change, of course.”

Many of Reynolds’ new works have been first played by SONOR, UCSD’s contemporary music ensemble, and the composer is not about to let his new status sway his loyalty to his university colleagues, which include violinist Janos Negyesy.

“I’m about two-thirds of the way through a violin concerto called ‘Personae’ for SONOR and for Janos. It will be in the pattern of ‘Transfigured Wind,’ in that it involves a number of solos that Janos recorded last June and which are now being processed in various ways by the computer at the Center for Music Experiment.”

Reynolds expects the concerto to be premiered next month at UCSD, after which SONOR will take it to a Columbia University concert in New York and a music festival at the State University of New York, Buffalo.

“It will be a great satisfaction to me; I’ve wanted to do this piece for Janos for a long time as an appropriate gesture to my colleagues here.”