There was a nice review of Positings in New York Classical Review, by George Grella, who described the entire event as "mesmerizing and beguiling." Below is the text concerned with Positings, my principal engagement with Roger over the course of the 2012-13 academic year, as a his computer music assistant:
"Positings ... adds an important feature of his thinking, the placement of sounds in space.
The instrumentation [of Positings] is for flute and piccolo, french horn, violin, cello and piano (the pianist also strikes gongs and triangles). There’s also a computer musician (Paul Hembreee, one of Reynold’s doctoral students), who samples the ensemble and plays back the snipped and processed sounds through a four-channel speaker system surrounding the theater. The quintet plays their music (mostly sustained tones, interspersed with rapid passages and some tutti climaxes) in a sequence, the computer plays back their playing in a different order, an antiphonal means turns into a complex temporal form in which future and past commingle.
The abstract simplicity of Positings seemed a challenge for both audience and musicians at first, the latter approached their attacks with a brittle, anxious feeling. But after the first computer response, both players and ears relaxed, and the piece became organic, logical and both sonically beautiful and emotionally beguiling in Reynolds’ distinctive way."
- See more here.
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