Todd Reynolds

Todd Reynolds came to composition through performance and curiosity. Captivated early on by analog synthesis and guitar pedals, digital processing and sampling, spatial audio and immersive sound, he built a practice rooted in deep listening and spontaneous decision-making — starting with a single note and following where it leads.

A longtime member of the Steve Reich Ensemble, an early member of the Silk Road Ensemble, a collaborator with Meredith Monk, and a fixture in the Bang on a Can community, Reynolds has lived his musical life making and performing the new music of his colleagues alongside them as they were writing it. That close connection to the creative process proved a foundational model for him as a composer.

He is a founding member of Ethel, the critically acclaimed amplified string quartet, and as performer, collaborator, and composer his work spans some of the most celebrated recordings and stages in contemporary music. His scores include These Birds Walk (Oscilloscope Laboratories, 2013), the SXSW-premiered documentary called "exquisitely scored" by the New York Times, and Mill Town (2017), a major site-specific commission for choreographer Stephan Koplowitz and the Bates Dance Festival. As a recording artist, his discography includes Meredith Monk's Songs of Ascension (ECM), for which he assembled and led the string quartet, his remix of Atlas Ascending for Monk Mix Vol. 2, his remix of Terry Riley's In C, and Seven Sundays, his commissioned work performed by the Bang on a Can All-Stars on Field Recordings alongside Julia Wolfe, Steve Reich, David Lang, and Michael Gordon. His own double album Outerborough (Innova, 2011) was named a favorite by NPR Music and Amazon's Best in Classical.

Reynolds is an early adopter and practitioner of Soundpainting, Walter Thompson's real-time conducted composition language, and brings its principles of spontaneous, present-tense music-making into both his performance and his teaching, alongside a decades-long practice of live electronic music that treats the concert stage itself as a compositional instrument. His instrument is a hybrid of centuries: an 18th-century acoustic violin wired into a 21st-century signal chain of analog pedals, digital processing, and real-time sampling, with which he layers and composes in the moment of performance.

Reynolds teaches at the Manhattan School of Music, NYU's Tandon School of Engineering, and the Bang on a Can Summer Institute, bringing to each the same conviction that drives his work as Artist-in-Residence and Director of Special Projects at the FreshGrass Institute's Studio 9 in North Adams, MA: that young artists deserve and benefit from full access to the technological and spatial dimensions of contemporary composition. That conviction led him to propose a partnership with the Tanglewood Music Center, bringing TMC Composition Fellows into Studio 9's Meyer Sound Constellation environment for hands-on spatial composition work, a collaboration that has grown into his appointment as TMC Composition Faculty.