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Roger Reynolds

Roger Lee Reynolds (born July 18, 1934) is an American composer. He is known for his capacity to integrate diverse ideas and resources, and for the seamless blending of traditional musical sounds with those newly enabled by technology. Beyond composition, his contributions to musical life include mentorship, algorithmic design, engagement with psychoacoustics, writing books and articles, and festival organization.

During his early career, Reynolds worked in Europe and Asia, returning to the US in 1969 to accept an appointment in the music department at the University of California, San Diego. His leadership there established it as a state of the art facility – in parallel with Stanford, IRCAM, and MIT – a center for composition and computer music exploration. Reynolds won early recognition with Fulbright, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Institute of Arts and Letters awards. In 1989, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a string orchestra composition, Whispers Out of Time, an extended work responding to John Ashbery’s ambitious Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror. Reynolds is principal or co-author of five books and numerous journal articles and book chapters. In 2009 he was appointed University Professor, the first artist so honored by University of California. The Library of Congress established a Special Collection of his work in 1998.

His nearly 150 compositions to date are published exclusively by the C. F. Peters Corporation, and several dozen CDs and DVDs of his work have been commercially released in the US and Europe. Performances by the Philadelphia, San Francisco, Los Angeles, and San Diego Symphonies, among others, preceded the most recent large-scale work, george WASHINGTON, written in honor of America's first president. This work knits together the Reynolds's career-long interest in orchestra, text, extended musical forms, intermedia, and computer spatialization of sound.

Reynolds's work embodies an American artistic idealism reflecting the influence of Varèse and Cage, as well as Xenakis, and has also been compared with that of Boulez and Scelsi. Reynolds lives with his partner of 59 years, Karen, in Del Mar, California, overlooking the Pacific.

Early influences: piano studies with Kenneth Aiken (1934–1952)
The seeds for Reynolds's focus on music were planted almost by accident when his father, an architect, recommended that he purchase some phonograph records. These recordings, including a Vladimir Horowitz performance of Frédéric Chopin's Polonaise in A-flat Major, Op. 53, spurred Reynolds to take up piano lessons with Kenneth Aiken. Aiken demanded that his students delve into the cultural context behind the works of classic keyboard literature they played. Around the time that Reynolds graduated from high school in 1952, he performed a solo recital in Detroit that consisted of the Johannes Brahms Piano Sonata No. 3 in F minor, Op. 5, some Intermezzi, the Franz Liszt Hungarian Rhapsody No. 6, as well as works by Claude Debussy, and Chopin. Reynolds remembers: "I don't recall public performance as being a particularly enjoyable experience. It served to bring what I cared about in music much closer than did mere phonographic idylls, but I did not, could not, feel that what was happening as I played was actually mine. It was not the applause that interested me, but the experience of the music itself."

University of Michigan: Engineering Physics (1952–1957)
Reynolds was uncertain about his prospects as a professional pianist, and entered the University of Michigan to study engineering physics, in line with his father's expectations. During what would be his first stint at the University of Michigan, he stayed connected to music and the arts because of the "virtual melting pot of disciplinary aspirations that then engaged him." Thomas Mann's Doctor Faustus and James Joyce's Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man both left marks upon his perception of music and the arts. "I ... consumed [Joyce's Portrait] hungrily, stayed in my dormitory room for weeks, feverish over the allure of its issues, not attending classes and only narrowly escaping academic disaster...". Reynolds received a B.S.E. in physics from the University of Michigan in 1957.

Systems Development Engineer and Military Policeman
After completing his undergraduate studies, he went to work in the missile industry for Marquardt Corporation. He moved to the Van Nuys neighborhood of Los Angeles, California, and worked as a systems development engineer. However, he quickly found that he was spending an inordinate amount of time practicing piano, and decided to go back to school to study music, with the goal of becoming a small liberal arts college teacher.

But prior to returning to school, Reynolds had a one-year obligation as a reservist in the military, which he fulfilled after his short time at Marquardt. As he recalls: "Knowing that I was an engineer, I presumed I would have been an Army engineer. But in fact my MSOs (military service obligations) were either light-truck driver or military policeman. So I chose military policeman, and I learned how to disable people and how to be extraordinarily brutal. It was a rather strange experience."

Return to University of Michigan: encounter with Ross Lee Finney
Reynolds returned to Ann Arbor in 1957, prepared to commit himself to life as a pianist. He was quickly diverted from this path upon encountering resident composer Ross Lee Finney, who introduced Reynolds to composition. Reynolds took a composition for non-composers class with Finney. At the end of the semester, Reynolds' string trio was performed for the class. According to Reynolds, "Finney just decimated it. ... I mean, everything about it, he destroyed. The sounds, the time, the pitches, the form, everything was wrong. I was chastened." Despite the harsh introduction, Finney pulled Reynolds aside after the performance and recommended that he study composition with him over the summer. These summer lessons proved to be brutal. But when Reynolds was nearly ready to quit, at the end of the summer, Finney responded positively to what he brought in. Reynolds was engrossed by composing music, but he was still unsure what it meant to be a composer in America. He recalls that summer: "Although the process was by no means a smooth or an immediately encouraging one, by the time regular classes resumed in the fall of 1960 I was twenty-six, and I knew that I would do everything I could to become a composer. What did that actually mean? I have no recollection now of having had the slightest sense of what the life of a composer in America might involve."

Finney was particularly generous to Reynolds, programming three of his pieces on a Midwest Composers Symposium, something "unheard of" for student works. At these Midwest Composers Symposia, Reynolds also first encountered Harvey Sollberger, who would become a lifelong colleague and friend. From Finney, Reynolds learned of "the primacy of 'gesture,' which [Reynolds] took to be a composite of rhythm, contour, and physical energy: the empathic resonances that musical ideas could arouse — at root, perhaps, an American tendency to value sensation over analysis."

Composition studies with Roberto Gerhard
Subsequently, when the Spanish expatriate composer Roberto Gerhard came to Ann Arbor, Reynolds gravitated towards him: "I was captivated by the uncommon dimensionality of this man. Not only was he a superb musician and an inventive, even commanding composer of uncluttered, poised, and original music, but he was also both deeply intelligent and emotionally vulnerable. His susceptibility to injury, the outrage he displayed at ethical injustices, the touching warmth he offered from behind a vestigial Spanish crustiness these made an irresistible combination." From Gerhard, Reynolds absorbed the idea that composition took "the whole man... you must put everything that you have and everything that you are into every musical act. And so where I live, who I interact with, what I hear, what the weather’s like, what my granddaughter says to me, and so on, they all affect the music."

Other early encounters; degrees conferred
During the later part of his composition studies at the University of Michigan, Reynolds also sought out encounters with other prominent musical personalities, including Milton Babbitt, Edgard Varèse, Nadia Boulanger, John Cage, and Harry Partch. Reynolds sought these composers outside of his academic studies: "It was outside class that I came upon and dug into the implications of Ives, Cage, Varèse and Partch. I sought out the last three and had personal contact with them. Perhaps it was the feeling of, if not exactly forbidden, then, certainly, 'not favored' fruit that caused them to loom so large for me." Reynolds met with Partch in 1958 in Yellow Springs, Ohio, at Antioch College, where he encountered a characteristic Antioch commandment: "'Examine your basic assumptions.'" Reynolds notes that such examination did not imply abandoning those assumptions.

During 1960, Reynolds met with both Varèse and Cage in New York (and the latter again in 1961 in Ann Arbor), with Babbitt in Ann Arbor in 1960, and with Nadia Boulanger in Ann Arbor in 1961.

During this time, Reynolds also composed The Emperor of Ice Cream (1961-1962), which combined aspects of music and theater, and contained many of the features of his later music. It was composed for the ONCE festivals, but was actually premiered later, in 1965, in Rome.

Reynolds received a second bachelor's degree in music in 1960 and an M.Mus. in composition in 1961.

ONCE Festivals 1961–1963
Reynolds co-founded the ONCE Group in Ann Arbor with Robert Ashley and Gordon Mumma, and was active in the first three festivals in 1961 to 1963. Other important figures in these festivals included George Cacioppo, Donald Scavarda, Bruce Wise, filmmaker George Manupelli, and later, "Blue" Gene Tyranny. The ONCE Festival was probably the most significant nexus of avant-garde performance art and music in the Midwest in the early 1960s, with programs consisting of both American Experimentalism and European Modernism. Reynolds recalls:

"I think the primary force in the beginning was Bob and Mary Ashley. Bob had been studying at the University of Michigan with Ross Finney. ... [Ashley] had [previously] been at the Manhattan School of Music; he was a pianist at that time. He was very intense and very rebellious in some regards. [Gordon] Mumma had been at Michigan but had dropped out and was working in some kind of research dealing with seismographic measurement... The two of them had become involved with a [visual] art professor named Milton Cohen, who had what he called a Space Theatre where he had taken canvas and stretched it to make a circular, tent-like situation ... in the middle there were projectors and mirrors which flashed imagery on the [surrounding] screens. Bob and Gordon had been involved in making electronic music in relation to Cohen’s [Space Theatre]. ...they realized that if they started a festival, they were going to need resources... I think that I came into the picture partly in that way. ... So there was a confluence of capacity, differential abilities, and common interest."

In 1963, C.F. Peters offered to publish Reynolds's work, a relationship which has been exclusive since that day.

Europe: Germany, France and Italy
After he left Ann Arbor the second time, Reynolds traveled throughout Europe with his partner Karen, a flutist. They visited Germany, France and then Italy with Fulbright, Guggenheim and Rockefeller support. This sojourn to Europe served as a way for Reynolds to find his voice as a composer:

"The idea was to get out and to have the time to do the kind of growing that I thought I needed to do, because I had composed very few pieces by the time I had graduated from the University of Michigan. So at that time, although it seems odd now, going to Europe was a way of living cheaply. I lived in Europe for almost three years on nothing and with nothing, and that time was spent trying to find myself and my voice."

It emerged later that Philip Glass was in Paris during a similar period and living in the same way.

Before Paris, Reynolds had gone to Germany to study with Bernd Alois Zimmermann in Cologne, on a Fulbright Scholarship in 1962/1963. But things did not turn out the way he expected:

"I was supposed to study with Zimmermann. I went to his class. And afterwards he took me to coffee and he said, “Look, there's no point for you to be in this class.” He didn't say why but he said, “Just do what you want, come back and see me at the end, and I'll sign off.” So I actually never met with him, never had a lesson with him, never even had a conversation with him."

Instead, Reynolds worked with Gottfried Michael Koenig, and collaborated with Michael von Biel, who was living in the atelier of Karlheinz Stockhausen's friend Mary Bauermeister. Reynolds worked at the West German Radio's Electronic Music Studio, where he completed A Portrait of Vanzetti (1963)

The following academic year, 1963-1964, Karen received a Fulbright to study in Paris, although, ironically, one of the most influential moments during that year for Reynolds was in Berlin. He and Karen traveled there to meet Elliott Carter, and heard his Double Concerto while there. Reynolds was particularly struck by the spatial elements in the piece. This influenced his own composition Quick Are the Mouths of Earth (1964–1965).

Throughout their years in Europe, despite their lack of funding, Roger and Karen curated and performed in several contemporary music concerts in Paris and Italy.

Japan
Reynolds accepted a fellowship from the Institute of Current World Affairs, which took him and Karen to Japan from 1966 to 1969. In Japan the Reynoldses organized the intermedia series CROSS TALK INTERMEDIA, which in 1969 culminated in a three-day festival in Kenzo Tangei's Olympic Gymnasium. He also met and became friends with composers Toru Takemitsu, Joji Yuasa, pianist Yūji Takahashi, electronics specialist Junosuke Okuyama, critic Kuniharu Akiyama, painter Keiji Usami and theatre director Tadashi Suzuki.

Reynolds' most significant work from his time in Japan was probably PING (1968), a multimedia composition for piano, flute, percussion, harmonium, live electronic sound, film, and visual effects, based on a text by Samuel Beckett. For the work he collaborated with Butoh dancer Sekiji Maro, cinematographer Kazuro Kato, who had previously worked as a cameraman for Akira Kurosawa, and Karen, who devised a strategy for projecting the Beckett text.

California
Roger and Karen were visiting the Seattle Symphony during 1965 with sponsorship from the Rockefeller Foundation. A trip down the West Coast to visit various university music programs was suggested by the foundation's Arts Officer, Howard Klein. The last stop on that trip was at the still young University of California, San Diego campus, in La Jolla. The nascent music life at this University was viewed with much promise:

"We thought that the most dynamic social scene at that point – this was the late ’60s – was California, and so that's where we went [when returning to the U.S.]. But there was not much in San Diego at that time. It was primarily a Navy town. There was a fledgling unit of the University of California ... it was an open playing field, so the possibility of doing things was very great. ... Partch was [also] in San Diego. That wasn't a reason to go there, but it was certainly an attraction after we got there."

University of California, San Diego (1969–present)
Several years after their visit to La Jolla, Will Ogdon, then UCSD's Department of Music chair, invited the Reynolds back to the area, offering Reynolds a position as a tenured associate professor. He began work on establishing what became the Center for Music Experiment and Related Research in 1971, an organized research unit that later evolved into the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts. As was the case with the San Francisco Tape Music Center, the initial funding for CME came from the Rockefeller Foundation.

While at UCSD, Reynolds has taught courses on Music Notation, Extended Vocal Techniques, Late Beethoven Works, Text (in relation to the Red Act Project and Greek Drama), Collaboration (co-taught with Steven Schick), Extending Varèse (also co-taught with Steven Schick), and the Perils of Large Scale Form (co-taught with Chinary Ung), musical analysis, as well as private and group composition lessons.

After his arrival at the University of California, his interests diverged into several concurrently evolving paths. Thus, it is easier to talk about his work from this point based on common features between works.

Work
Reynolds has addressed the European musical tradition with three symphonies, four concertos and five string quartets, works that have been performed internationally as well as in North America.

Influence of technology
Aside from the traditional instruments of the Western Classical orchestra, Reynolds worked extensively with analog and digital electronic sound, typically employed to bolster the form and timbral richness of his works.

CCRMA
In the late 1970s, John Chowning invited Reynolds to come to Stanford's summer courses at the Center for Computing Research in Music and Acoustics (CCRMA). Because of the expense of computer equipment, electroacoustic work was done very differently at that time: "...[W]hen I went to Stanford to start working in computers at the end of the ’70s, I worked with a lot of different people there who were around the lab, because this was at a time when the so-called time-sharing machines meant that everyone in the building heard what everyone else was doing and everyone was involved with everyone else. So if something wasn't working you just asked the person sitting next to you [for help] and you'd work it out together." At CCRMA, Reynolds finished the sound synthesis portion of ...the serpent-snapping eye... (1978) (uses FM Synthesis) and VOICESPACE IV: The Palace (1978–80) (uses digital signal processing).

IRCAM
Shortly after his involvement at CCRMA, the French Institut de Recherche et Coordination Acoustique/Musique (IRCAM) offered Reynolds a commission and residency, which was followed up by two more residences over the course of two decades. When he first went to IRCAM, he made the choice to utilize technologically expert assistants to create software or hardware solutions to specific musical ideas inherent in his compositions. This practice has since spawned many collaborative ventures with various musical assistants, as Reynolds notes: When I went to IRCAM ... there was this concept of the Musical Assistant. ... I realized right away that this allowed me to make a choice: whether I would decide to spend a few years not composing and learning what I would need to do to become a self-sufficient computer-music composer or that I was going to collaborate with other people. [On collaboration:] You enter into a relationship with one or more people and you have to sacrifice some of your autonomy and they have to sacrifice some of theirs in order to get to a place that you couldn’t get without each other. And I like that kind of situation. Archipelago (1982–83) was one of the first works that Reynolds did that used technology to drastically alter not only the sounds of the composition, but also the process of composing. The impetus was as the title suggests, a chain of islands, an idea which Reynolds elaborated on with a layered theme and variations process. With fifteen themes and their own variations, distributed unevenly over sub-groups of a thirty-two member chamber orchestra, Reynolds needed technology to transform both the timbres and the intricate fragmentation and reordering of the sounds in ways that live performers could not. This was the first time that Reynolds spent extended periods of time working with computers to transform musical material, along with spatialization. IRCAM was an extremely fertile environment for compositional innovation, allowing the Archipelago project to thrive: "...[T]he process [of composing the piece] was interactive because I was at IRCAM and had the privilege of working with a very smart young composer, Thierry Lancino, who was my musical assistant, and also consulting with people like David Wessel and Stephen McAdams and so on. It was an astonishing opportunity. But in this case, the tie between the impetus, the medium, and the need for technology was absolutely clear. If one listens to the piece, one hears that [technology] was needed and also that it works." Odyssey (1989–93), primarily composed during the early 1990s, incorporates two singers, two speakers, instrumental ensemble, and six-channel computer sound. "Odyssey required me to settle on an ideal set of multilingual Beckett texts by means of which to portray the course of his life." There was a chaotic element in the text that Reynolds wished to portray in the music, and he undertook some of the first experiments with using strange attractors (specifically the Lorenz attractor) in music with this composition, citing influence from James Gleick. Reynolds notes that the process of creating musically beguiling results from a strange attractor was "arduous" and "grueling."

His last work at IRCAM, The Angel of Death (1998–2001), for solo piano, chamber orchestra, and 6-channel computer processed sound, was written with a substantial number of perceptual psychologists assisting and analyzing both the planning and the end results. His assistant on the project was Frédérique Voisin, and the principal psychologists were Steven McAdams (IRCAM) and Emannuel Bigand (University of Bourgone). The end results included a special issue of the journal Music Perception, edited by Daniel Levitin, an audio CD / CDROM publication by IRCAM, along with a day-long conference in Sydney, Australia.

UPIC (1983–84)
Shortly after his first trip to IRCAM, he was also invited to compose a work using the Les Ateliers UPIC System, which Iannis Xenakis had created for Mycenae Alpha (1978). This engagement resulted in Ariadne's Thread for string quartet and UPIC sound.

SANCTUARY (2003–07)
A composer-in-residence appointment at the California Institute for Telecommunications and Information Technology (at UCSD) allowed Reynolds to finish his SANCTUARY project: an evening-length, four-movement piece for percussion quartet and real-time computer transformations. The completed work was premiered in 2007 at I.M. Pei’s National Gallery of Art, and later the same year repeated in the courtyard of the Salk Institute in La Jolla. The DVD that arose from this project was intended to alter the way contemporary classical music is received, because of the intimacy with which the performers knew the work and the audio-visual complexity with which it was presented. Steven Schick and red fish blue fish had been working on the piece for five years by the time the DVD was recorded. Ross Karre prepared a complexly scripted editing plan. The embodied experience that such intimacy breeds is very important to Reynolds: "A lot of our experience with music is empathic – that is, we, our bodies, our sensibilities, identify with and respond to, even literally move with the physicality of the sounds that are generating the musical experience. ... [The immersion of the performers in a work] allows our empathy as listeners to flow out and extend and commit. We see that the performers are really engaged and we get engaged; we trust them."

imAge/imagE
Around 2000, Reynolds began writing a series of short, complementary solos, entitled, for example, imagE/guitar and imAge/guitar. The “E” is more elegiac and evocative, the “A”, assertive and angular. As his interest in algorithmic transformation migrated towards real-time performance interaction, Reynolds produced a series of extended compositions using the materials of a solo pair as his thematic resource. Dream Mirror, for guitar and computer musician, is a duo whose internal sections are framed by completely notated music, but move into a collaboratively improvisational interaction within these frames.

The improvisatory interactions are algorithmically driven, with the soloist and computer musician interacting flexibly, but under well-defined conditions. Both Dream Mirror, for guitarist Pablo Gómez-Cano, and MARKed MUSIC, for contrabassist Mark Dresser, involved close collaboration with computer musician, Jaime Oliver. Toward Another World: LAMENT for clarinet and computer musician, as well as similar duos involving violin (Shifting/Drifting) and cello (PERSISTENCE) followed.

When composing Shifting/Drifting, Reynolds worked closely with his frequent violin collaborator Irvine Arditti on the acoustic material, and computer musician Paul Hembree on the electronic sound. The French classical music periodical Diapason (magazine) described the piece as: ''Un espace aussi artificiel que vaste apporte une sensation de distance et de perspective assez vertigineuse. Le rendu sonore global frappe par l’expansion du lyrisme et d’une virtuosité violonistique qui prend en quelque sorte racine chez Bach (la Chaconne de la Partita no 2 fait d’ailleurs une apparition masquée)...'' (English: A space as artificial as it is vast brings a rather dizzying sensation of distance and perspective. The overall sound rendering is striking by the expansion of lyricism and a violin virtuosity which takes root, in a way, in Bach (the Chaconne from Partita no. 2 also makes a hidden appearance)...)

Influence of literature and poetry
Text has been an important resource for Reynolds's work, in particular, the poetry of Beckett, Borges, Stevens, and John Ashbery. Since the mid-1970s he has been engaged with the use of language as sound, "the ways in which a vocalist's manner of utterance – whether spoken, declaimed, sung, or indebted to some uncommon mode of production" affect the experience of the ideas that the text carries. Reynolds was stimulated by his UCSD colleagues Kenneth Gaburo and baritone Philip Larson, deploying extended vocal techniques, such as "vocal-fry" in the VOICESPACE works (quadraphonic tape compositions): Still (1975), A Merciful Coincidence (1976), Eclipse (1979), and The Palace (1980). The VOICESPACE works also involve the intricate spatialization of both the voices and computer-generated sounds.

While serving as Valentine Visiting Professor at Amherst College in the late 1980s, Reynolds immersed himself in poetry because of the connection of Amherst with poet Emily Dickinson. He came across John Ashbery's Self-Portrait a Convex Mirror (1974) while reading one evening: "The next morning I realized that things that I had understood the night before I couldn't understand the next morning. In other words, there was something time specific about comprehension. ... That was very interesting. What usually happens when something like that occurs is that I want to write music about it, and so I decided to do a string orchestra piece." This string orchestra piece, Whispers Out of Time, was premiered in 1988 in Amherst, and won the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1989. Reynolds later worked collaboratively with John Ashbery on the seventy-minute song cycle last things, I think, to think about (1994), which uses a spatialized recording of the poet speaking.

Influence of visual arts
Visual art has provided Reynolds with inspiration for several works, such as the Symphony [The Stages of Life] (1991–92), which drew from self-portraits by Rembrandt and Picasso, and Visions (1991), a string quartet that responded to Bruegel. A later project involving visual art was The Image Machine (2005), which arose from rather elaborate interdisciplinary collaboration called 22, headed by Thanassis Rikakis, then at Arizona State University. This large-scale work involved motion capture of a dancer, to be used as a control element: "At the center of this project was the idea that it would be possible to capture the complex motion [of a dancer] in real time, and to have a computer model and then monitor the motion in such a way that it could send control information to other artists who would create parallel and deeply responsive elements to a larger performance totality." Reynolds worked with choreographer Bill T. Jones, clarinetist Anthony Burr, and percussionist Steven Schick on the project, along with audio software designers Pei Xiang and Peter Otto, and visual rendering artists Paul Kaiser, Shelley Eshkar, and Marc Downie. The process was not necessarily tranquil, though it was rewarding, as Reynolds recalls: "We achieved a meld of media, high technology, and aesthetic force unequaled by anything else I had experienced. The process was not smooth. In fact it was sometimes destructively rancorous. None-the-less, the product of long effort and mutual adjustment, one component resource to the other, showed vividly and thrillingly what one of art's futures might be." Among the audio software resources created for 22 was MATRIX, a new algorithm designed by Reynolds which he has used since on various projects.

Influence of mythology
Myth has been an important resource for Reynolds's work, as evident in the title of his second symphony: Symphony [Myths] (1990). Later, this mythological preoccupation grew into the Red Act Project, the first installment of which was commissioned by the British Broadcasting Corporation. This piece, The Red Act Arias, was premiered at the 1997 Proms, animating text from Aeschylus with narrator, choir, orchestra and eight channel electronic sound. "Perhaps the most powerful impression any narrative text has ever left on me, though, is that inscribed by Aeschylus in Agamemnon, the first play of the Oresteia trilogy. Again, there is an intersection of intellectual implication, moving narrative, associations through imagery and oppositions that is magnetic. Nevertheless, it is the flow of the language itself as rendered into English by Richmond Lattimore that cemented my resolve to embark upon the Red Act Project. I [was] engaged with it for more than a decade." Responding to related texts, Reynolds produced Justice (1999-2001), commissioned by the Library of Congress, and Illusion (2006), commissioned by the Los Angeles Philharmonic with funding from the Koussevitsky and Rockefeller foundations.

Space: metaphoric, auditory, architectural
Reynolds has been involved with the concept of Space as a potential musical resource for most of his career, leading to a reputation that rests, in part, upon his “wizardry in sending music flying through space: whether vocal, instrumental, or computerized”. This signature feature first appeared in the notationally innovative theater piece, The Emperor of Ice-Cream (1961–62). In this work, Reynolds sought to bring conceptual elements in the text to the fore with the aid of spatial movement of sound.

"I began my own efforts to address space in modest fashion, in a music-theater composition [The Emperor of Ice Cream] intended for the ONCE Festivals but not actually premiered until 1965 in the context of the Nuova Consonanza Festival of Franco Evangelisti's, in Rome. ... So, in the case of [Wallace] Stevens's line 'And spread it so as to cover her face,' the eight singers, arrayed across the front of the stage, pass the phonemes of the associated melodic phrase back and forth by fading in and out successively."

Later, in Japan, Reynolds worked with engineer Junosuke Okuyama to build a "photo-cell sound distributor," which used a matrix of photoelectric cells to move sounds around a quadraphonic setup, with the aid of a flashlight as a kind of controller. This device was used in the multimedia composition PING (1968). More recently, Reynolds's Mode Records Watershed (1998) DVD was the first such disc to feature music conceived specifically for discrete multichannel presentation in Dolby Digital 5.1.

"I wrote a piece, Watershed IV, for percussionist Steven Schick, which involved the very fundamental conceit that he was centered within an instrumental array. The idea was that the audience would be put in there with him, metaphorically. There would be speakers surrounding the audience that would reproduce, at some level, for the listener, the experience that Steve was having within his array of instruments. Steve and I worked almost a year on the setup for that piece, playing with different spiral arrangements and numbers of instruments and different geometries."

He is concerned not only with the physical locations of sound sources around a listener, but also metaphoric notions of space. As he notes, "'Space' can signify a physical framework by means of which we comprehend the conditions of the 'real world' around us, but it can also become a referential tool that helps us to place into relative and often revelatory relationships other less objectively characterizable data."

In addition to the auditory effects of spatial location and metaphoric notions of space, Reynolds has responded to various architectural spaces, creating works explicitly for performance in various buildings, including Arata Isozaki's Art Tower Mito and also his Gran Ship, Kenzō Tange's Olympic Gymnasium in Tokyo, Louis I. Kahn's Salk Institute, Frank Lloyd Wright's Guggenheim Museum, Christian de Portzamparc's Cité de la Musique, Frank Gehry's Walt Disney Concert Hall, the Royal Albert Hall, and the Great Hall of the Library of Congress, the Kennedy Center, I.M. Pei's East Wing of the National Gallery of Art. Reynolds adapts his use of spatial audio to the performance space.

"Gradually it became clear that blunter tools can work to greater advantage in large spaces with comparatively larger audiences. In composing The Red Act Arias for performance in London's cavernous, 6,000-seat Royal Albert Hall, for example, I decided to use a multileveled system with eight groups of loudspeakers. Rather than attempting to position sounds precisely on perceivable paths around the hall, I concentrated on broad, sweeping gestures that surged across or around the performance space in unmistakable fashion."

Other series of works
From the 1970s, when he produced the five VOICESPACE works, Reynolds has been interested in generating series of related works. He has performed multiple presentations of PASSAGE events (involving the reading and spatialization of original texts, projected images, and live performances), composed seven complementary pairs of imagE/ and imAge/ solo works, and, most recently, six works belonging to the “SHARESPACE” series of duos for individual instruments and computer musicians.

Mentorship, research and writing
In addition to his compositional activities, Reynolds's academic career has taken him to Europe, the Nordic countries, South America, Asia, Mexico and the United States, where he has lectured, organized events, and taught. Though his focus has been on the Music Department at UCSD, Reynolds has occupied visiting positions at various universities: the University of Illinois (Champaign–Urbana, IL, Spring 1971), CUNY-Brooklyn College (Spring 1985), the Peabody Institute of Johns Hopkins University, Yale University (Spring 1982), Amherst College (Fall 1988), and at Harvard University as Fromm Visiting Professor (Fall 2013). In his role as a UC University Professor, Reynolds was artist-in-residence and taught courses at University of California, Washington Center, the University of California’s Washington, DC campus (2010–2015).

At the University of Illinois, Reynolds wrote his first book, Mind Models: New Forms of Musical Experience (1975). It covers a wide range of topics concerning the contemporary world and the role of art in that world, specific considerations of the materials of music, and the way those materials are shaped by contemporary composers.

"At the time that Mind Models first appeared in print, no one else had attempted to rigorously define the issues raised by those composers who broke most deliberately with traditional European practice. ... Reynolds was the first to clearly identify and consolidate into a single framework the vast array of forces (cultural, political, perceptual, and technical) shaping this heterogeneous body of work."

Reynolds wrote A Searcher's Path (1987) while serving as visiting professor at CUNY – Brooklyn College, and Form and Method: Composing Music while serving as Randolph Rothschild Guest Composer at the Peabody Conservatory of Johns Hopkins University. The later closely details Reynolds's compositional process. In addition to his books, he has written articles for periodicals including Perspectives of New Music, the Contemporary Music Review, Polyphone, Inharmoniques, The Musical Quarterly, American Music, Music Perception, and Nature.

Most recently, Reynolds completed the monograph Xenakis Creates in Architecture and Music: The Reynolds Desert House (2022), working with his wife Karen Reynolds to describe how Xenakis designed an unbuilt but fully-planned house for the Reynolds family in the Anza Borrego desert.

In addition to visiting positions, Reynolds has also given master classes around the world, in places such as Buenos Aires, Thessaloniki, Porto Alegre, IRCAM, Warsaw, the Sibelius Academy in Helsinki, and the Central Conservatory of Music in Beijing. Furthermore, he has been a featured composer at numerous music festivals, including Music Today and the Suntory International Program in Japan, the Edinburgh and Proms festivals in the United Kingdom, the Helsinki and Zagreb biennales, the Darmstädter Ferienkurse, New Music Concerts (Toronto), Warsaw Autumn, Why Note? (Dijon), musica viva (Munich), the Agora Festival (Paris), various ISCM festivals, and the New York Philharmonic's Horizons.

Discography

 * MUSIC FROM THE ONCE FESTIVAL 1961–1966 (1966) – New World 80567-2 (5 CDs)
 * Epigram and Evolution (1960, piano)
 * Wedge (1961, chamber ensemble)
 * Mosaic (1962, flute and piano)
 * A Portrait of Vanzetti (1962–63, narrator, ensemble, and tape)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: VOICESPACE (1980) – Lovely Music LCD 1801
 * The Palace (Voicespace IV) (1980, baritone and tape)
 * Eclipse (Voicespace III) (1979, tape)
 * Still (Voicespace I) (1975, tape)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: ALL KNOWN ALL WHITE (1984) – Pogus P21025-2
 * …the serpent-snapping eye (1978, trumpet, percussion, piano, and tape)
 * Ping (1968, piano, flute, percussion, and live electronics)
 * Traces (1969, flute, piano, cello, and live electronics)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: DISTANT IMAGES (1987) – Lovely Music VR 1803 7-4529-51803-1-9
 * Less than Two (1976–79, two pianos, two percussionists, and tape)
 * Aether (1983, violin and piano)
 * NEW MUSIC SERIES: VOLUME 2 (1988) – Neuma Records 45072
 * Autumn Island (1986, for marimba)
 * ARDITTI (1989) – Gramavision R2 79440
 * Coconino … a shattered landscape (1985, for string quartet)
 * COMPUTER MUSIC CURRENTS 4 (1989) – Wergo WER 2024-50
 * The Vanity of Words (1986, for computer processed vocal sounds)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS (1989) – New World 80401-2
 * Whispers Out of Time (1988, string orchestra)
 * Transfigured Wind II (1983, flute, orchestra, and tape)
 * ELECTRO ACOUSTIC MUSIC: CLASSICS (1990) – Neuma Records 450-74
 * Transfigured Wind IV (1985, flute and tape)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS (1990) – Neuma Records 450-78
 * Personae (1990, violin, ensemble, and tape)
 * The Vanity of Words [Voicespace V] (1986, tape)
 * Variation (1988, piano)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: SOUND ENCOUNTERS (1990) – GM Recordings GM2039CD
 * Roger Reynolds: The Dream of Infinite Rooms (1986, cello, orchestra, and tape)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: ELECTROACOUSTIC MUSIC (1991) – New World 80431-2
 * The Ivanov Suite (1991, tape)
 * Versions/Stages (1988–91, tape)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: SONOR ENSEMBLE (1993) – Composers Recordings, Inc. / Anthology of Recorded Music, Inc. NWCR652
 * Not Only Night (1988, soprano, flute, clarinet, violin, cello, piano)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: THE PARIS PIECES (1995) – Neuma Records 450-91 (2 CD)
 * Odyssey (1989–92, two singers, ensemble, and computer sound)
 * Summer Island (1984, oboe and computer sound)
 * Archipelago (1982–83, ensemble and computer sound)
 * Autumn Island (1986, marimba)
 * Fantasy for Pianist (1964, piano)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS (1996) – Montaigne 782083 (2 CD)
 * Coconino... a shattered landscape (1985, revised 1993, string quartet)
 * Visions (1991, string quartet)
 * Kokoro (1992, solo violin)
 * Ariadne's Thread (1994, string quartet)
 * Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward... (1989, solo cello)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: FROM BEHIND THE UNREASONING MASK (1998) – New World 80237-2
 * From Behind the Unreasoning Mask (1975, trombone, percussion, and tape)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: WATERSHED (1998) – mode 70 DVD
 * Watershed IV (1995, percussion and real-time sound spatialization)
 * Eclipse (1979, computer generated and processed sound)
 * The Red Act Arias [excerpt] (1997, for 8-channel computer sound)
 * STEVEN SCHICK: DRUMMING IN THE DARK (1998) – Neuma Records 450-100
 * Watershed I (1995, solo percussion)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: THREE CIRCUITOUS PATHS (2002) – Neuma Records 450-102
 * Transfigured Wind III (1984, flute, ensemble, and tape)
 * Ambages (1965, flute)
 * Mistral (1985, chamber ensemble)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: LAST THINGS, I THINK, TO THINK ABOUT (2002) – EMF CD 044
 * last things, I think, to think about (1994, baritone, piano, and tape)
 * FLUE (2003) – Einstein Records EIN 021
 * ...brain ablaze... she howled aloud (2000–2003, one, two or three piccolos, computer processed sound, and real time spatialization)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: PROCESS AND PASSION (2004) – Pogus P21032-2 (2 CD)
 * Kokoro (1992, violin)
 * Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward... (1989, cello)
 * Process and Passion (2002, violin, cello, and computer processed sound)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: WHISPERS OUT OF TIME [works for orchestra] (2007) – mode 183
 * Symphony [Myths] (1990, orchestra)
 * Whispers Out of Time (1988, orchestra)
 * Symphony [Vertigo] (1987, orchestra, and computer processed sound)
 * ANTARES PLAYS WORKS BY PETER LIEBERSON AND ROGER REYNOLDS (2009) – New Focus Recordings FCR112
 * Shadowed Narrative (1978–81, clarinet, violin, cello, piano)
 * EPIGRAM AND EVOLUTION: COMPLETE PIANO WORKS OF ROGER REYNOLDS (2009) – mode 212/213
 * Fantasy for Pianist (1964, piano)
 * imAge/piano (2007, piano)
 * Epigram and Evolution (1960, piano)
 * Variation (1988, piano)
 * imagE/piano (2007, piano)
 * Traces (1968, flute, piano, live electronics)
 * Less than Two (1978, for 2 pianos, 2 percussionists and computer processed sound)
 * The Angel of Death (1998–2001, piano, chamber orchestra and computer processed sound)
 * MARK DRESSER: GUTS (2010) – Kadima Collective Recordings Triptych Series
 * imAge/contrabass and imagE/contrabass (2008–2010)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: SANCTUARY (2011) – mode 232/33 DVD
 * Sanctuary (2003 – 2007, percussion quartet & live electronics)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: VIOLIN WORKS (2022) – BMOP/Sound 1086
 * Personae (1989-1990, solo violin and chamber ensemble with computer processed sound)
 * Kokoro (1991-1992, solo violin)
 * Aspiration (2004-2005, solo violin and chamber orchestra)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: ASPIRATION (2022) – Kairos 0015051KAI
 * Shifting/Drifting (2015, solo violin, real-time algorithmic transformation)
 * imagE/violin & imAge/violin (2015, solo violin)
 * Aspiration (2004-2005, solo violin and chamber orchestra)
 * Kokoro (1991-1992, solo violin)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: ASPIRATION (2022) – Kairos 0015051KAI
 * Shifting/Drifting (2015, solo violin, real-time algorithmic transformation)
 * imagE/violin & imAge/violin (2015, solo violin)
 * Aspiration (2004-2005, solo violin and chamber orchestra)
 * Kokoro (1991-1992, solo violin)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: THE imagE-imAge SET (2022) - Neuma 450-114
 * imAge/piano & imagE/piano (2007-2008, solo piano)
 * imAge/contrabass & imagE/contrabass (2008-2010, solo contrabass)
 * imAge/guitar & imagE/guitar (2009, solo guitar)
 * imagE/viola & imAge/viola (2012-2014, solo viola)
 * imagE/flute & imAge/flute (2009-2014, solo flute)
 * imagE/cello & imAge/cello (2007, solo cello)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: COMPLETE CELLO WORKS (2014) - mode 277-278
 * Thoughts, Places, Dreams (2013, solo cello and chamber orchestra)
 * Colombi Daydream (2010, solo cello)
 * Focus a beam, emptied of thinking, outward... (1989, solo cello)
 * imagE/cello & imAge/cello (2007, solo cello)
 * Process and Passion (2002, violin, cello and computer processed sound)
 * A Crimson Path (2000-2002, cello and piano)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: ROGER REYNOLDS AT 85, VOL 1 (2020) - mode 326
 * FLiGHT (2012-2016, string quartet)
 * not forgotten (2007-2010, string quartet)
 * ROGER REYNOLDS: ROGER REYNOLDS AT 85, VOL 2 (2021) - mode 329
 * Piano Etudes: Books I & II (2010–17, solo piano)

title: Roger Reynolds


text:
North Pyongan Province

North Pyongan Province (also spelled North P'yŏngan; ; ) is a western province of North Korea. The province was formed in 1896 from the northern half of the former P'yŏng'an Province, remained a province of Korea until 1945, then became a province of North Korea. Its capital is Sinŭiju. In 2002, Sinŭiju Special Administrative Region—near the city of Sinuiju—was established as a separately governed Special Administrative Region.

Geography
The Yalu River forms the northern border with China's Liaoning province. The province is also bordered to the east by Chagang Province and to the south by South Pyong'an Province. The Sinŭiju Special Administrative Region is located in the western corner of the province, and was created as an administrative entity separate from North Pyongan in 2002. North Pyongan is surrounded by water to the west with the Korea Bay and the Yellow Sea.

Administrative divisions
North Pyongan is divided into 3 cities (si) and 22 counties (kun). Each entity is listed below in English, Chosŏn'gŭl, and Hancha.

license: Creative Commons - Attribution Share-Alike - https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/4.0/

title: North Pyongan Province


text:
Talk:San Jose State University

Requested move 14 October 2022

 * The following is a closed discussion of a requested move. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made in a new section on the talk page. Editors desiring to contest the closing decision should consider a move review after discussing it on the closer's talk page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.

The result of the move request was: not moved. As laid out in the discussion, current name appears to be the common name. (closed by non-admin page mover) – robertsky (talk) 15:56, 22 October 2022 (UTC)

San Jose State University → San José State University – The official name and corresponding logos contain an accent over the e. Jay Coop · Talk · Contributions 19:40, 14 October 2022 (UTC) The discussion above is closed. Please do not modify it. Subsequent comments should be made on the appropriate discussion page. No further edits should be made to this discussion.
 * Support per nom.--Ortizesp (talk) 20:36, 14 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME. Wikipedia prefers the common name used by most independent reliable sources, not the official name. Most local and national media, as well as other independent reliable sources, especially when covering the university's football team and its other sports teams, seem to commonly use "Jose" without the accent when covering the school. This is consistent with the common usage of the name of the city of San Jose, without the accent. Zzyzx11 (talk) 01:34, 15 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME for the reasons stated. --Coolcaesar (talk) 02:31, 16 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Strong Support, the accent is not only used overwhelmingly in official sources, it is also used by third parties, from major news outlets to major college rankings (such as ESPN - San José State Spartans Basketball or US News & World Report - San José State University). Cristiano Tomás (talk) 14:21, 17 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME. Agree with Zzyzx11. Also note that the first external link in above comment mostly uses "Jose" without the accent, and the second uses both, very inconsistently. Station1 (talk) 08:11, 18 October 2022 (UTC)
 * Oppose per WP:COMMONNAME based on the Google Ngrams. Rreagan007 (talk) 18:33, 20 October 2022 (UTC)

Requested move 13 January 2023

San Jose State University → San José State University

The official name of the institution is San José State University (with diacritical mark included), and has been this way now for at least a decade. Many page-one Google search returns for "San Jose State University" include the diacritical mark. These search returns include the university's official website, all of the university's official social media feeds, the latest USNWR college rankings and Glassdoor. ESPN also includes the diacritical mark in all of its SJSU athletics coverage.

Why are we resisting referring to SJSU correctly and accurately? A Wiki page move here helps to clear the air and basically set the record state. Let Wikipedia lead by example as any legitimate encyclopedic enterprise should.

In Wiki's own published essay on this topic, it states: "Particular care is taken to spell personal names correctly."

Moreover, the essay states: "Accuracy (the lack of diacritics in foreign names is considered a grammatical error or misspelling by several reliable sources), consistency (following the "house style" instead of case-by-case use of the most common spelling), harmlessness (the diacriticless spelling is deducible from the proper noun, but not vice versa), pronunciation guidance, informativeness (an encyclopedia's primary purpose is to educate the readers by providing accurate, complete and trustworthy information) and respect (particularly with living people, knowingly misspelling a name could be both unencyclopedic and unethical)."

Can we put this to a vote again, please? Let's do the right thing here.

Londonfifo (talk) 04:43, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

 * Support per WP:DIACRITICAL MARKS Again, there is no harm in including the diacritic here since the old, incorrect spelling is easily deduced from the newer, correct spelling. Conversely, and more importantly, the correct spelling that includes the diacritic cannot easily be deduced from the old, incorrect spelling. Above all, Wikipedia is supposed to reflect current, accurate information; not outdated, inaccurate information. The official name of the university is San José State University and has been for years. Let's get this right per Wiki's own guidelines. Londonfifo (talk) 05:03, 14 January 2023 (UTC)

 * Support per WP:DIACRITICAL MARKS: For the same reasons stated by @Londonfifo SammySpartan (talk) 22:37, 3 February 2023 (UTC)

— Relisting. SammySpartan (talk) 23:50, 20 November 2023 (UTC)

title: Talk:San Jose State University


text:
User talk:Ani07l

Hello, and welcome to Wikipedia. Here are some useful links in case you haven't already found them; *How to edit a page *How to write a great article *Naming conventions *Manual of Style If you have any questions, see the help pages, add a question to the village pump or ask me on my talk page. I hope you enjoy editing here and being a Wikipedian! Alexandros 03:11, 6 Dec 2003 (UTC)

License tagging for File:Jan de Bont.jpg
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title: User talk:Ani07l


text:
It's Academic

It's Academic is the name for a number of televised academic student quiz shows for high school students through the United States and internationally. It's Academic programs have notably aired on NBC-owned WRC-TV (and, as of October 29, 2022, exclusively on PBS member station WETA-TV) in Washington, D.C., NBC affiliate WVIR-TV in Charlottesville, Virginia, and CBS-owned WJZ-TV in Baltimore, Maryland.

The Washington, D.C. version of the show has been on the air since October 7, 1961, and is recognized by the Guinness World Records as the longest-running quiz program in TV history. The program was created for WRC by Sophie Altman, who continued as executive producer until her death on May 24, 2008. Mac McGarry hosted the Washington shows from the beginning until June 25, 2011. Hillary Howard, formerly a news anchor for Washington radio station WTOP-FM, took over as host subsequent to McGarry's official retirement in November 2011. The program is sponsored by philanthropist investor David Rubenstein and by the McLean, Virginia-based Mitre Corporation.

Format
The single-elimination tournament features 81 schools in the Washington metropolitan area, 81 schools in the Baltimore metropolitan area (including Western Maryland and the Eastern Shore), and nine schools in the Central Virginia region. The winners in each region go on to battle each other in the Super Bowl.

Each contest is composed of five rounds. Round 1 is a category round with eight themed questions (e.g. "the letter B" or "famous paintings"). Questions do not appear on the players' monitors but do appear for the home viewers. Each team is given 100 points before this round and teams receive 10 points for each correct answer and lose 10 for each incorrect answer.

In Round 2, each team is individually asked five questions and receive 20 points each for a correct answer, but do not lose points for an incorrect answer.

Round 3 is a toss-up visual round. The monitor displays an image and the host provides a question accompanying the image. Teams receive 20 points for each correct answer and lose 20 for each incorrect answer (10 until April 19, 2014 in Washington, Baltimore, and starting with the 2014 season in Charlottesville; other cities' visual rounds are still 10 points up or down). Eight questions are used. The fourth question is always a math question.

Before Round 4 the captain of each team introduces the sponsors and school administrators and coaches. Teams then select from three question packets. The team to the immediate left of the team that is supposed to answer chooses which packet the answering team will use. Eight questions are given to each team, with 20 points for a correct answer and no penalties. A 25-point bonus is given if a team correctly answers all eight questions, for a total of 185 points in this round. The fourth question is always a science question and the seventh question is always a math question (data from both those questions are displayed on the monitor or team's screen).

Round 5 features quick-fire toss-up questions, each worth +/-20 points. Visual questions are worth +/-30 points. The number of questions varies depending on the time left in the game. The game ends when the buzzer sounds, home viewers may realize that the game will come to a close while the countdown clock appears on the television screen. If a team has buzzed in prior the buzzer sounding, the team is required to answer the question before the game is considered over. If there is a tie in the knockout round (e.g. the final), the presenter may ask one last tie-breaker question to determine the winner.

After the host has announced the teams' final scores, the studio audience is invited down from the stands to join the contestants on camera during the closing credit sequence. In the Washington version from about 1976 to June 2017, the song heard under the credit roll (if there are no musicians from any of the competing schools) was "T.L.C. (Tender Loving Care)" by the band MFSB (a new theme was introduced in Washington for the 2017–18 season, entitled "Just Let Go", by Marti Amado and Ron Bolton, music production by Network Music which is used throughout the show).

As a result of the COVID-19 pandemic in the United States, later episodes in the 2019–2020 season were played in a remote format, with teams in separate locations, and without buzzers. Teams were recorded separately, and were not aware of other teams' scores. The competition will return to the studio in late winter/early spring 2023.

Discontinued rounds
Prior to the adoption of the current format, there were several other formats of play.

Category round
The "very fast" category round consisted of questions pertaining to the same category. In some cases, the question was the same throughout the round: teams were given different items, and had to answer the common question on the basis of each item (e.g., given a state, name either senator from that state ). In other cases, all the answers in the category round shared an announced characteristic in common (e.g., geographical locations whose names begin and end with "A" ). Teams used their buzzers in this round, earning 10 points for a correct answer, but losing 10 points (later 20 points ) for wrong answers.

Timed round
In all forms, a team individually answers questions from a packet within a time limit. In one form, at the beginning of the game, teams get one minute to answer questions for 20 points each. In this form, teams are not penalized for wrong answers, in order to help the teams in "building score". In another form, teams have one and a half minutes to answer questions for 20 points each. However, 20 points are deducted for a wrong answer. Teams may pass a question, losing 10 points; however, the other two teams may buzz-in to answer the passed questions (with a few exceptions) for plus or minus 20 points after the time runs out for the team's turn. Every question that is fully read must be answered or passed within a reasonable time. However, if a question is not finished when time expires, the team may reject it without penalty or answer the question at their own risk. In this form, getting all 10 questions (later eight) correct originally earned the team a 50-point bonus, later reduced to 25.

Scrimmage round
A "scrimmage round" was once used during the 1977–78 Buffalo season championship, as well as in Washington and Baltimore through much of the 1970s, and also in Cleveland at about that time. Teams were instructed to "use [their] lights and buzzers" for a "one-minute scrimmage round." 10 points were scored for a correct answer, with no penalties.

Guest questions
Beginning in 2008, telecasts on the WRC-TV version have included "guest questions" from notable persons in government, business, sports, and the arts. Among those seen in pre-recorded videos are:

 * Stephen Breyer, US Supreme Court Justice
 * Lynda Carter, Actress
 * Elaine Chao, US Secretary of Labor
 * G. Wayne Clough, director of the Smithsonian Institution
 * Gen. Jack Dailey, director of the National Air and Space Museum
 * Tom Donohue, president of the U.S. Chamber of Commerce
 * David Gregory, host of Meet the Press
 * Miguel Insulza, Secretary-General of Organization of American States
 * Tim Kaine, governor of Virginia
 * Ted Leonsis, owner, Washington Capitals and Washington Wizards
 * Carl Levin, U.S. Senator from Michigan
 * Chris Matthews, NBC News
 * Barbara Mikulski, U.S. Senator from Maryland
 * Rusty Powell, director of the National Gallery of Art
 * Cal Ripken Jr., member of Baseball Hall of Fame
 * Tim Russert, television journalist and moderator on Meet the Press
 * Chuck Schumer, U.S. Senator from New York and Senate Majority Leader
 * Leonard Slatkin, music director of Washington and Detroit orchestras
 * Margaret Spellings, U.S. Secretary of Education
 * John Sweeney, president of AFL–CIO
 * Clarence Thomas, Supreme Court Justice
 * Jim Webb, U.S. Senator from Virginia
 * Elias Zerhouni, director of the National Institutes of Health

Spin-offs

An Australian version of the show aired on Network 10 and the Seven Network from 1968 to 1975, and was revived by Seven's Perth affiliate in 2001. Seven took the show national in 2005.

A New Zealand version was also screened by TVNZ in the 1980s, with Lockwood Smith and John Hayden as hosts.

WNBC in New York aired a local edition of It's Academic from September 15, 1963 through July 1, 1972, hosted most of the time by Art James, with Lee Leonard filling in for a year.

WMAQ-TV in Chicago had a version in the 1960s and 1970s under the It's Academic name, hosted by Ed Grennan. The show debuted on September 29, 1962, with Arlington High School facing off against Homewood-Flossmoor High School.

WLWT, WCPO-TV and WCET in Cincinnati aired a local It's Academic from October 13, 1963 to May 30, 1982. The Cincinnati hosts included Dave Manning, Lloyd Baldwin, Steve Douglas and Claire Slemmer.

A version of It's Academic aired on CBS affiliate WBEN-TV in Buffalo from January 27, 1968 through 1986. Initially hosted by National Football League Hall of Fame radio broadcaster of the Buffalo Bills, Van Miller, the first season concluded on April 20, 1968. The show was later revived for a few months in 2008 by NBC affiliate WGRZ, with Kevin O'Neill as host. The show returned to the area starting January 12, 2013 and was hosted by O'Neill and produced by Full Circle Studios for broadcast on WGRZ.

A show using the It's Academic name aired in Richmond, Virginia on the NBC affiliate, WWBT Channel 12, from November 22, 1975 to June 26, 1976 (the Richmond championship aired on May 16, 1976), which was also hosted by Mac McGarry and sponsored by Giant. That was replaced by Battle of the Brains. Battle of the Brains has also replaced a version of It's Academic that aired in Hampton Roads.

The World Affairs Council, in conjunction with the United States Department of State, hosted an It's Academic International event in 2002, also hosted by Mac McGarry.

KHII-TV in Honolulu aired a local version titled It's Academic Hawaii hosted by Billy V (from Hawaii News Now-Sunrise). It was previously hosted by Rick Hamada and Keahi Tucker.

WEWS in Cleveland has had a version of the series since 1964. It was originally titled It's Academic and hosted by Don Cameron. In 1972, the series changed its name to Academic Challenge with host Don Webster, later replaced by Lou Maglio; the series later reverted to its former title during the mid-1990s, at which time Webster also returned as emcee. After a 35 consecutive year run and a brief hiatus, Academic Challenge returned to the WEWS airwaves in 2003 with host Adam Shapiro. Danita Harris hosted the 2006 season; from 2007 to 2016, Jason Nicholas was the host, succeeded by Hakem Dermish in December 2016 after Nicholas left WEWS. Dermish was succeeded by WCPN host Rick Jackson on April 28, 2018 after Dermish left WEWS for CBS Sports in New York, while Jackson was subsequently replaced by Rob Powers for the 2019 season.

Similar shows
A similar show predating It's Academic ran in the United Kingdom for many years featuring teams from British secondary schools. Top of the Form which ran on BBC Radio from 1948 to 1986 with a television version airing on BBC 1 from 1962 to 1975.

A Canadian quiz show, Reach for the Top was modelled on Top of the Form and began on CBUT in Vancouver in 1961 with locally produced versions airing across Canada on CBC Television from 1966 to 1985. The Toronto edition of the show on CBLT was hosted for several years by Alex Trebek, who later went on to be the long-term host of Jeopardy!.

Another similar British quiz show featuring competition by post-secondary teams is University Challenge, which has been on air since 1962, making it only slightly younger than It's Academic. It was featured in the British sitcom The Young Ones where one of the characters, Adrian, used a Stielhandgranate against another university team.

Notable contestants
Notable people who have competed on It's Academic include: Other notable participants:
 * Matt Amodio, former Jeopardy contestant
 * Michael Chabon, Pulitzer Prize-winning author
 * Bruce Cohen, Oscar-winning producer of American Beauty
 * David Ignatius, journalist and novelist
 * Joshua Foer, writer
 * Donald E. Graham, chairman and chief executive officer of Graham Holdings
 * Angus King, U.S. Senator from Maine
 * Laura Lippman, author
 * Jon Callas, cryptographer
 * Peter Salovey, President of Yale University
 * Charles Schumer, U.S. Senator from New York
 * George Stephanopoulos, political commentator
 * Michael Stryker, neuroscientist.
 * Ian Terry, Big Brother 14 winner
 * Mike D'Orso, journalist/author
 * Merrick B. Garland, U.S. Attorney General under President Joe Biden
 * Sandra Bullock appeared on the show as a cheerleader.
 * Hillary Clinton was an alternate for Maine South High School in 1965 on WMAQ-TV (Chicago).

In 1979, a charity special was held between a team of three Democratic senators (Patrick Moynihan, Lloyd Bentsen, and Alan Cranston), three Republican senators (Lowell Weicker, John Danforth, and John Heinz), and three members of the press (Jessica Savitch, Art Buchwald, and David Broder). The special was handily won by the press team.

Champions
(Note: bold denotes Super Bowl Champions (since 1972).)

title: It's Academic


text:
High-Level Shader Language

The High-Level Shader Language or High-Level Shading Language (HLSL) is a proprietary shading language developed by Microsoft for the Direct3D 9 API to augment the shader assembly language, and went on to become the required shading language for the unified shader model of Direct3D 10 and higher.

HLSL is analogous to the GLSL shading language used with the OpenGL standard. It is very similar to the Nvidia Cg shading language, as it was developed alongside it. Early versions of the two languages were considered identical, only marketed differently. HLSL shaders can enable profound speed and detail increases as well as many special effects in both 2D and 3D computer graphics.

HLSL programs come in six forms: pixel shaders (fragment in GLSL), vertex shaders, geometry shaders, compute shaders, tessellation shaders (Hull and Domain shaders), and ray tracing shaders (Ray Generation Shaders, Intersection Shaders, Any Hit/Closest Hit/Miss Shaders). A vertex shader is executed for each vertex that is submitted by the application, and is primarily responsible for transforming the vertex from object space to view space, generating texture coordinates, and calculating lighting coefficients such as the vertex's normal, tangent, and bitangent vectors. When a group of vertices (normally 3, to form a triangle) come through the vertex shader, their output position is interpolated to form pixels within its area; this process is known as rasterization.

Optionally, an application using a Direct3D 10/11/12 interface and Direct3D 10/11/12 hardware may also specify a geometry shader. This shader takes as its input some vertices of a primitive (triangle/line/point) and uses this data to generate/degenerate (or tessellate) additional primitives or to change the type of primitives, which are each then sent to the rasterizer.

D3D11.3 and D3D12 introduced Shader Model 5.1 and later 6.0.

Shader model comparison
GPUs listed are the hardware that first supported the given specifications. Manufacturers generally support all lower shader models through drivers. Note that games may claim to require a certain DirectX version, but don't necessarily require a GPU conforming to the full specification of that version, as developers can use a higher DirectX API version to target lower-Direct3D-spec hardware; for instance DirectX 9 exposes features of DirectX7-level hardware that DirectX7 did not, targeting their fixed-function T&L pipeline.

Pixel shader comparison

 * PS 1.0 — Unreleased 3dfx Rampage, DirectX 8
 * PS 1.1 — GeForce 3, DirectX 8
 * PS 1.2 — 3Dlabs Wildcat VP, DirectX 8.1
 * PS 1.3 — GeForce 4 Ti, DirectX 8.1
 * PS 1.4 — Radeon 8500-9250, Matrox Parhelia, DirectX 8.1
 * Shader Model 2.0 — Radeon 9500-9800/X300-X600, DirectX 9
 * Shader Model 2.0a — GeForce FX/PCX-optimized model, DirectX 9.0a
 * Shader Model 2.0b — Radeon X700-X850 shader model, DirectX 9.0b
 * Shader Model 3.0 — Radeon X1000 and GeForce 6, DirectX 9.0c
 * Shader Model 4.0 — Radeon HD 2000 and GeForce 8, DirectX 10
 * Shader Model 4.1 — Radeon HD 3000 and GeForce 200, DirectX 10.1
 * Shader Model 5.0 — Radeon HD 5000 and GeForce 400, DirectX 11
 * Shader Model 5.1 — GCN 1+, Fermi+, DirectX 12 (11_0+) with WDDM 2.0
 * Shader Model 6.0 — GCN 1+, Kepler+, DirectX 12 (11_0+) with WDDM 2.1
 * Shader Model 6.1 — GCN 1+, Kepler+, DirectX 12 (11_0+) with WDDM 2.3
 * Shader Model 6.2 — GCN 1+, Kepler+, DirectX 12 (11_0+) with WDDM 2.4
 * Shader Model 6.3 — GCN 1+, Kepler+, DirectX 12 (11_0+) with WDDM 2.5
 * Shader Model 6.4 — GCN 1+, Kepler+, Skylake+, DirectX 12 (11_0+) with WDDM 2.6
 * Shader Model 6.5 — GCN 1+, Kepler+, Skylake+, DirectX 12 (11_0+) with WDDM 2.7
 * Shader Model 6.6 — GCN 4+, Maxwell+, DirectX 12 (11_0+) with WDDM 3.0
 * Shader Model 6.7 — GCN 4+, Maxwell+, DirectX 12 (12_0+) with WDDM 3.1

"32 + 64" for Executed Instructions means "32 texture instructions and 64 arithmetic instructions."

title: High-Level Shader Language