Kory Reeder is an American composer and performer whose music, drawing inspiration from the visual arts and political theory, is often introspective with a “rarefied atmosphere” (Bandcamp), investigating ideas of objectivity and immediacy, while exploring the social implications of musical interaction with pieces ranging from symphonic and chamber works to field recording, text scores and computer-assisted improvisations.
Described as “one of the most captivating composers in modern classical music” (Dallas Observer), Kory’s music is performed frequently around the world in concert halls, festivals, academic settings, basements, and bars across North and South America, Africa, Asia, Australia, and Europe. A dedicated collaborator, he has frequently worked with opera, theater, and dance programs, as well as noise, free-improv, and new media artists on projects ranging from video collaborations to 24-hour live performance art works, “Pushing at limits was always on Reeder’s agenda” (Chamber Music America). He has been artist-in-residence at Arts, Letter, and Numbers, The Kimmel, Harding, Nelson Center for the Arts and has been Artist in Residence in the Everglades, Artist in residence at the Homestead National Monument, and the Composing in the Wilderness program.
With a catalog of over 100 programmed works, his work has been performed by the Toledo Symphony, The Fort Worth Symphony, and the New Jersey Symphony, as well as performances by Apartment House. His work has been heard on the BBC, Klangraum, the New Jersey Symphony Edward T. Cone Composition Institute, the New York City Electroacoustic Music Festival, the New Music Gathering, The Composers Conference, the Molten Plains series and the Molten Plains festival, Taproot New Music Festival, International Society for Contemporary Music’s World Music Days, Composer’s Circle, SEAMUS, LaTex, The New Music Conflagration’s Traveling Tunes // Traveling Sounds, the national BGSU Graduate Student Forum, the Bowling Green New Music Festival, the Electroacoustic Barn Dance, New Music on the Point, Noise Floor, New Music on the Bayou, various SCI Conferences, among many others. His work for Hecuba was awarded by The Kennedy Center American College Theater Festival for achievement in Original Composition Music and Sound Effects, he has been an ASCAP Morton Gould Award finalist, and has been recognized by the Fulbright Program, the Minnesota Orchestra Composer Institute, ACSM 116 (Tokyo), Festival Stradella (Italy), XIV Open Composition Competition named after Andrey Petrov (Russia), among others.
His music has been released on Edition Wandelweiser Records, where one may also find scores of his work, as well as portrait albums released on Full Spectrum Records, Sawyer Editions, Sawyer Spaces, Impulsive Habitat, and Another Timbre, with further releases planned for 2024 and 2025. Kory runs/operates Sawyer Editions, a small-batch label specializing in contemporary, experimental, and improvised music, especially of new and unreleased artists and the Sawyer Spaces imprint focusing on field recordings and soundscape composition.
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As a performer, Kory is a bassist, sometimes pianist, and sometimes noisemaker. Performing as a section and substitute bassist in regional orchestras as well as contemporary and traditional chamber ensembles, Kory also tours frequently as an independent artist or as an ensemble member performing his chamber music and works of others as well as in creative music and improvised musical contexts.
Kory is from Nebraska and currently resides in Texas where he is an active performer and teacher. He received his PhD from the University of North Texas where he taught courses in composition, electronic music, rock music, music as politics, and vaporwave and directed the University’s Electronics Ensemble, and the Free Improv Ensemble. He is a former student of Antoine Beuger, Anthony Donofrio, Sungi Hong, Joseph Klein, Mikel Kuehn, Elainie Lillios, and Darleen Cowles Mitchel, holds a Master of Music degree in composition from Bowling Green State University and a Bachelor of Music in composition from the University of Nebraska at Kearney where he was named a Gary Thomas Distinguished Music Alumnus in 2024.
Photo by Anton Lukoszevieze
Creativity is not a hierarchical, but an intertextual, rhizomic process, pulling from a vast array of interests, experiences, and influences. These feed into each other, to inform and motivate artists as creating persons in an ongoing process we call the creative act. Anytime an artist sets out to make something, they are experiencing a dynamic yet concentrated moment of energy in the chaotic cloud of creativity. To demonstrate this, I wrote a dissertation that you can download by clicking here that explored several ideas that inform my piece, Codex Symphonia, including musical influences, but also visual art, film, literature, philosophy, social theory, and politics. In this document, I show that the act of creating a musical work is a deeply personal process that relies heavily on the experiences and vast network of influences on the composer. With this document I look to the contextual structure(s) that point to the possibilities that a work might exist. That is to say that the composition Codex Symphonia is a specific result of an extensive network of ideas and influences not coming from a single origin—it is, in fact all of them together at the same time in a metamodernist act of reconciliation.
Because of my philosophical beliefs about creativity, I care deeply about the backgrounds of artists and what informs their work - to affirm the validity of each person’s creative context and to be empathetic to each other as creating vessels.
As a family we would go somewhere for vacation every summer. I think that there, in those trips, is where my yearning for travel and the idea of “place” became instilled in me. Growing up in a small, rural town in Nebraska, I never really appreciated the place that I lived until I was a few years into my undergrad; with experiences traveling constantly with a nationally-touring rock band, studying abroad in Norway, and performing regularly in orchestras, and several ensembles shaping my appreciation for my surroundings.
Eventually I did realize that Nebraska, shockingly, is a beautiful place. The world is quiet there; I could say “placid” and it would be accurate, but I would mean it as a term of endearment. The engulfing expanse of grass, and the dauntingly wide landscapes are immediate in effect, but temporal in comprehension. This experience is something that has forced its way into my musical language. Much of the music I write is quiet, fairly slow and delicate, but there is always activity and constant development of material that, I believe, aids in my music becoming an object in an environment as much as a sonic experience over time; something you live with, something you become, somewhere you go.
In a way, I think visual art captures these ideas of objectivity, place, immediacy, and quiet stasis perhaps better than music alone can. I think that there is so much to be learned from the techniques used in the visual arts and how they might be used in musical craftsmanship on a technical level beyond any programmatic elements that could subjectively be placed in a sonic medium. I’m especially interested in how visual artists work in series and how musicians might explore this idea of working the same “subject” again and again. With this in mind, I look to poetry and literature through the same lens (more and more, I’m thinking about my pieces as “poems,” “stories,” or “books”). Still, when we make music, what we are really dealing with are interactions and situations between people. Real people, not abstract concepts of “performers” and “audience.”
Music making, as an act of coming together is a concrete, or in a physical experience, and I think this is the real element that is often overlooked in a lot of our music-making practice (particularly “classical” music). It is the fact that music (as a verb) is an experience dealing with, and relying on the very concrete manifestations of human agency. Real people, really doing something, right now. This is fundamentally empathetic in practice, it is social. I want to be here, with you, because I’m real and so are you.
In the end, I think my work and artistic drive can be summarized as having been built on the fact that I just want to do cool stuff with my friends- all the time. That is affirmation, and I think we need that right now.
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