Born in California, James Reynolds currently lives in Berlin. He studied contemporary music with John Adams, as well as percussion at the San Francisco Conservatory of Music and composition in Cologne under Michael von Biel. Reynolds was Composer in Residence at the Laurenz Haus Foundation Basel (2004) and Visiting Artist at the University of California, Santa Barbara (2009).
After teaching Master classes at the Folkwang Hochschule Essen and playing percussion on and off-Broadway (and as band member of The Units) in the 80s in New York, Reynolds took up his long-term working relationship with the Cologne based broadcasting institution WDR. For over two decades, he has written music for literary productions, thrillers, fairytales, and children’s radio plays for the broadcaster.
Reynolds’ compositions explore the combination of words, sounds, and images – in film music as well as in his work for theatre. In 2002 he composed the music for the melodrama Vergeltung, a commissioned work from the WDR in partnership with the author Christoph Klimke, with whom Reynolds later worked on the Johann Kresnik directed plays Felix Nussbaum (Theater Osnabrück, 2010) and Fürst Pücklers Utopia (Staatstheater Cottbus, 2010). His collaboration with Johann Kresnik began in 2007 when the director adapted Kafka’s Amerika for the stage, followed by Maestro, based on the life of Herbert von Karajan (Landestheater Salzburg).
His work for the stage also includes the highly praised piece The Mousewedding, which was played in repertory at the Children’s Opera of Cologne and in the Cologne Philharmonic Hall as well as his compositions for Pavel Mikulastik and his Choreographic Theatre. Reynolds wrote the music for Mikulastik’s dance theatre productions Tanz-Marathon (2001) and Gilgamesch (2002) and for his musical Rats (2003). Further compositions for dance include a ballet by the Cathy Sharp Dance Ensemble, commissioned by the Käthe Kollwitz Museum Cologne with a premiere at the Bundeskunsthalle Bonn and a work by Lutz Gregor performed at Tanzhaus NRW.
In the field of film music, Reynolds has set Lutz Gregor’s ARTE-productions Verborgenes Venedig (2012), Das Land der Dogon (2011) and Akte Theo: Ungelöst (2010) to music. Moreover, he has written the scores to several episodes of the ARTE documentary series Auf Expeditionsreise as well as for numerous films of the documentary filmmaker Christel Fomm, of which the most recent one was Der Vietnamkrieg: Gesichter einer Tragödie (2015), awarded with the Gold World Medal at the New York Festivals 2016.
Reynolds’ latest works for the stage include the piece Tucholskys Spiegel (world premiere in July 2017 at Schlosstheater Rheinsberg) as well as the opera Ghost Knight (Geisterritter), based on the novel by the German writer Cornelia Funke. After successful film and theatre adaptions, Ghost Knight is the first book of the internationally known writer to be adapted for an opera. The world premiere took place on December 3, 2017 at the Opera Bonn.
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