Graham Reynolds is a composer by day and a performer by night. In Austin, Reynolds plays around town in his band Golden Arm Trio, where he leads with both piano and drumming duties. Golden Arm Trio, a fixture on both Austin rock and experimental music scenes, relies heavily on improvisation and spontaneity, and a definite sense of devilish glee and play in which Reynolds revels.
But Reynolds also leads a successful career as a composer, which involves commissions for theater troupes, dance companies, concert halls, and film directors, not to mention his own original compositions, of which he has created a rich corpus. Most notably, Reynolds composed the idiosyncratic yet elegant score to Richard Linklater’s rotoscope-animated A Scanner Darkly, a modern film adaptation of the novel by science fiction icon Philip K. Dick.
Reynolds’ own listening habits are decidedly eclectic, and this sense of musical freedom and curiosity has spilled into his own sound creations. Reynolds cites Max Richter, Igor Stravinsky, John Zorn, Henry Cow, and Brainiac all as influences and inspirations, and though this mix of contemporary classical, free jazz, prog-rock, and post-punk may seem improbable, Reynolds’ postmodern genre mash-up has been working him wonders.
Reynolds’ interest in working with film is elsewhere in his career as well. His first soundtrack project to a feature-length film was for an Austin screening of the 1925 silent film, Battleship Potemkin, directed by famed Russian director Sergei M. Eisenstein. This Saturday, the Cornell Cinema will screen Battleship Potemkin with live accompaniment from the Golden Arm Trio.
We recently spoke to Reynolds from his home in Austin, Texas, where he was eagerly looking forward to his visit to Ithaca - he hasn’t been back since he visited college campuses in the area as a high school student many years ago.
Popcorn Youth: Why did you decide to move to Austin?
Graham Reynolds: I came to Austin specifically to form a band, although I grew up close to NYC. I decided that I would be able to make more music — and ultimately higher quality music — here [in Austin] because I could focus on it more, thanks to the density of the musicians, combined with the affordability of the city. In NYC, just getting around is an incredible task - and never mind paying the rent. (Laughs) But here, I’ve got a studio in my house, I can rehearse right here, it’s really easy.
Popcorn Youth: Do you find that’s also the case for other transplanted musicians in Austin?
Graham Reynolds: Yes, I think those are probably some of the dominant reasons. Any place that has that kind of density of musicians and opportunities to play will attract musicians, but then you combine it with a practicality of the place. There isn’t as much industry so your chances of signing to a big label or hooking up through your connections is maybe harder, but to actually produce music is much easier. So when the focus is on that, it’s a really good place. And there are events like SxSW [Festival], which have a more industry feel.
Popcorn Youth: How do you see Golden Arm Trio fitting in with the Austin music scene?
Grahamn Reynolds: One thing that is nice about Austin is that it has country music clubs and jazz clubs and things like that, but it’s not as strict in genre specificity. A big city like NYC has a niche market and niche clubs. We’re able to play pretty much any club in the city. We’ve played with people who have played with Merle Haggard, and we’ve played with people who were super punk rock. Actually, the least receptive venue is the jazz venue, which I think is funny.
Popcorn Youth: What was the impetus for forming Golden Arm Trio 10 years ago?
Graham Reynolds: Well, from college, I played piano or drums in a lot of bands, and each band would be one or the other. Most bands, if you took the drums away, it doesn’t really work. So I wanted to form a band where I could play both instruments in the same band, and where it wouldn’t feel weird if the drummer stopped playing, and the other way around.
Popcorn Youth: Did you go to music school?
Graham Reynolds: I studied piano all my life, but I didn’t go to a composition program or a music school or anything like that. When I was in early junior high school, I was starting to improvise a lot and write a lot of music, and my classical music teacher didn’t really know what to do with me or my brother.
Popcorn Youth: Wow, so you were already composing music in junior high?
Graham Reynolds: Well, yes, I wrote pieces of music that were frameworks with melodies, but then in the middle I would improvise. But yes, I started pretty early with that. And my teacher, she didn’t know what to do with us, really, although it was in the nicest of ways. She recognized the direction that I was heading in and the direction that my brother was heading in, and that was not something she knew how to teach, so she sent us to a jazz teacher. And that wasn’t because we were playing jazz necessarily, but because we were improvising, and the jazz teacher had a little more sense of how to develop that. So then my training was in jazz for the most part until the middle of college.
Popcorn Youth: How has free jazz been influential in your approach to composition and improvisation?
Graham Reynolds: One of my favorite things to do as a player is to sit down and play. I play more confidently improvisationally than something that is written out or something I’m supposed to remember. So having that kind of looseness, and having that kind of vocabulary is really interesting to me.
Popcorn Youth: How do you think about your corpus in relation to the broader history of popular music?
Graham Reynolds: That’s a big question. I see it parallel with the direction of technology, in terms of people’s listening habits and that aspect of the experience, as well as the performing and the recording aspect. As soon as we got recording technology, music switched forever.
Now we’re at a point where people have access to any kind of music at any point of the day - and that’s a whole new way of listening that just wasn’t the case until relatively recently. At any point of the day, you could download music from Nigeria, or you can listen to the latest pop song — and you can listen to it within seconds after you are curious about it. Our generation was sort of the first to have that access and throughout the past century that’s increased. Now it’s instant access.
I think people’s listening tastes are more eclectic than ever before in the past. I grew up listening to this huge group of records, and instead of just two things, I drew upon hundreds and hundreds of styles. I try to make sense of that as a composer, and take that musical world and make it mine as a listener, composer, performer and player.
Popcorn Youth: The issue of access in music is one that is very significant today, and has really increased very recently, as you said. Instant access is certainly something that has increased well after Golden Arm Trio formed 10 years ago. How has increased accessibility affected the trajectory of GAT?
Graham Reynolds: For me, it solidified the approach a little bit. I had a radio show in college before everyone was downloading, but to have that access instantly there in the college radio station. I would just pull out all of these records of the past 30 years. Mixtapes and things like that were always eclectic, but it’s definitely affected me because I enjoy research, and so I will get deep into things and quickly dive in.
For example, I came to Austin knowing nothing about country music, and now I know a lot about country music! [I appreciate] the way that it allows you to explore things quickly and with relative depth, even though It’s a different kind of depth than actually growing up with country music. It doesn’t replace that, but it does allow for me to explore that tendency to have that eclecticism, but to even a more extreme degree. It also allows me to apply it and feel less weird. It’s not like it’s a brand new idea to bounce around, like John Zorn, or people like that bounce around from one genre to another. I’m certainly not the first person who has done that.
Popcorn Youth: People like to emphasize the jazziness in the work you’ve done, even though you have similarities to some classical composers.
Reynolds: There are links to both, I think. I have a much more compositional approach in a lot of things I do than most jazz people ever would have. We have an entire concert series of composed music, and I score for the theater and films as well. And all of that informs what goes on with the band as well.
So having that compositional aspect in a classical way — where you compose and watch someone else perform it — is something that I do regularly now. And that’s not always something that a band guy would do, to have that experience.
Popcorn Youth: Does the term “post-classical” have any relevance to what you do?
Graham Reynolds: I think that does help. It’s always tough — classical and jazz are genres that people have such strong associations with. It helps if you picture the instrumentation and the idea that compositional elements are reprioritized [in post-classical music]. It’s also trying to let go of some concepts that people don’t like; for example, people who think of “classical” as stuffy or dated-sounding. It’s all about trying hard to understand what people may have associations with, and trying to do something with a certain vocabulary, or also getting behind certain elements of a classical vocabulary in some instances. And certainly the academic classical world would not put me in that trajectory, so I’m not there personally. But to a listener, you hear strings or something clearly associated with classical music. Putting that word in there somewhere, it can make sense.
Popcorn Youth: Does there exist a group of composers that compose exclusively for films and television? Is that a road that many composers choose to go down these days?
Graham Reynolds: It’s definitely an avenue that people go down. It’s the blessing and curse of the choices that I’ve made, where I have not focused on any one thing. From both an artistic and a learning point of view, but also from a marketing point of view, it’s hard to pin down what I’m doing.
But anybody from Bernard Herrmann to John Williams to Hollywood standard composers, the vast majority of their work is soundtrack work. When people study their work, they will be studying their soundtrack work. Most of them do other things as well, but not all of them. Bernard Herrmann wrote an opera to Wuthering Heights and concertos and things like that. John Williams wrote the fanfare for the Olympics. He definitely does other projects, but their main projects and main source of income comes from soundtracks.
It’s my choice not to live in L.A. I think that if I lived in L.A., I would do more film work and there would be the danger of having it take over and take away from other things that I like to do.
Popcorn Youth: In the 21st century, would you say that the main source of income for modern classical composers is these commissioned works? It is possible to have a successful career without those kind of jobs?
Graham Reynolds: It’s always been a challenge for composers to figure out where the main income is coming from. And there are a couple of definite avenues to go down. My career doesn’t represent a large chunk of composers, but there is the academic path, where the steady income is from a professorship. And that has been the case not only now but, for example, Chopin taught. People have always been teaching in the classical world, so a professorship is a more normal venue. Most of the more “classical” composers in Austin are UT professors.
And there’s the soundtrack crowd, and that pays a lot more than a professorship would, but it also doesn’t have the same artistic freedom. If you’re a professor and you have a steady income, even if you worked a commission that paid, it would probably be one where you have a say and artistic ownership and you get to make decisions about this and that, which is not the same with soundtrack composers.
Popcorn Youth: You’re involved in so much. How do you distinguish your various projects? Does each project fulfill a different creative impulse?
Graham Reynolds: They do. There are three categories for myself that I put them in: one is the band and performance direction, where I am a leader, performer, musician, and improviser. And then there’s the composer section, which is what I’m doing independently of scoring for other people in films, but composing for a concert where a string quartet or orchestra or someone else plays what I write.
The third one — which is the one that pays the bills — is writing for other people, whether it is film or theater or dance, and those are all different needs. Artistically, it’s a very rewarding thing as well, where you’re feeding off of artists who are working in an entirely different world. The theater/film crossover medium and collaboration is totally different than anything else I do. And certainly when you write something for someone else to play, it brings a whole different side of me out. I write things that I physically could not play, and I’m performing in a way that I couldn’t write in notation and I couldn’t ask for someone else to do. So they are completely distinct. That’s the reason I do them all … My interests in listening are eclectic, and my interests in playing are eclectic, as well.
Popcorn Youth: Despite your eclectic interests, is there still some sort of aesthetic consistency in your work?
Graham Reynolds: Those things can be really hard to articulate, but people I work with the most can pretty much tell that it’s me right off … I’m more melodic than most people who are working either in the classical compositional world or in the post-jazz, free-jazz world … And I enjoy repetitive figures, not just the way Phillip Glass uses them, but the way pop music uses them, too.
I enjoy the way that when something repeats, it gives you permission to listen to all of the different layers. Because once you’ve listened to one layer, you can listen to what’s going on with some other instrument that’s going on. Whereas if nothing is repeating, you’re probably just listening to one element that’s going on at the time, and the other instrument or layers are just being supportive with that central thing. And I’ve done that with melodies, where that’s probably the central thing that people are listening to, but then it departs from there.
Popcorn Youth: Which 20th century classical composers have been influential for you, particularly with regards to repetition and minimalist figures of which you just referred?
Graham Reynolds: I focus on classical composers from the early 20th century. That’s generally my favorite period — Prokofiev, Stravinsky, Ravel, Debussy … really, all that stuff informs my work, much more so than Richter, Phillip Glass, Stockhausen, although all of them have played a role. Max Richter, in particular, I like.
Popcorn Youth: I noticed you list Brainiac as an influence on your MySpace page! It was really such a surprise to see them there. Could you explain how more unpredictable influences from pop and rock figure into your music?
Graham Reynolds: Brainiac, on that list, represents not just themselves but also a lost of post-punk. The club that we first started playing at in Austin was Emo’s, and it is still the place that we’ve played the most here. And it’s a punk rock/post-punk place that Brainiac and Enon and Skeleton Key and all of those guys were playing at. For me, in classical music, you can pretty much name the central instrument that is used to perform it. And you can name those instruments and they are also used acoustically in a relatively “straight-up” way. Whereas with pop music, if you are talking about a guitar, or one’s guitarist’s amp versus another’s, the sounds are radically different, like Jimi Hendrix to Brainiac to Bob Dylan to whoever. Even the most uneducated listener can pretty much tell that these are different artists, that they have a different sound. But you would have to study pretty hard to tell whether it was Yo Yo Ma playing or some other fantastic cellist.
Brainiac is one of those bands that really takes that idea pretty far in their exploration of tone and sound, and [in] a way that pop music does really well, and in a way that classical music has not explored so well. Brainiac comes up with these intense sounds, but puts them into songs that are clearly recognizable, and the construction is interesting, and also decipherable.
Production becomes an element that is a strong part of the artistic product. Composed music is still composed and then performed on a stage, and with pop music, the final product is what is recorded in the studio. Those are very different things, so I like to listen to people where the final experience and the final documentation of it is the recorded element.
Popcorn Youth: Tell me about how you became involved with the “Scanner Darkly” project.
Graham Reynolds: Well, Linklater lives here in Austin and his studio is here in Austin. As you said, I do a million different things, so it was inevitable — as long as he didn’t stay home every night — that he would run into me or he would hear me. So he eventually did, and we also have mutual friends and things like that.
He asked me to do a short film called “Live From Shiva’s Dance Floor,” which was a 9/11 short, about 20 minutes long. And it was simple, a piano score. What I didn’t know at the time, but it seems clear to me in retrospect, was that it was kind of an audition for the larger show. (Laughs) What I was doing, which was really unusual for me at the time, was playing piano accompaniment for a jazz singer in a theater, playing jazz standards like Billie Holiday. And Linkalter was at that, and after that gig he told me he was thinking about doing this movie and he was thinking about me doing the music. So I said that sounded great and I reread the book which I had already read.
Popcorn Youth: Are you a big Phillip K. Dick fan?
Graham Reynolds: Oh yes, definitely. Actually, my roommate at the time was a huge fan, and he owned every book published pretty much. But I had it as well, so I just pulled it off the shelf and reread it. And I didn’t hear about it for a couple of years, and then [Linklater] called again and said he was doing the film and if I wanted to do the music — and of course I wasn’t going to say no.
Popcorn Youth: When all is said and done, do you feel as though your score for “A Scanner Darkly” can exist on its own terms, without the film?
Graham Reynolds: [Pauses] Yes. It’s always tough for some people, but when we were done making the music for the screen version of the film, we were going to put out the soundtrack. We spent a lot of time working on the soundtrack itself — not just taking the mixes from the movie and putting them in sequential order and be done, but I tried to do a combination so you could get a sense of the arc of the film by listening to the CD. Someone who wanted to re-experience the movie by listening to the music could accomplish that to a degree, for example, picture what’s happening to the character. Essentially, I did that by keeping the first two tracks the same. The opening theme starts the movie as it does in the soundtrack.
Popcorn Youth: I found the opening theme to be remarkably effective in the context of the opening scene of the film. The sense of disorientation, schizophrenia, general chaos was well conveyed in the music as well.
Graham Reynolds: Oh, cool. I mean, that was the hardest scene, by far. That music, more than anything else, was [worked on] up to the very last minute. Literally the night before I flew out to L.A. for the final mix, I was recording new tracks and trying new ideas. It was the most challenging part of the film. The scene is different from the rest of the film; you see his house again a little bit, but at the same time, you’re setting the tone for the whole film. So I tried to make it fit with the whole scene and have it go with his character, even though he doesn’t turn out to be the main character, so there were a lot of challenges with that.
With the soundtrack, I ended it with the ending of the movie as well, but in the middle, I took some artistic license and put it in an order that, to me, was a listening order. Because with the music in the movie, in 10 minutes from one cue to another, you might hear the same music again, or something too similar to listen to, back-to-back. So instead I played around with the order, I took the smaller chunks of music and put them into bigger chunks of music and tried to make it a listening CD, not just a document of the films.
Popcorn Youth: How did you get involved with the “Battleship Potemkin” project?
Graham Reynolds: That was the first feature-length film that I composed feature-length music to. I composed music that ran in the Alamo [Cinema] and it opened 10 years ago now. It’s an Austin institution, and the owner came up to me at [Austin venue] Emo’s one night and asked if I wanted to play to a silent film.
I said yes and dove into that, and just last year we remounted that show where I took out my old scores and updated and changed them around and did the show again.
Popcorn Youth: Now, have you been to Ithaca before?
Graham Reynolds: I have been to Ithaca, once, a long time ago. I think I was actually looking at colleges in the area. (Laughs) I grew up in Connecticut, but I haven’t been there since then. People always talk about Moosewood [Restaurant].
Popcorn Youth: Are you a vegetarian?
Graham Reynolds: I’m a vegan.
Popcorn Youth: Gotcha. So what will your lineup be for the Ithaca performance? I know it changes all the time.
Graham Reynolds: Right, exactly. When we tour, I try to pick players and instruments that represent all the different things so that we can capture as many directions as possible. I play the piano and drums, and I bring a real piano. We’ve got a cellist, Jon Dexter, who is incredible. His technique far surpasses anything I could do. He represents the composed music element and technical facility element, too. He plays the hardest, fastest material, and he’s really exciting to watch.
And then we’ve got a saxophonist who brings not only the jazz element, but the loose element. He’s coming from that direction, and he’s comfortable with improvisation and generating music that way, in a way that I really like to do. You know Townes Van Zandt? He used to play with Townes for 10 years, which makes his Austin musical royalty of sorts. (Laughs)
Popcorn Youth: And you go back and forth between playing the drums and the piano?
Graham Reynolds: (Laughs) Yes. I have a stool in the middle and I spin around and play the drums and spin back and play the piano.
Popcorn Youth: Do you frequently perform solo?
Graham Reynolds: I haven’t in a while, but I do sometimes, yes. I’ll bring the same setup and I’ve done that quite a bit, especially solo accompaniment to silent films. I’ll also play clubs by myself. The first GAT show I played by myself in Houston, we had the small label Love Letter come up and say they wanted to put out a GAT record. It works well enough, and it’s fun to do. I like having collaborators on the stage, though, and I wouldn’t want to be alone all the time.
And as far as the last member of the band, Chris Black, he’s been doing a fair amount of touring in his own right. He’s played in quite a few different Austin bands, and he plays upright bass. And that’s been able to cross over quite a few genres, because he’s able to pull out the bow and play classical, but he’s also able to rock out. He’s played in Shoulders, which is sort of like The Pogues, you know, rocked-out Irish bar music. So he’s not coming from a straight jazz or straight classical background, he knows how to rock out and he knows how to have fun on stage.