Roger Reynolds played the piano until graduating from secondary school, when he opted to pursue studies in science. After a short career as an engineer, he returned to music, enrolling at Ann Arbor University in Michigan, where he studied composition with Ross Lee Finney, and later with Roberto Gerhard.

In the early 1960s, he co-founded the ONCE Festival in Ann Arbor, a platform for the presentation of musical research and experimentation.

In 1962, wishing to broaden his compositional perspectives, he embarked on an extended period of travel. He first went to Germany on a Fulbright Scholarship to study with Bernd Alois Zimmermann in Cologne, but quickly abandoned Zimmermann’s class, instead working at the Westdeutscher Rundfunk Electronic Music Studio. While passing through Berlin, he heard Elliott Carter’s Double concerto, a work that would deeply influence the composition of Quick Are the Mouths of Earth (1964–1965). From 1966 to 1969, Reynolds lived in various cities in Japan, where he notably met Tōru Takemitsu. While there, he composed Ping for chamber ensemble, live electronics, film, and visual effects, based on a text by Samuel Beckett.

Upon his return to the United States in 1969, he became a professor at University of California San Diego, the first in a series of academic posts he would occupy throughout his career. In 1971, he founded the Center for Research in Computing and the Arts at the aforementioned institution.

The late 1970s marked the beginning of a fruitful period of collaboration between Reynolds and IRCAM, where he had been invited as composer-in-residence. In 1982-83, he composed Archipelago, and in 1989-93, Odyssey. In 2000, he worked on The Angel of Death, a piece which was closely connected to Stephen McAdams’ research on cognitive psychology; the work was premiered in June 2001 at the Agora Festival. He dedicated the years of 2004 to 2010 to the composition of Sanctuary, an evolutive piece for percussion quartet and electronics. In 2013, george WASHINGTON, for orchestra, narrator, video, and electronics, was premiered at the Kennedy Center.

Remaining active as a teacher, in 2011, Reynolds inaugurated the “Arts Activism” series of courses at the Washington campus of the University of California, while continuing to teach composition at UCSD.

Beyond the interdisciplinary nature of his catalogue, Reynold’s work betrays the influences of American experimental and European avant-garde musics. He described the nature of these influences as follows: “Having left the United States after graduating from high school, I found myself outside of the various movements of American music. Of course, I was still surrounded by American music; I knew Cage and Nancarrow personally, was fairly familiar with Varèse and Partch, and listened to a lot of Ives, Ruggles, and other American composers. But I was a student of Roberto Gerhard, a Spanish expatriate who had studied composition with Schoenberg in Vienna before the Second World War.” (Risto Nieminen, “Waiting for Roger Reynolds”, Résonance No. 4, June 1993, Ircam-Centre Pompidou, 1993.)

Roger Reynolds was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Music in 1989.