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.