During his early career, Reynolds worked in Europe and Asia, returning to the US in 1969 to accept an appointment in the music department at the University of California, San Diego. His leadership there established it as a state of the art facility – in parallel with Stanford, IRCAM, and MIT – a center for composition and computer music exploration. He has addressed the tradition with three symphonies, and four string quartets, works that have been performed internationally as well as in North America. Reynolds won early recognition with Fulbright, Guggenheim, National Endowment for the Arts, and National Institute of Arts and Letters awards. In 1989, he was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for a string orchestra composition, "Whispers Out of Time", an extended work responding to John Ashbery’s ambitious "Self-Portrait in a Convex Mirror". Reynolds is author of three books and numerous journal articles. In 2009 he was appointed University Professor, the first artist so honored by University of California. His work has been featured at festivals including Warsaw Autumn, the Proms and Edinburgh Festivals (UK), the Suntory International Series (Tokyo), the Helsinki and Venice biennales. The Library of Congress established a Special Collection of his work in 1998.