John McGuire

Works For Instruments

Genre: MODERN CLASSICAL / AMBIENT

Boomkat Product Review:

Post-minimalist master McGuire describes gyring vantage points on his music with this significant 2008 salvo for the excellent Edition RZ, home to seminal works by Harley Gaber, John Cage, Iancu Dumitrescu and many other C.20th avant greats.

Student of Stockhausen at Darmstadt in the ‘60s, and Gottfried Michael Koenig in the ‘70s, John McGuire is a US composer with strong ties to European avant-classical music. His ‘Works for Instruments’ is a notable number among many in the precious Edition RZ catalogue, spanning five pieces realised between 1967-2002, a period also covered more recently in Unseen Worlds’ publications of his electronic compositions ‘Pulse Music’ and ‘Vanishing Points / A Cappella.’

McGuire’s Editions RZ survey however covers his work for instrumentalists, realising his robust use of melody and harmony in a post-minimalist and post-serialist context. He leaves us heart-in-mouth with the near half-hour of stately, percolated pomp in ‘Cadence Music’ for 21 instruments of Ensemble Modern, directed by Ernest Bour, and sets soprano Julia Rempe to the precisely jagged strings of Pellegrini-Quartett on disc 1. Disc 2 displays his range with a grasp of grippingly dissonance and buzzing bee dynamics on ‘Decay’ for eight horns of musikFabriek, who also tackle his fascinating ‘Frieze’ for four pianos in intense call-and-response, and the brilliantly clashing, tonalities of his ‘Music’ for horns, pianos and cymbals with dashing results.

2CD (5)