Upcoming Concerts:

Victoriaville , Quebec May 17, 2013  featuring Keith Kirchoff playing ‘A Short History of Lounge’ and Bill Solomon and Sayun Chang playing ‘Narcissus auf Bali’.

Recent Concerts:

 Short History of Lounge for Piano and CPU

April 16, 7:30,  St. Cloud University

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 Short History of Lounge for Piano and CPU

March 21, 7:30 pm  Western Michigan University

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 Short History of Lounge for Piano and CPU

Feb. 22, 1:00pm  Hull University, Cottingham, GB, master class follow

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Short History of Lounge for Piano and CPU

February 19, 800 pm – Manchester Metropolitan University, Cheshire GB

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Narcissus auf Bali for Vibes, Marimba and CPU

Hartford School of Music Thursday, January 27, 2011

lecture Wed. January 26

Reviews of Live Concerts:

April 2013         The Victoriaville Festival

Are you a fan of maximalist music? Of mash-ups between plunderphonics, contemporary, world and electroacoustic music? MC MAGUIRE is a sonic discharge, a long punch to the plexus that opens up your ears and saturates your brain cells. This composer from Toronto combines in his works for instrumentalists and computer Merzbow’s maelström, Paul Dolden’s stacks of tracks, Noah Creshevsky’s hyperrealism, and Xenakis’s mathematics.

Still little known despite having released three strong albums (one on Tzadik, two on Innova), this man will surprise you. His epic pieces demand tremendous levels of virtuosity from the performers – and they are rarely performed live – while bombarding listeners with sonic information.

For this concert, MAGUIRE will offer us a lesson in lounge (“A Short History of Lounge Music” for piano and CPU), followed by a rereading of the Greek myth of Narcissus through the lens of the gamelan (“Narcissus auf Bali” for vibraphone, marimba, and CPU).

Feb. 2011           The Yale Gatekeeper (Anne Rhodes)

Warning! ‘I hate this composer/music’ review.It’s always good to get a second opinion, especially if it’s terminal.

I do not want to devote much space on this blog to negative reviews (unfortunately my mind can be pretty fertile ground for such things, as you are about to see, and I don’t like to encourage it). But I heard a premiere several weeks ago of piece of music that was so poorly conceived it had me reconsidering other things I thought I hated; that is not to say so much that it lowered the bar, but that it helped me clarify the distinction between “stuff that doesn’t appeal to me” and “stuff I consider to be complete and utter shit.” The piece had such a strong thread of blind self-satisfaction and arrogance woven through it that I have no major reservations about bashing it, though I do offer my apologies to the performers involved.

The composer in question is MC Maguire(those do seem to be his initials, but judging from his sensibility as a composer, he may also be making a lame reference to hip-hop culture), and the piece I heard was “Narcissus auf Bali,” for marimba and vibraphone soloists with pre-recorded electronics. Let me just say this up front: the percussionists, Bill Solomon and Sayun Chang, did a spectacular job – Solomon in particular is a tremendously engaging performer – and if there had been anything edgy, elegant, or provocative to squeeze out of this vacant shell of a piece, they could have done it. Unfortunately, the solo writing was all blank virtuosity; lots of fast notes and not much music. It was based on a mode that is used in some Indian ragas, but even this felt like an empty gesture.

Michael Hamad of the Harford Advocate diplomatically stated that, “Maguire hardly ever offers a dull moment.” I would disagree and say that the whole thing was one forty-five-minute long dull moment. Yes it was loud, but that didn’t make it interesting or exciting. It served up just about every tired, outdated cliché possible in electro-acoustic music, and did so ad nauseum. Self-consciously quirky recordings of mundane dialogue – complete with the sound of a beer can opening? Check. Sounds and music from far-off lands, apparently meant to add “exotic” flavor? Check. Halfway tongue-in-cheek clips from popular and rock music (the kind of thing that says “I love rock, but I am a serious composer and want to make that distinction.”)? Check. Heavy breathing? Vague female moaning? Hip-hop rhythms? Tritely, wearily present. It all overlapped and faded in a way that had no compositional shape to speak of, except for intermittent, hackneyed pulsating rhythms, as if made by an adolescent boy as a means of haphazardly learning to use a multi-track recorder.

The worst thing about this piece was its countless self-serious climaxes. They occurred via melodramatic crescendos in the electronic tracks as well as ham-fisted winding-down ritards in the marimba and vibraphone parts. The first one seemed contrived. The next couple were eye-roll inducing. And it went on like that until some audience members were openly laughing. The piece just wanted so desperately to be epic; it seemed to announce itself as such, then, like a hard-to-dump boyfriend, continued to beg us to love it in a way that was at the same time abusive and needy.

“Narcissus auf Bali” was backward-looking in its lack of innovation, and I left wondering if the composer had ever heard any of the experimental electronic music that has been created during the last couple of decades, or even some of the seminal works of the 60s; the ground-breaking works of Alvin Lucier, Pauline Oliveros, and John Cage, the intricate ear-tickling installations of Marianne Amacher, or the über-savvy, painstakingly-crafted mash-ups of GirlTalk. There is such a rich variety of relevant material out there; composers use mundane sounds in interesting ways by isolating, repeating, or processing them. Like Ron Kuivila, they create new sounds with software like SuperCollider, or by applying contact mics and speakers to various objects. In the tradition of George Lewis, they process the sounds of voices and instruments creating unique accompaniments in the moment. They use feedback and other artifacts of amplified sound in their instrumentation. They combine these techniques in creative and unexpected ways, or use single techniques – including sampling – to deliver simple but compelling ideas. If the program had not stated otherwise, I would have thought this piece was written in the 1980s or earlier, because it relied heavily on a sense of novelty that has long since been surpassed and built upon.

McGuire actually makes the distinction between “primitive and high cultural” music in his artist statement, which is a pretty clear indication of his ignorance of contemporary musical discourse. Ethnomusicologists use the word “other” as both a noun and a verb, referring to the treatment of non-western, traditional, or popular music as less an art form than an anthropological curiosity to be exploited and borrowed from by self-proclaimed artists, experts, and scholars. This possibly well-meaning but flippant objectification of the “other” was a foundational component of “Narissus auf Bali.”

He also uses all manner of press quotes on his website, many of them of the “this music did in fact occur” variety, and some obviously verging on the negative. He may indeed be as clueless as he seems, or it may be that his whole raison d’etre is to provoke. If it’s the latter, McGuire has certainly succeeded with “Narcissus auf Bali,” but probably not in the way he intended.

 

• Sept 2004            Arts Journal.com

….absolutely obnoxious, but pretty brilliant…

• April 2003           Vancouver Georgia Striaght

….surreal blend of cheesy latin lounge music and hard rock bombast…..

• April 2003          Vancouver Sun

…From Lounge to Heavy Metal in one tune…49 chord series that unfolds sequentially while classic themes from corny, celebatory lounge-esque  Latin themed tunes morphs into head-banging heavy metal…the score is pretty complicated not just because of the speed, but because of the change in time…

• July 2001        Vancouver Georgia Straight

…visceral assault of cranked-up, cacophonic music…bracing in your chair like the guy in the Maxell ad. The music is post-modern and deconstructed: Maguire creates aural panic by spicing and layering everything  from clanging chimes and screeching guitars to piano arpeggios and old-school rap….It’s a gruelling, exausting challenge….The best way to describe it is to look at movies like ‘Requiem for a Dream’ and Snatch’ in which filmmakers compress whole hours of activity in a flash of split-second clips. In a age of  technology we’ve learned to process information at hyperspeed…there’s no doubt that the  sheer onslaught of the score made the dance vocabulary richer and fuller and more intense than it might of otherwise. But ultimately it was a cathartic look at the intensity of  life’s  journey. We came to see the cutting edge…this jumped right over it into the abyss.

• Aug2000         International Dance Magazine

..M.C.Maguire begins at a full chaotic pitch and through the works compelling world beat rhythms, often returns there…

• May 2000,       Vancouver Sun

…intricate score of sampled and distorted sounds laid over top of a musical structure… the feeling here is one of fighting through hardship or complexity to stretches of sound where continually rising, major-scale harmonies seem like rays of sunlight…               

• May 2000,       Vancouver Westender

..fevered afro-techno beat score by M.C. Maguire….             

• May 2000,       Vancouver Georgia Straight

…the choreography is made even more intense by Michael Maguire’s blasting electro acoustic score, which ranges from the sound of screeching freight trains to layers of deep,  throbbing percussion. Each move is linked perfectly to the stirring musical phrases….

• May 2000,       Vancouver Courier

…M.C. Maguire’s driving yet pretty electro-accoustic score….    

• January2000     Toronto Star

…the mix of accessiblity and extremism was confrontational rather than meditative in arrangements that hewed towards the dark and aggressive… Even the humour was heavy-handed with campy lyrics, a quite hideous Wagner spoof,…if this is representative of the ideas of today’s leading composers one could only shutter at what will emerge in the next 999 years….                 

• January 2000    Toronto Globe and Mail

…a little campy….Maguire’s electric bluster made me think of George Bernard Shaw’s description” an insanely rampageous curiousity.”…

• January 2000      National Post

…appears in heavy metal guise…

• July, 1999              Vancouver’s Georgia Straight

….the Mike Maguire thing is a sort of hilarious takeoff….halarious and rockin’…

• July 1999               Vancouver Courier

Maguire’s obviously relishing the chance to take a satirical swipe at the deadly serious Wagner ethos..

• August, 1998       Kuala Lumpur Times

Assault and battery Opera…..a hint of Asian dance influence and hard head-pounding, metal crashing synthesizer-enhance music-which depending on your taste could be very innovative or very agitating. Brillant, overpowering, extraordinary -If you saw the show the music is still pounding in your head…

• July 16, 1998        Vancouver Georgia Straight

Maguire’s multilayered score, ranged from sounds of water gurgling and birds chirping to snippets of crashing industrial music….

• June 3, 1997         New York’s Village Voice

…capturing Maguire’s bad boy role of festivals gone by……

• Winter 1997         Dance International

Maguire’s score is exciting and oddly easy to listen to; I put it this way because it is so full of urban crash that it is certainly not in the easy-listening category….it is extremely well crafted with an array of hard chords,braking glass and fast forward garble as well as   islands of Indonesian music and voices….

• March 1996    Sidney Morning Herald

Maguire’s rich gallimaufry of sound lived up to the bizarre association of the title….

• March 1996      Australia’s Real Time

Maguire’s hot jam is less a support frame for piano virtuosity (although it demands and receives plenty) than a reminder what is usually left out of serious composition. It’s a thickly layered cake (how manylayers can you take?) of a concerto utilizing tape (Wagner, Doris on a bad day, channel-switching headaches, and a bit of Beethoven romance). The instruments further layer the cake with nuts (and bolts), fruits (and detritus) in textures that grate against, or multiply and compound their usual flavours. The result is a densely architectonic piece,measured (like a city) against its own length and densities of material. A far more provocative essay on the drawing architecture out of human experience than the virtually sycophantic Seidler exhibition (the Grollo Tower proposal for Melbourne) in the festival Theatre foyer….

• Oct. 1995       Dance International

Maguire’s fascinating score reflects the clash and cross-fertilization of ancient and modern cultures…his soundscapes have a brilliant, crash and burn vibe that fuses ambient sounds to evoke both ecstasy and despair…packs a huge emotional wallop….

• Sept.  1995        New York Times

…example of a ‘big’ guitar sound in works performed at the Lincoln Center in the last two years…

• April   1995       Vancouver’s Georgia Straight

He packs enough musical invention to fuel the equivalent of two Bruckner symphonies…Maguire is an utterly uncompromising composer…few have the wherewithal to assimilate such a plethor and intensity of musical ideas at once or the depths of the composer’s intentions…I have heard music of great beauty from this talented writer….

• April  1995          Vancouver Sun

Urban insistence and multiple layers in Maguire’s sampled score a comment on the erratic pulse of a multicultural life of a large city…..

• June  1993       New York’s Village Voice

Nothing prepared me for the Maguire premiere…Lisa Moore playing hell for leather at the piano harmonies and tunes that would give Muzak a bad name….overlaid with what sounded like oceans of electronic phlegm…

• Sept  1993        Vancouver Sun

Accumulates and overlays images of aggression and intimacy skillfully in Maguire’s rich score…

• June  1993        New York’s Village Voice

Nothing prepared me for the Maguire premiere…Lisa Moore playing hell for leather at the piano harmonies and tunes that would give Muzak a bad name….overlaid with what sounded like oceans of electronic phlegm…

• March  1993   New York Times

Pits a lyrical piano line against a dense wall of noise from both the ensemble and tape track….

• March   1993   New York’s Village Voice

Irrepressibly raucous, considered by only three people to be a genius and I’m one of them.

• Jan  1993        Toronto Globe and Mail

Violent chaos…unrelenting onslaught of the music which at the composer’s insistence was played at deafening volumes–interesting piece nontheless….

• March  1992   New York’s Village Voice

Vancouver wild man…which says one thing-noise…

• June   1991       New York’s Village Voice

For me, the mindboggling, undecipherable high point was Maguire’s new work…only more subtle, more varied yet equally weird as his previous work… the ensemble jerked around jazz fragments in automated unison.. the woodwinds and keyboards outline the  structure like bright oil paint on a chaotic charcoal background Maguire’s from Vancouver via Eastman, but this is the music downtown (N.Y.C.) has been pointing to for 10 years; a fusion of vernacular and anarchy, jazz  and noise, with none of the back references to 60’s structural props that make so much New York noise formally retro. sounded like a drunken jazz concert on a ship in a hurricane, frozen in surreal slo-mo…. and the closing Boris Badenov quote taped from Bulwinkle made the perfect non sequitor ending.

• June 1991        New York’s Village Voice

The day’s dirtiest and most original work by a good margin…..

• April 1991       The Toronto Star

It’s hard to believe anything could drown out Maguire…went for the world record in decibels, the music was loud enough to make dozens of listeners try to plug their ears.

• June 1989         The Vancouver Sun

Composer makes a name with his new kind of music….a fevered rush of sampled sound,ghostly, rhythmic,and distinctly surreal…

• May 1989          New York’s Village Voice

Vancouver Composer eats Manhattan…. arrogant, noisy, too loud, sped aimlessly forever yet somehow it cohered, swallowed you up, made cosmic sense, sounded like nothing I’ve ever heard. All those wildly proliferating melodies, disjointed but in the same key and tempo, issue from some almost inaudible center that I couldn’t locate for the life of me. The piece spoke a language too overloaded with meaning for the conscious mind. I haven’t been this spellbound or this irritated since “Einstein on the Beach”.(Philip Glass) That’s 13 years folks….