As a composer I have created a very personal post-modern hybrid which is a quirky synthesis of the historical and modern western tradition, as well as combining styles of popular music and the various primitive and high cultural traditions of world music.

I work primarily in my studios' multi track electronic environment (up to 400 tracks), using the whole range of sampling and digital editing possibilities, then usually synchronizing virtuosic live players to the tape part via a click track and / or conductor. The finished musical structure consists of a rigid late 20th C. hierarchical, multi-layered construct, which is mathematically proportioned to reflect the philosophical / psychological thrust of each individual work's raison d'etre.

I have also branched out into the popular idioms of pop music, T.V. and movie soundtracks, and have created elaborate scores for advertising.

I'm fascinated by the crossbreeding of popular and classical culture, and I believe that only through the reevaluation of high art aesthetics in the light of popular cultures' ubiquitous, formulaic infectiousness will creative art be saved from extinction in the 21st Century.

• In January 2010 signed a distribution deal with Naxos Records through Innova Records for the rerelease of 'Trash of Civilizations'.
  
• In September 2009 TRASH OF CIVILIZATIONS - 52nd GRAMMY nominated in Category #79 Best Album/Classical and in Category #103 Best Chamber Music Performance/Classical
  
• In September 2009 completed 'The Discofication of the Mongols' for Violin, Ensemble and CPU for a Continuum Commission.
  
• In November 2008 sign a record contract with Innova Records for the New CD ’ Trash of Civilizations’ (July, 2009 release) featuring ‘The Spawn of Abe’ for Clarinet, oboe and CPU and ‘Narcissus auf Bali’ for Vibraphone, Marimba, and CPU.
  
• In October 2008 received a commission from Toronto Arts Council for a new work for Flute and CPU called 'S'Wonderful the man I love watches over me'(based on 3 Gershwin songs).
  
• In September 2008 Graduate Student form the University of Missouri, Jedd Schneider, published- "Meta-Diegesis: Toward an analysis of MC Maguire's A Short History of Lounge"
  
• In June 2008 Received commission from CONTINUUM (Toronto) for double concerto for violin and cello, ensemble and CPU.
  
• In May /June 2008 Received live performances Of 'Short History of Lounge'(Jenny Lin) and 'Got that Crazy Latin Metal Feelin'(John Gzowski)'in NYC (The Stone) and in Toronto (Music Gallery)
  
• In December, 2007 Received Grant from Ontario Arts Foundation and City of Toronto for commissioning 'The Spawn of Abe' for clarinet, obie and CPU.
  
• In 2006, signed with John Zorn's Label Tzadik to record and release in May 2007 'A Short History of Lounge' for Piano and CPU, and 'Got that Crazy, Latin/Metal Feelin' for CPU and Electric Guitar. A 5.1 DVD of both sessions will follow in September 2007.
  
• From 2004 and 2006 composed the sound track for the director Nick Vitis for the short film 'Polychroma' (1st Prize Stonybook Film Fest, 1st Prize Westcliffe Film Fest, 1st Prize Canadian International Film Fest, Finalist at the Hollywood Film Fest {2005} and 'Flux' (1st. Prize in Canadian International Film Fest for Experimental Film and Best All-Round Independent Film {2006} and Finalist in the Hollywood Film Fest {2005}.) Currently in postproduction on Nick Vitis' new feature film 'The Prevision' (2007), and preproduction of an Instillation / 5.1 DVD on the Greek Myth of Narcissus and Echo (2007).
  
• In 1999, wrote the music for the TV series Skullduggery on the Comedy Network.
  
• From 1995 and 2005 wrote and produced 5 Pop C.D.'s, with singers, Christine Duncan (Vancouver), Mel Jones (Australia). 2X Sam Sinanan (Toronto) and an original drum and bass CD.
  
• From 1993 to 2002, wrote 4 full scale ballets, which were performed world-wide, one ballet won the coveted award, Choregraphiques Internationales of Paris 1999.
  
• From 1991 and 2006 produced music for over 40 advertising demos to break into the advertising industry in N.Y.C., London, England, Toronto and Vancouver, Canada.
  
• In 1994 composed a sound track for the feature film Thought Box (Filmed in L.A. for the director Scott Sill.
  
• From 1988 to 2006, implemented a composition career, including 12 major commissions. Highlights included a performance of my Piano Concerto at Lincoln Center and a major opera commission, "The Idiot", (libretto by Joan Mcleod ) which was extensively work shopped at Banff Center for Performing Arts in 1991 and 1992. Most recently did a Guitar Concerto for Orchestra and CPU for Vancouver New Music in Vancouver, 2003.
  
• From 1988 and 2006, maintained a professional digital studio, Currently remodeling for 5.1 Surround.
  
• From 1977 to 1993 won many of the major composition awards available to North Americans, as well was acclaimed by New York's Village Voice as the most irritating and spellbinding composer since Philip Glass's Einstein on the Beach.
  
• From 1971 to 1984 attended university and besides studying composition also studied music theory, music history, ethnomusicology, as well as many other subjects all requiring, in the 12 year tenure, up to 100 academic papers.
  
• From 1971 to 1984 wrote the music, rehearsed, and conducted for over 30 performances of original composition during the University tenure.
  
• From 1970 to 1983 organized, wrote the music, did the arrangements, did the fronting, and was in charge of the recording, for a number of rock bands.

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• Canada Council Awards (B Grants, Short-term Grants, Opera Grants)
  
• Pew Foundation
  
• Opera America
  
• Banff Centre
  
• B.C. Cultural Fund
  
• Vancouver Foundation
  
• Canadian University Women Award
  
• CAPAC
  
• PRO (SOCAN)
  

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...

April 2003 - Vancouver Georgia Striaght

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

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.

August 2000 - 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 Courier

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

May 2000 -Vancouver Georgia Straight

...the choreography is made even more intense by Michael Maguire's blasting electroacoustic 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....

January 2000, 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 - National Post

...appears in heavy metal guise...

January 17 - 2000 Globe &: Mail

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

July 1999 -Vancouver Courier

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

July, 1999 - Vancouver's Georgia Straight

the Mike Maguire thing is a sort of hilarious takeoff....hilarious and rockin'...

August 1998 - Kuala Lumpur Times

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

July 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 many layers 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...

October 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...

September 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 plethora 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...

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...

September 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...

January 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 nonetheless...

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. It sounded like a drunken jazz concert on a ship in a hurricane, frozen in surreal slo-mo...

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 to 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...

• SOCAN
  
• Canadian Music Centre
  
• Canadian Electronic Music Community