Radio Interview Tom Schulte's 'Outsight Radio'

• November 2011             outsight@usa.net               USA

​Click on Link:

http://www.archive.org/details/McMaguireInterviewOnOutsightRadioHours

Naxos Interview with Colin Rae:

• February 2010              Naxosblog                 USA

In an ongoing series of conversations with artists and composers I present a short YET eye-opening discussion with Innova recording artist MC Maguire.

Who r u?

There's no delicate way to put this -I am an ex-con. But I'm determined it won’t impede my mercurial rise into the heady, glamorous world of international composition. I've paid my debt to society–if anything they owe me!!! Soon after my internment, I got mix up in the seedier side of music academia (I’m not sure when the punishment ended and the pedagogy began). It’s all a big hurtful, medicated blur–but from pain comes Art, right? Also I vaguely   remember a glimpse of an impaled piano teacher, some fire in the trash in the theory dept. and blood coming from my    dogs’ ears.

 How did these works come about?

The two double concertos on the disk are the rewritten remixes of works conceived in the 90s, when my quill was afire and computers had the power of my current cell phone. One of the bitter ironies of life, is just as technology is allowing my 400 track albatrosi to come to true fruition, regular coinage from music's infrastructure is shriveling, and some punk is illegally downloading a two second snippet of my masterpiece for a ringtone (that very kid is dead as we speak!!). The virtuosic bros who r playing on these pieces, live in the hood, have my back, even though I now or at one time owed them money, or have had at least one absinthe-induced altercation.

What inspires you and your work?

Theology, meta-physics, architecture, visual arts,my soiled, overused bios of Bismarck, Cromwell, Custer and Napoleon (St. Helena reflections), and the great carnivorous Pac-man of pop culture, infomercials, no limit holdem poker, mixed martial arts, as well as the numbing spewing forth of ghetto flora and fauna. For me, most music has become white noise–except for maybe the first movement of Mahler’s’ 9^th (which I’ve made a career of subconsciously stealing/rewriting) which synchronistically is now playing iPod wallpaper for my weary Oblomov, remote mit hand-tremor, languishing on the chaise-lounge persona.

What are your musical “guilty pleasures”? 

What immediately springs to mind is Wagner, as his aging prowess sputtered, he would drape himself in fine silk and frilly lingerie, and dowse himself in expensive ladies’ perfume– but this is clearly not the question. Suffice to say, I feel guilty saying publically ‘I am composer’–but its’ combined pretentiousness and anachronistic irrelevance brings me secret, impish pleasure.

What did you want to be when you grew up?

I wanted to be someone famous, who, when sashaying jauntily on the promenade with a coquettish female visage on my arm, or pontificating in my box at the theatre with societies’ crème of culture and learning–people might say in passing” now he clearly has the bull by the tail” or “there is a curtain je ne sais quoi about that fellow”, without knowing the actual meaning of the phrase.

What question have you always wanted to answer in an interview? What is the answer to that question?

My greatest musical influence: As an impoverished, food-stamped child growing up in a drafty log cabin, marooned in the Canadian north, my family lived on deer testicles, discolor snow, occasional poking blades of grass and an inhabitable tundra stew (my mom's specialty). During meals, we sat fearfully mute at a twisted old table while my quasi-deaf father (who had severe undiagnosed ADD) would just keep manually rotating the four available, blaring TV channels, fragmenting any clear narrative arch into an incomprehensible blur. Not only was a loud, circular, rondo-like form chiseled into my cortex (the TV was a radioactive inch from my face) but my father's endless commentaries, diatribes, and inane deconstructionism pointed my impressionable misquideness in a misshapened, multilayered, maximalist, quixotic, economic dead-end direction.  He was clearly the first pre-post-modernist, for that I am simultaneously extremely bitter and resignedly grateful.