John McGuire
'Pulse Music III'
Cat. No: SCD28043 Genre: electronic/minimalism
A CD of extraordinary electronic works by American composer John McGuire. Originally written for multi-speaker systems, these compositions are concerned with the motion of sounds within the listening space, creating hypnotic swirls of overlapping patterns in and out of phase with each other. 'Pulse Music III' is a half-hour piece structured with absolute precision. A series of sound waves or pulses are set in motion across the listening space at different speeds, creating overlapping patterns of dancing pointillist sounds.
McGuire describes 'Vanishing Points' as 'an experiment in motion perspective. To begin with, I pictured driving along a road with an unobstructed horizon in front of me: the horizon was always the same distance away. It was, so to speak, continuously regenerated'. 'A Cappella' took 5 years to complete and was written for McGuire's wife, soprano Beth Griffith. Her pure, rich vocal qualities attracted McGuire to sample her rendering of three vowel sounds - A, E, U ?at various pitches, and process them into a complex polyphony of choral sounds. Griffiths then sang in dialogue with the choir of samples of her own voice.
Reviews:
'The piece that turned me to jelly, though, was A Cappella, by John McGuire, recently resident in New York after decades in Cologne. With impassioned expressiveness, soprano Beth Griffith sang syncopated vowel sounds over a sparkling electronic background, medieval but vibrant in its contrapuntal austerity.' (Kyle Gann - The Village Voice)
Credits:
PULSE MUSIC III, VANISHING POINTS and A CAPPELLA were commissioned by the West German Radio, Cologne, and produced in the Studio for Electronic Music at the radio in 1978, 1988 and 1995-97. All three works were originally quadraphonic; stereophonic versions were made for broadcasting and compact disc
Realisation: John McGuire
Produced by: Wolfgang Becker-Carsten
Technical collaboration: Volker Muller, James Whitman (Pulse Music III), Volker Muller, Bardo Kox (Vanishing Points) Volker Muller, Markus Hassler, Paulo Chagas, Michael Peschko (A Cappella)
all world-premiere recordings
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Price: £12.00
