Tone Glow 103: John McGuire
An interview with the American minimalist composer about studying under Stockhausen, writing for voice, and finding inspiration in Samuel Beckett
John McGuire
John McGuire (b. 1942) is a composer born in Artesia, California and currently based in New York City. After completing his BA in music at Occidental College, Los Angeles, he received a series of travel scholarships that allowed him to study in Europe with Krzysztof Penderecki at the Folkwang Hochschule in Essen and with Stockhausen at Darmstadt. After completing his MA at the University of California, Berkeley, in 1970, he returned to Europe where he studied computer composition with Gottfried Michael Koenig at the Institute for Sonology in Utrecht, Netherlands. He later settled in Germany, where he remained until 1998. Between 1975 and 1977 he studied electronic music at the Hochschule für Musik (State Conservatory for Music) in Cologne, composing 108 Pulses, Pulse Music I and Pulse Music II during this time. In 1978, Pulse Music III was the second of six commissions from Westdeutsche Rundfunk and was realized in the famous WDR electronic music studio in which Stockhausen had composed his first electronic works. In the past two years Unseen Worlds has released two records of his music: Pulse Music and Vanishing Points / A Cappella. 48 Variations for Two Pianos was also released by Largo in 1987, and Works for Instruments by Edition RZ in 2008. Joshua Minsoo Kim and McGuire shared a phone call on September 22nd, 2023 to discuss his family’s musical background, studying under Stockhausen, composing for his wife, and more.
Joshua Minsoo Kim: I know a lot about when you were studying music but I don’t know a lot about your life beforehand. What was it like in Artesia, California? Was your household a musical one?
John McGuire: I didn’t grow up in Artesia. We moved to Long Beach when I was small, when I was five years old. My father was very musical. When I was a toddler he sang me to sleep with songs like “Danny Boy” and “My Wild Irish Rose.” He was an Irish tenor so I grew up very familiar with that repertoire at a very early age and I just loved it. Of course I was in a Catholic church so I heard all the Gregorian chants, which were still used when I was young, before Vatican II and so forth. So that’s my musical background. The first orchestral music I heard, the instrumental music, was from movies.
Do you remember what specifically?
Not necessarily. I do remember John Ford’s Stagecoach (1939) and stuff like that with big orchestral scenes and big panoramas.
Do you feel like these musical experiences helped you recognize the beauty and power of music, or were they just things that were around you?
That’s a good question. I think something of both. I certainly wouldn’t have been conscious of the power of music while I was being overwhelmed by it (laughter). That was just what happened, you know what I mean?
Was your father eager to share music with you?
I was a very good audience because I was so delighted that he was always singing to me. He was very good. I had an old record that he made in a bar once, of him singing “When Irish Eyes Are Smiling” and “Mother Machree.” I found out much, much later when I had gotten married to a singer how good he really was (laughs). Like, professional level even though he had zero success—it was a very typical Irish story. He was a boilermaker, that was his day job, but he loved to sing. Whenever we would drive by this bar called The Shamrock, people would be standing around outside and say, “Hey Mac, come on in and sing something.” That’s what it was like growing up with him.
Was your mother musical?
Yes, she played a bit of piano. She loved music. So when I started out, they were both very supportive. I started out with music officially when I was eight years old. It started out, very characteristically, with the movies. I went to see a movie called Young Man With a Horn (1950). It was a sort of biopic of Bix Beiderbecke.
With Kirk Douglas?
Exactly. I think I was more impressed with the drama of the whole thing but I ran home to mommy and said, “I wanna play the trumpet!” (laughter). She was a teacher and she was nobody’s fool, so called up the father of a friend of mine who was an orchestra director of a local high school. He pointed her toward a small music school in downtown Long Beach and said, “We’ll test his musical ability.” She took me there to have me tested and he said, “Well, he’s probably gonna be a professional musician. You should start him on the piano rather than the horn.”
I love that from this test that he already knew you were gonna be a professional musician.
That’s what he said, yes (laughter).
Do you remember what it was like to take those initial piano lessons?
Oh, it was a thrill. I loved them. My mother called the same guy and asked him to recommend a teacher and so he did. I had this wonderful teacher who was also a botanist—she was a hobby pianist. She led me to the good stuff. I started out with the John W. Schaum piano method and pretty soon I was playing Schubert and Bach, and I liked that best—still do, in fact. Schubert was a complete delight. It was like white magic, speaking across a century and a half to a little kid in Los Angeles. It was the most phenomenal thing I had encountered in my life, and the love was immediately there.
I love that these artists are still ones you cherish today.
Their music is worth a lifetime, for sure.
So how do we get from these piano lessons to when you’re eventually studying with Robert Gross in the 1960s?
I got into college through a back door. In junior high school the local orchestra conductor wanted to do some pieces that required a good French horn, so I took it up. He wanted to do the Symphony of Psalms by Stravinsky, for example. I didn’t have very good grades, I wasn’t really that interested in academics, but I did get into Occidental College which was right in the middle of Los Angeles. At the time it had a tremendous musical life, as you know. This man, Lauris Jones, insisted that I get a scholarship to go to the college, and that happened.
I started and I didn’t really know what I wanted to do. I decided to take Harmony thinking that would be easy and after a couple of months the teacher said, “Take what you’ve learned so far and write a piece and we’ll have a little concert.” That’s what got me started with writing, the suggestion of this teacher. The minute I heard my own music, which I never dreamed I could do, I kind of went crazy with it. I knew I was gonna do this for the rest of my life.
What year was this? And what instruments was this written for?
It was 1960 and it was for organ and piano—those were the two instruments in the little chapel hall that we were working in. And it seemed to me that those were all you really needed. The organ had all the colors, and the attack forms could come from the piano. In a way that’s what I’ve done ever since. My electronic pieces are like that too.
I imagine you felt really emboldened after that.
Oh, for sure. The next piece was a string quartet which was written in simultaneous 3/4 and 6/8 time. From the very first year I was into conflicting meters—I thought it was a cool thing to do.
Do you mind talking about what it was like to study under Robert Gross? How was he as a teacher?
He wasn’t a very good composition teacher, I can say that for sure. He drove me crazy (laughter).
How so?
He had a red pencil that he would write your score up with. He was criticizing little details but not having a notion of overall structure or anything like that. In other words, he was a terrible teacher. But I got very good advice… partly because I was living in Los Angeles, my piano teacher got sick and they brought somebody else in who was studying composition at USC and through her I got in contact with Ingolf Dahl, who was one of the great teachers. They don’t get better than Dahl (laughs). So I had very good advice and guidance practically from the start. That was in 1963, when I got to work with him. And I kept in contact with him until the end of his life. He curated the two biggest festivals in the United States—Ojai and Tanglewood. Nobody ever questioned his judgment. He was very respected and rightly so.
Like Wittgenstein said, the good teacher is the one who gives you the right tip at the right time. And Dahl was extremely sensitive and knowledgeable. He started me out on twelve-tone technique but he noticed that I didn’t like the usual Schoenberg teaching with melodies and accompaniments and twelve notes. So I started out with Leopold Spinner’s book, and he was a student of Webern. It was a totally different approach, and it was similar to Webern’s, of composing sound crystals. There were also countless procedural tips that he gave me that I still do, like cutting paper apart—as one would do in a tape studio—splicing pages together to see what your overall structure is going to be.
My very first meeting with Dahl, I brought in a piece called Four Canons for Two Clarinets and he was very friendly. He started looking at it and got down to the bottom of the first page and gave a sigh. I thought, oh no, he found it (laughter). And he found it really quickly. There were two places where I had these little cheats. And finally he got through the score and said, “If you’re gonna call something a canon, then it should really be a canon, or else it’s cheating.” I was so ashamed (laughter). I said, “Never again am I going to cheat.”
I love that he set this high standard for you with all the compositions you would make thereafter.
He certainly did that. He did that for everyone who knew him.
Would you say he was the most transformative teacher you had? I know you also worked with Krzysztof Penderecki, Karlheinz Stockhausen, and Gottfriend Michael Koenig later. Was it Dahl you feel who had shaped a lot of your understanding of composition?
All my teachers did that, but I would say the most transformative teacher I had was Stockhausen?
Why him specifically?
Because he had so many ideas! He would pepper you with ideas all the time and ask for your criticism of his ideas, and if you couldn’t offer anything he’d get impatient and even angry. He’d be like, “Come on! You can do this!” (laughter). In a way, he was like a real tough coach—someone you totally couldn’t mess with. I had very fortunate experiences with teachers.
Do you remember the first piece you composed that your parents came to see you perform?
They came to my senior recital. That was where I had written a piano sonata, as well as Four Canons for Two Clarinets, and a string trio for Ingolf Dahl. I don’t know if they actually liked the music—I can’t tell you that—but they were very encouraging.
Do you feel like you’re similar to your parents? Are there traits they have that rubbed off on you?
I’m afraid so (laughter). Don’t we all have that?
I would say so. What qualities did you see in them that you also see in yourself?
My love of music comes from my father, of course. He would sometimes be sitting in front of the television set, and if someone he respected would come on he’d say, “Johnny, come here! Listen to this!” (laughter). Once we went to some kind of gathering of the Catholic church and the priest sang. He was horrible. I remember when we came out of this event, my dad said “That guy can’t sing!” (laughter). I’m afraid that’s rubbed off on me too.
As in you’re very open about expressing your opinions?
I complain quickly, let’s put it that way (laughter). I don’t necessarily say that to other people, but there you have it. Stockhausen took the courses of Messiaen in Paris when he was very young. I think he was 20. And at one point he remarked that he never heard Messiaen complain about any of his colleagues. I mentioned this to Stockhausen and asked if he had taken this as a model for himself, because I had never heard him complain about his colleague. He said he had, and that Messiaen was a model for him. “However, that doesn’t mean I don’t have my own opinions,” he added very ominously (laughter).
Did you often spend time with Stockhausen outside of this teacher-student relationship? Were you two friends?
In a way, there wasn’t any such thing as friends with him. I did some translating for him, so sometimes I’d visit him and we’d have a talk. There were a couple occasions where he invited me just to talk, too. And on one occasion we went for a walk and he sang to me. It was the most beautiful thing. He was singing from his piece Stimmung. We were sitting on a bench and listening to the German countryside, which had bells ringing around 6 o’clock in the evening and he just started singing. It was really quite beautiful.
You shared this story of your dad being a singer, you mentioned Gregorian chants, and this memory with Stockhausen is one of him singing. And of course you have pieces with singers, you have A Cappella with your wife Beth Griffith and the other piece, Exchanges, with Julia Rempe. I know with A Cappella you were specifically thinking about her voice and its specific qualities. I’m wondering if you could speak to your interest in the voice as a compositional material.
I think it’s the ur-material, in a way. It fascinates me but it also scares me quite a bit. My dad wasn’t just nice, he was a little bit scary at times.
In terms of reprimanding you?
He had a little bit of a drinking habit and that would get out of hand sometimes. Like I said, it’s a very Irish story. But I kind of have a love and fear of the voice. For many years I wanted to write for voice and I couldn’t… I just couldn’t do it. And finally I decided, it’s now or never. That’s when I took six years to write the piece for Beth.
Why are you fearful of writing for voice? What’s going through your mind when composing something for it?
It’s maybe that I know it too well. I know all its vulnerabilities. Banks of sine tones don’t have that problem (laughter).
Is it fair to say then that for your other pieces without voice that you’re drawn to them because they lack this personhood? That there’s no personification? Is that what appeals to you about working with electronics?
I like the abstraction. I remember when Stanley Kubrick was making 2001: A Space Odyssey (1968), he said, “There’s something sexy about machines.” I could very much identify with that (laughter). Somehow I knew exactly what he meant.
Can you expand on that?
If you’ve ever had a really good sine tone generator and started manipulating it, making it go up and down, it’s just the most satisfying activity. That’s all I can say, really. And also the way they can interrelate, and we don’t need to get into that—it’s pretty obvious what’s meant there (laughter).
I’m seeing a parallel here, of the voice as the ur-instrument. And of sine tones as being similarly primal in a way, albeit from a machine.
Good point, I hadn’t thought of it that way.
And I know with the Pulse Music pieces that you made the “superdevice” out of a synthesizer and multi-track tape player. Earlier you mentioned this notion of Dahl having you work by hand. How important is this process of working by hand for you? It feels like composing is this process of discovery for you, and working by hand aids in that.
That’s an interesting point. And it’s very true, too. I like things to be handmade, mmhmm. I like to write out my scores by hand. It’s somehow more gratifying, and I feel like I own them when I do that. When you type them with a computer keyboard, it’s just not the same thing. When one looks at one’s hand and sees how flexible its movements are, and when you look at a typewriter keyboard… it’s all robot stuff. It’s just not as much fun.
I should also mention that I had composition lessons one summer from Karl Kohn. He played a lot of Boulez. He and Boulez did the American premiere of Structures II for two pianos, for example. It was one of the most inspired concerts I’d ever heard. Karl played for me quite often. Every lesson he’d play something for me, and it was just beautiful to watch his hands move across the keyboard so quickly. One of the most remarkable things he did was play Boulez at breakneck speed while smoking a cigar (laughter). You could watch him play and see that those hands were moving so quickly while the cigar wasn’t—it was perfectly stationary. It was like watching Bruce Lee. It was really impressive.
I love that.
And you’d love it even more if you could see it up close. It was extraordinary.
I want to go back to this “superdevice.” Can you speak more about it? What was it like to make music with it?
It was great. I didn’t know that I was going to use a thing like that but what I started out with was the multi-track machine. I was going to play each of the tracks slowed down, just one note at a time on to the tape machine. It turned out, however, that this was really not possible. No matter how hard I tried, or how hard anyone else tried, you wouldn’t be able to get it exactly together, say 15 or 20 or 30 times without having it be totally off.
At this point, the engineer I was working with said that maybe we could maybe trigger the ARP 2500 synthesizer from the tape, just put the pulses on the tape and then run the tape back into the synthesizer and run that multiple times. And it would always be exactly synchronous, and it really worked. Suddenly here was a whole orchestra, perfectly synchronized. This really set me off. Pulse Music I had 30 layers of sound in it that were all synchronized, and to me that was a big deal. I went on doing that in Pulse Music III and also Vanishing Points, where the timing resolution went up to 1800 Hz.
I know with Vanishing Points that this marked a change for you, where you were working with a digital setup. What made you decide to go in this direction?
I thought I could do it and they had this new equipment at the West German Radio [in Cologne]. I remember getting the equipment. It was brought to my house, actually, and the audio engineer set it up for me. I was like, well let’s try it. There were several volumes of user manuals and several terms I had never heard before, like MIDI. What I could do was get the thing going so fast that it would be well over the threshold of pitch-to-color. I would use what I think you would call granular synthesis to make all the colors, which would again be something that was something entirely dependent on your ear.
If it’s going that fast and there are any clicks at all in the sound, at the end you’re gonna hear nothing but clicks (makes a noisy sound with his mouth). With all those gone, you may have something that’s very indistinct. It’s a very difficult place to get to where you have no clicks and distinct motions anyway. So that takes a lot of intervention on the part of the listener, the composer. So there I was back at square one, working with my own ears and hands, and that’s where I wanted to be. I wanted the digital stuff to have that vulnerability as well. I’m not sure it did, but that was the idea.
One of the things that I knew had to happen was that the sounds had to move around in space or they’d bunch up and sound weird, like choking. It’d be almost like a physical feeling of something you didn’t wanna listen to. I originally had them on one track, to try it out and see if I could get them to move around the room in an interesting way. They would start to breathe. You would have colors that went (making sounds analogous to winds rushing through the air). Each of these swells would contain 60 to 100 sine tone pulses.
Did you often have other people listen to your works? I’m reminded of how Stockhausen asked you to give criticism of his ideas. Did you ask others to do the same for you?
Oh, definitely. Many people came in and wanted to hear what was going on and I would play them stuff. I had the great fortune of being friends with Péter Eötvös, one of the great modern conductors. He did a lot of work in that studio and he came in and I often played whatever I could. I remember playing Pulse Music III and I asked him, “What do you think of the intonation here?” He’d say, “It’s hard to tell because it’s changing all the time.” And I was like, “Oh, it is? Dear me.” (laughter). He’s a terrific musician.
Do you remember when you first met your wife Beth?
It was sometime in the early ’70s. In downtown Cologne there was a building with five stories, the top two of which belonged to my publisher, Feedback Studio. The third story was being rented by Mauricio Kagel and so I had heard that he was working with an American singer, and I said, “Well, that’s somebody I want to meet.” I just opened the door one day and there was Beth. I thought, she doesn’t look like an American singer at all. Usually they look kind of bitter (laughter).
So how did she look?
I thought she had the kindest eyes I’d ever seen. She looked gentle. I thought, oh I must get to know her better, so I chased her around the city for about a year (laughter). Finally we did get together and we have been together ever since.
I know she sang the Feldman piece, Three Voices, as well as an interlude on John Cage’s Four Walls. You heard her in this setting with Kagel. How did you approach utilizing her voice with A Cappella?
I had been accompanying her for 15 years by the time I started working on A Cappella in 1990. I accompanied her doing everything under the sun: Fauré’s Requiem, a lot of Mozart and Puccini. I knew very well what she could do and what she sounded like. I started thinking independently of musical structures and having faith in the fact that I knew the voice well enough not to make any big mistakes. I also knew she had an absolutely unbelievable feel for rhythm. I could write something like A Cappella, which is rhythmically close to impossible. I think any percussionist would be challenged by the rhythm of that piece. She got through the whole thing without a single mistake, which I could never do myself. I had this experience with her voice and this trust in her sense of rhythm.
Did she ever remark on what it was like to sing this piece?
She said she loved to do it and that it was really fun. And I don’t think she said that sort of thing many times—she didn’t say it to make me feel good. It’s a call-and-response structure with the way I’d written it. She calls to a set of… singers, let’s call them. And while they’re singing, she calls to another set and they start singing. And then the two sets of singers overlap all the time. She loved to think of herself as being with “her girls” in South Africa, a place she loved to be, and it was just great fun for her.
You mentioned earlier that there was this sense of fear in composing for voice. Did you feel that when composing A Cappella?
I didn’t feel that anymore. It had prevented me from writing anything for voice for 15 years—I had wanted to do it for that long—but I just couldn’t get to it. But when I did, the dam was broken, so to speak. The writing itself was no longer a big deal.
Was there anything that specifically changed? Or was it just this amount of trust?
There was all that trust between us, yes. And I knew that she could do practically anything. She had done Stockhausen’s Stimmung a bunch of times and that’s very difficult.
I know that both Vanishing Points and A Cappella were released alongside Pulse Music III on a CD by Sargasso over 20 years ago. How has it been reflecting on these pieces with this new release by Unseen Worlds?
I’m glad that they reappeared. Beth did A Cappella a couple years ago in London and a number of people came up to her after the concert, interested in where they could find the recording. I think that Tommy McCutchon [of Unseen Worlds] has a clear sense of what he’s trying to do, of finding an audience.
Yeah he’s great. And he really cares about how everything is presented.
He does.
I know for Vanishing Points you were inspired by perspective drawing. You had earlier mentioned a quote from Wittgenstein. Do you think it’s important as a composer to be aware of what’s happening in other mediums, to be aware of philosophers and theory?
I think it’s terribly important to have an awareness of what’s happening in the world in terms of the arts and the thoughts. We’re all part of that fabric, and to know that we are is a great thing. You really do need it or it’s just going to die on that vine without that sort of awareness. I love the work of so many writers and painters and it’s important that they’re part of my makeup.
Do you mind sharing about any writers and painters who have really shaped the way you think about art?
I can think of a specific example, and that was when I wrote the piece for 8 French horns many years ago.
Is this Decay?
Yes. That was inspired by Samuel Beckett’s How It Is (1961) and there’s this guy who’s crawling through the mud throughout the book. I was so struck by it that I immediately thought, ah, eight French horns (laughter). That’s where the idea came from. And I also like Beckett’s structures, of partial sentences that keep coming back with asymmetries. I started writing pieces just like that, that did the same thing. And then I went to Europe and discovered Penderecki and Stockhausen and all that got incorporated into the piece, but it all started with Beckett.
Is there a specific Irish facet to his work that you identify with?
I can’t say so, but there is the Irish obsession with cycles. I have looked at that very specifically in the writings of Yeats. There’s A Vision (1925) and Joyce with Finnegans Wake (1939), which I spent years with. I don’t know if that’s because I have this partially Irish American background, but it just fascinated me. And it still does. It’s part of me by now.
There was a point in the late ’60s when I became aware of the fact that I was too dependent on the ideas of Stockhausen. I had to do something about it. I made a list of characteristics of Stockhausen’s music. I had a list of 50 characteristics and I said, “Okay, they’ve all gotta go.” (laughter). This is kind of like telling yourself that you can’t write parallel fifths. After I had gotten rid of all these things in my mind I said, “What’s left?” And the only thing I could think of at the time was the cyclic form. So I started to inspect that very carefully, and I found these sources, like Joyce and Yeats, and started conceiving of those as models for the kinds of forms I wanted to develop. I spent several years working this way with the piece Frieze for four pianos. That’s pure cyclicism, just wheels and wheels and wheels, so to speak. And I’ve been working on that kind of thing ever since.
Is there anything you wanted to talk about that we didn’t get to today?
You’ve asked some very interesting questions. And of course I could go on about themself forever. As I’m sure you’re aware, any composer can do that (laughter). But no, I think your questions have been very good and I’ve enjoyed talking with you.
I’ve enjoyed it too. I liked hearing about your father singing these Irish songs, and then even just the mention of the Gregorian chants was insightful. I imagine that was immense.
They were. Penderecki was really into liturgical music. Russian Orthodox music. Every time he would go home to Kraków he would come back with records of this stuff. That helped me a lot, to become more deeply into that kind of singing. I often thought, when I was in the old city of Cologne—that’s where the electronic studio was located—that you couldn’t walk 50 yards without walking by a church. I thought, wow, is that having an effect on me? (laughter).
Do you feel like the landscape of California has had an effect on the music you made?
I would hope so. The city of Los Angeles, in the most obvious way, has so many musicians living there. There were nine full-time symphony orchestras in the Hollywood studios. Ingolf Dahl was offered professorships all over the country but he wouldn’t leave Hollywood. Nothing could get him out of there—he had too many possibilities for music-making.
You mentioned John Ford movies at the beginning of our conversation.
I was only three years old when I started going to the movies.
That’s so young!
Where we were living, there was this huge vacant empty lot going all the way to the Pacific Ocean. Just miles and miles of nothing. But in the middle of this, there was an old Mexican adobe house and every Saturday night the owner of the field would project movies onto the outer wall of this house. People could come and sit there and watch movies. I would go with my older brother, him holding me by the hand, and we would sit there and watch movies every Saturday night.
That’s incredible you had that opportunity.
It was also kind of strange, kind of perverse. The real reason for doing this was medical quackery.
What do you mean?
The owner of the place had upside-down bottles which he said had some kind of therapeutic water. He’d dangle copper wires from the bottles and wrapped them around people’s wrists, so as they were watching movies, people were apparently getting healed. It was pure Los Angeles quackery (laughter). I found out about this later from my brother; of course as a three year old you don’t know what’s going on. It was really weird.
How much older is your brother?
Four years older.
I wanted to ask about working with Beth. What sort of things do you feel like you learned from working with her that you may have never learned if you never met her?
For one thing, I’ve learned what is possible, and to believe in the impossible. I wrote A Cappella on the edge of my chair. Was I writing something impossible? And I knew if anybody could do it, it was her. And it was true—it is true! She could do it!
More information about John McGuire, including his recent releases Pulse Music and Vanishing Points / A Cappella can be found at the Unseen Worlds website. Liner notes for both albums can be found there as well.
Thank you for reading the 103rd issue of Tone Glow. Let’s learn about what is possible from one another.
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Great interview!