John McGuire (b.1942) first came to my attention some time during the 1980s, when I was exploring the high quality vinyls from Edition Michael Frauenlob Bauer in Frankfurt am Main. I had already received Beth Griffith’s ingenious and rewarding version of Morton Feldman’s Three Voices from the company, plus John Cage’s Empty Words, piano improvisations by Herbert Henck and Dieter Schnebel’s Laut – Gesten – Laute, and was very intrigued by the label, which, sadly, seemed to fade out with the coming of the CD media.

The McGuire LP presented Frieze For Four Pianos (Pi-hsien Chen, Deborah Richards, Herbert Henck and Gérard Frémy, conducted by Péter Eötvös) plus Pulse Music III, which is reissued on this Sargasso CD.

Even though McGuire was born in Artesia, California, he set sails for Cologne in 1966, the year of Stockhausen’s Telemusik; a Stockhausen that had recently taken up residence in the small community of Kürten in Bergisches Land just 30 kilometers east of Cologne; a community he would make world famous through his Stockhausen Composition and Interpretation Courses from the late 1990s on.

Stockhausen was to become one of John McGuire’s foremost teachers. McGuire stayed in Europe – mostly Germany - for 32 years before heading back to America, but this time pitching camp on the down-to-earth East Coast instead of the dreamy Western shore.

He didn’t stay all the time in Cologne, or even Germany, but stayed for periods in other cities of Europe. He studied, for example, with Penderecki in Essen from 1966 to 1968, at der Folkwang Hochschule. He participated in the Composition Courses in Darmstadt, where he attended Stockhausen’s tuition. He played in an ensemble with Stockhausen in Darmstadt 1967, and participated in Stockhausen’s Musik für ein Haus in 1968. After that he studied computer composition with Gottfried Michael Koenig at the State University of Utrecht in Holland 1970 – 1971 and later electronic music with Hans Ulrich Humpert at the University of Cologne 1975 – 1977.

The first work on this CD, Pulse Music III, was realized a year later, in 1978.

McGuire’s art has come out of a peculiar mix of the minimalism he encountered in his 1960s’ California and the serialist thinking of cultural atmospheres like Darmstadt. He says:

In addition to his role as a composer he has taken on several other duties. He has been a pianist with the Radio Symphony Orchestra of Saarbrücken (1972-75), organist at the Church of St. Nikolas von Tolentino in Rösrath (1979-82), and editor for Carl Fischer in New York (1998). Since 2000 he has been Visiting Adjunct Professor at Columbia University.

When reading McGuire’s notes on Pulse Music III you get an impression of a scientist at work, metering and measuring, calculating and determining, setting small packets of energy in motion through an intricate but known and evaluated grid of rules. This really does sound stockhausenesque. You will recall many of Stockhausen’s works that are composed in the smallest detail, but which yet, according to certain rules – changing from work to work – may sound quite different from performance to performance. This is a fascinating and extremely rewarding method. I feel the comparison to Stockhausen in Pulse Music III is correct in the first sense; the minuscule details that are planned and executed, but since this is a pure electronic work which is recorded once and for all, it of course does not vary at any time. The fascination with which this hits me lies in the artistic, musical result that does arise from McGuire’s scientific approach.
The music is also quite typical with reference to McGuire’s statement about synthesis of minimalism and generalized serialism. You have to put the music into its timeframe too, considering what tools were in use back in 1978. You did not at all have the personal computers of today, with which you quite easily, with the right calculations, could reach results that at least on first hearing and on the surface, would sound similar to Pulse Music III.

It is interesting to bring the initial idea or inspiration for the piece into focus. McGuire says that he wanted to capture an image he’d had for a while; an aural image that did not relate to acoustical instruments or voices, but which had to do with motion rather than sound. I’d wish he’d elaborate some more on this piece of information, because it sounds very interesting to me, being the first spark of the cold fire of the music. It seems, from the short description (which feels more like a hint at something important than a real description), that the inspiration for the work came from a dream state, from a relaxed state of the mind, out of which an image rose which took shape in Pulse Music III. This is the one instance in the creation of this work that does not sound scientific or calculating, and again I could make references to Stockhausen, who many times has let dreams and visions set complicated compositional processes in motion. The two most obvious examples might be Trans and Musik im Bauch, which arrived straight out of dreams. I’m sure. However, that this cannot be taught or learned, unless you already naturally live that attitude of openness to the great within.

This is what John McGuire says in three short notes on the composition:

He also explains that he recorded two series of pulses, which are then played out of phase with each other. The overlapping of these repeated and out of phase waves forms a continuous looping motion in space, as McGuire expresses it.
This is not the end though. Instead this method is repeated in four layers of looping motions of this kind, all at their individual speeds. You can imagine all the different shapes of sound that may arise inside this complex context, as sounds thin out or get dense, producing miraculous mirages that rise like ghost ships out of the tonal web, only to disappear in a timbral mist, perhaps to reappear in different colors and timbres somewhere else.

McGuire, in the booklet, offers a detailed insight into the pure technicalities of the compositional method, achieved through the usage of an EMS Synthi 100 synthesizer.

To experience the whole scope of the sound, from the deep, rumbling murmurs that will move bric-a-brac towards the edge of bureaus and slide paintings sideways on the wall to the crystal edges of starshine that permeates the soaring upper layers of the audio with intergalactic light, you need good stereo equipment with a big, bulky subwoofer. Then this music really happens to you, like an Abrams tank to a mud wall, or like the Red Sea to the Egyptians, save you get out of it alive and well, just with your senses a bit sharpened!

A simple, laid-back spin of Pulse Music III opens sudden glimpses into the nature of matter itself; into the traces of elementary particles, into the atomic jitter, the grains of molecules, the knotty surfaces through scanning electron microscopes, reflections inside reflections, electromagnetic force fields transmitting secrets across the galaxies...

At times I think this music exists in some kind of circuit of influences where the musics of Michael Obst, Steve Reich and Morton Subotnick cross tracks.

The impression, at last, is that of a de-humanized music, anonymous, or all encompassing, perhaps, somehow expressing static and fleeting states of matter. This music is mineral music!

McGuire has a compelling description of the nature of Vanishing Points. He says the piece is an experiment in motion perspective, beginning with his perceptions when driving down a road with an unobstructed view in front of him. On a passage like that, the horizon in front of you remains the same, or, rather, appears all the time regenerated, while the immediate landscape to your left and right moves quickly backwards.
I have experienced exactly this feeling driving through the desert from Damascus to Baghdad way back in 1972. Sometimes it felt like we were sitting still, though moving quite fast, and at other times it felt like we were going straight up or straight down. Our senses were tricked by the seemingly static motion through a landscape that was deprived of stimuli, across a desert that didn’t change, the horizon in front of us regenerating in the manner that McGuire describes above in connection with his work Vanishing Points.
McGuire makes the analogy between the this regenerated but still identical horizon and the rhythm-to-pitch threshold, i.e. the point when individual pulses appear at such immense speed that they join up – in our limited perception – as pitch. That is when points vanish! Stockhausen worked with this discovery in Kontakte. It was revolutionary at the time, as Stockhausen probed into sound and discovered the very nature of it.
This piece was realized ten years after Pulse Music III, in 1988, and McGuire used a Yamaha QX1 Digital Sequence Recorder, which ran McGuire’s programs, driving a TX816 tone generator.

However, the jewel of this set is A Cappella; a wonderful, mysterious music made up of small bits of vocal sounds. The voice belongs to Beth Griffith, the renowned Texas-born soprano, who incidentally is married to John McGuire.
As I said in my prefatory words, I know Griffith from her great recording of Morton Feldman’s Three Voices on a vinyl. Joan La Barbara also made a recording of Three Voices. It was my first Feldman CD, on New Albion. La Barbara is married to Morton Subotnick. Everything seems connected…

Anyhow, John McGuire describes the process of constructing A Cappella. He indicates that he started by recording single tones sung by Beth Griffith. He made three groups of recordings, allotted to the vowels e, ah and u. Each of those groups of vowels consisted of 11 or 12 pitches, individually recorded at intervals of a major second or minor third, which translates to the range of Griffith’s voice.
The groups were treated like digital instruments, which McGuire could use at will. Then different sets of sound were extracted, combined into strands of changing vowels. These strands in turn were overlaid and synchronized to execute the polyphonic sequences of two virtual choruses.
In a performance Beth Griffith sings live to the playback of these two choruses made up of samples of her own voice. This is reminiscent of Feldman’s Three Voices, which has two pre-recorded tapes of the singer interact with the actual, live performance of the singer.
There is a certain pattern or sequence to Griffith’s interaction with the virtual choruses, described in the booklet. There are also spatial aspects acted out during the performance, concerning closeness versus distance as well as left and right placement. Speed and register are other variables, which are utilized to make this a rare musical experience.

Finally McGuire defines the principle stages in the production of the taped sections:

Maybe it’s the human touch of Griffith’s voice that takes this recording off of the mineral characteristics of Pulse Music III and Vanishing Points unto a soaring spiritual elevation of auditive bliss in the realm of the angels.
The atmosphere is enchanted from the first bar, in an intense, otherworldly sound texture which carries the serene and holy stillness of Arvo Pärt as well as reminiscences of some of the purest music out of the oeuvre of Philip Glass, and there are strong medieval aspects at play inside this luminous, transparent glass music of human and super-human voices, all stemming from the voice of Beth Griffith.
To me this music is a wonder of equilibrium, the wobbling reflections in a water drop, hanging, trembling, from the threads of a spider web in a spruce forest on an island of myths, fairies and elves hovering in the transparent but super-charged layers of vocalisms which spread in the colors of the rainbow across the score, timbre by timbre…

I let my mind go straying, out in the light of this music of A Cappella, out into the timelessness of these pure waves of beauty, and the light illuminates my skull as I listen…