In light of my post some days ago on altered times and altered spaces, it feels appropriate to be listening to the music of John McGuire right now. I’m doing so in a work context, but the dynamic stasis that McGuire creates in, for example, his Pulse Music III seems to speak, obliquely, to our current moment.

McQuire is a fringe figure in American minimalism (although I hope the project I am currently writing for will move him a little closer to the centre). He’s the sort of composer who gets mentioned in lists of great, overlooked minimalists (Kyle Gann offers one such list in his overview essay in The Ashgate Companion to Minimalist and Postminimalist Music), but is rarely encountered elsewhere. Perhaps the fact that he studied in Germany and the Netherlands (with Stockhausen, Penderecki and Koenig) plays some part in this. He learnt a lot from serialism, but found a way to realise its concerns with continuity and discontinuity, parametrism and pulse, and the spatiality of time within a minimalist aesthetic. The relation of his pulse compositions to Gruppen (a comparison the composer himself makes) reminds me of the relationship of Music for 18 Musicians to John Coltrane’s Africa/Brass: a pixellated abstraction that reveals a new or hidden world beneath.

The dialogue between discrete units and extended continuities, which in turn creates a multi-dimensional musical space, leads me, not for the first time in recent weeks, to Bergson’s concept of durée. I haven’t yet read Bergson, although Time and Free Will is now on my reading pile. I simply leave this here as a thought. Under lockdown – a succession of days relatively undistinguished from one another – the quantitative and qualitative aspects of time, central to Bergson’s theory, have begun to blur into one another. It’s an experience anticipated, it seems to me, in McGuire’s hypnotically beautiful constructions of algorithmically controlled pulse streams.

There was a performance of McGuire’s 48 Variations for Two Pianos at Music We’d Like to Hear in 2017, a concert I now regret not attending. You can hear that piece (though not that performance) here: