John McGuire

Born in Artesia, California, on 27 June 1942; John McGuire is a composer. After a bachelor’s degree in composition with Robert Arthur Gross at Occidental College in 1964, he went to Europe with travelling scholarships from the University of California at Berkeley and a Fulbright scholarship, studied with Krzysztof Penderecki at the Folkwang-Hochschule Essen from 1966 to 1968 and attended Karlheinz Stockhausen’s composition studios in Darmstadt in 1967 and 1968. In 1970 he completed his master’s degree at Berkeley with Ingolf Dahl and Seymour Shifrin, in 1970/71 he studied computer composition with Gottfried Michael Koenig in Utrecht, and from 1975 to 1977 electronic music at the Musikhochschule Köln. In 1971 he won first prize at the International Gaudeamus Composition Competition with “Decay” for eight horns. In Germany he was pianist of the Rundfunk-Sinfonieorchester Saarbrücken from 1972 to 1975 and organist in Rösrath from 1979 to 1982, and the WDR commissioned six works from him for its electronic studio; in 1995 he was composer in residence at Schloss Wiepersdorf. After returning to the United States he worked from 1998 as a music editor at the publisher Carl Fischer in New York and taught at Columbia University from 2000 to 2002. His works include “Frieze” for four pianos (1969-74), “Pulse Music I-III” (1975-78), “48 Variations” for two pianos (1976-80) and “Vanishing Points” (1985-88). In the Cybele catalogue his first electronic composition “Pulse Music I” (1975/76) for tape, realised in the studio of the Cologne Musikhochschule and premiered in Cologne in 1977, is heard as an excerpt on Feedback Studio Köln Sampler – 25 Years of Feedback Studio Köln Studio (1996) and complete on Feedback Studio Köln Vol. 2 – Ton-Antiton (2001).