John McGuire: Music for Double String Trio

Axel Lindner conducting. Photograph by Rick Minnich.

Geographically and culturally, John McGuire’s musical roots lie far from his California home, in the electronic studios of postwar Cologne. Of particular significance to him were the Studio for Electronic Music at Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR), where Karlheinz Stockhausen had first made his mark in the 1950s, and the Feedback Studio founded in 1970 by Stockhausen Ensemble members Johannes Fritsch, David Johnson, and Rolf Gehlhaar. It was in these two spaces that McGuire developed his unique take on European serial practice, combining the lessons of parametrical thinking and the continuity of pitch and rhythm (first explored by Stockhausen in works like Gruppen and Kontakte) with a smoother, more minimalist aesthetic of tonal harmonies and steady pulses.

Many of these experiments were worked out electronically; indeed, as documented on previous Unseen Worlds recordings, McGuire’s style developed in parallel with the steady upgrades in technology that took place through the 1970s, 80s and 90s—from Pulse Music I (1975–6) and III (1978), through Vanishing Points (1985–8), to A Cappella (1990–97). But he maintained an interest in instrumental music too, and the different possibilities and challenges that it presented: the composition of Pulse Music II for orchestra, for example, required him to rethink the qualities of speed and precision that were central to the other Pulse Music pieces but impossible for a large number of live musicians. For A Cappella, comprised entirely of vocal samples (of McGuire’s wife, the soprano Beth Griffith), McGuire had to carefully edit around the organic aspects of the sound (the inevitable, brief “search process” at the start of each sample when the voice is settling on its correct note) in order fit it to a digital concept.

The loose “trilogy” of pieces for double string trio presented on this recording, all of them composed relatively recently, began life in 2009 as sketches for a mixed ensemble of clarinets, horns and strings. As McGuire describes it, as work progressed on what would become Jump Cuts (2012), that instrumentation progressively slimmed down and down until all that was left was a pair of violins, a pair of violas and a pair of cellos, grouped into two string trios who would play facing one another on either side of the stage. That stereo arrangement not only arose out of McGuire’s experiences within the studio, but also connected back to his experiences as a teenage French horn player of playing sixteenth-century antiphonal brass music, by the likes of Giovanni Gabrieli.

Sketch for Jump Cuts, 01.24.2013

The connection between past and contemporary, acoustic and digital, can be heard in all three pieces. Axel Lindner, who conducted the three recordings presented here, speaks of how, despite their minimalist surface, they are made up of figurations that “may appear in Classical or Romantic music.” This observation contributed to how the players approached questions of articulation and phrasing, who related it to the music of Vivaldi.

McGuire’s musical style may have been forged in a world of synthesizers capable of generating up to 1,800 pulses per second and infallible distinctions of pitch and timbre, but something remarkable happens to it when it comes into contact with the inevitable fuzziness of live musicians and acoustic instruments. Paradoxically, seems to open up, like light penetrating through a curtain that has become slightly frayed.

How that fuzziness plays out evolves across the three pieces here. To start with the earliest piece, the musical gestures of Jump Cuts might be described as the most idiomatically “electronic.” They are an extension of the experiments McGuire undertook in A Cappella and Exchanges to relate the proportions of individual notes to those of measures and phrases. This analytical basis is reflected in Jump Cuts’ vocabulary of repeating pulses that are passed (across octaves) between four of the six instruments at any time, with the other two playing sustained notes accented with a rising appoggiatura at their onset.

Sketch for Jump Cuts, 11.03.2011

Jump Cuts’ proportions are all derived from the Fibonacci series of numbers (1, 1, 2, 3, 5, 8, 13, etc). Three tempi are used, in the ratios 2:3:5. Three different bar lengths are used (3, 5, and 8 eighth notes). Within this scheme, the work is divided into six sections of fourteen subsections each; the number of bars in each subsection is also a Fibonacci number, between 3 and 34. Each even-odd pair of subsections (e.g., 2–3, 4–5, 6–7) is played at the same tempo and is symmetrical in terms of bar lengths and bar subdivisions. Finally, each new subsection moves one step anticlockwise around the circle of fifths, beginning with B major. In Classical terms, that would suggest the music was continually “resolving” from dominant to tonic via perfect cadences, but in fact, the tempo and/or rhythmic changes that occur at each section break heighten rather than lessen the music’s instability and tension.

Indeed, the twelve-step cycle of key centers around the circle of fifths is in a phasing relationship with the fourteen-step cycle of phrase lengths, which requires the work’s eighty-four sections to run through its complete phase cycle.

Sketch for Jump Cuts, 08.24.2011

Double Bars (2017) also did not begin as a piece for double string trio but only emerged that way as McGuire began experimenting with his materials. In this case, these are patterns of crescendos and descrescendos that overlap one another, exchanging different musical lines between foreground and background. Although also possible electronically, this is an idea more obviously suited to acoustic instruments, relying for its effect on continual listening and balancing between the six players. It also gives rise to a greater sense that the music is “breathing,” as the more active layers recede and advance against the more static layers. Nevertheless, the music is still highly structured: McGuire establishes three pairs of tempo/meter relationships (effectively a 2:3 ratio of durations, at three different speeds). Each half of the pair is assigned to one of the trios, and these can be swapped, giving a total of six pairs of meter/tempo relationships. These are permutated for each of the work’s six sections.

Sketch for Double Bars, 10.20.2016

The debt to past forms is most explicit in Playground (2021), the only work of the three to have been conceived from the start with a double string trio in mind. Lindner describes the figurations in this piece—the snapping, short-long octave leaps—as reminiscent of a build-up passage in a Beethoven symphony, but the work’s basis lies further back in history than even that. It is essentially a form of passacaglia, a seventeenth-century form based on a repeating chord sequence, and best known from Pachelbel’s famous Canon. Usually, this sequence would repeat unchanged, but McGuire adds variety first by periodically changing the underlying key center; and second by stretching or contracting the duration of each chord.

Sketch for Playground, 07.15.2015

His six-chord sequence is heard in quick succession in the work’s opening moments, one chord to a bar; for the next subsection, this is expanded to eight times that length. Subsequent repeats contract and expand in similar fashion. On top of these changes, the music’s tempo also changes, getting progressively slower over the first three subsections, then speeding back up again. Meanwhile, the musical figurations do the reverse, reducing from quarter notes to sixteenth notes, and then back. The music doesn’t therefore slow down or speed up as such, but does both at once in different dimensions, as if accelerating into a black hole. This general pattern repeats four times, for a total of twenty-four subsections; as with Jump Cuts and Double Bars, the music also transposes with each new subsection.

With its minor-key tonality and the harmonic suspensions that underlie its six-chord sequence, Playground has something of Henry Purcell about it (another passacaglia fan from back in the day). At least, that’s how it sounds at first. But just a few bars into the second subsection, as the relationship between tempo and duration becomes distorted, it quickly becomes clear that something weirder than this is going on. From here on, our attention splits between a surface of figurations, pauses, and cadences that seems to tug at well-known emotional expectations, and a disorienting formal construction that throws all of that into question.

Sketch for Playground, 01.31.2021

This gets to one of the fascinating paradoxes of McGuire’s music: that even though its surface may be comprehensible—even familiar—it quickly gets strange. And the longer it goes on, the less comprehensible it becomes. That is especially true with the instrumental music. McGuire’s electronic music is a beautifully harmonious, crystalline world that, once entered, can be shaped by the ear into a space of flowing continuities between one point and the next. Transferred to stringed instruments, however, that world becomes infinitely more complex, suffused as it is with the expectations of history, and the richnesses and impurities of human players and their acoustic technologies.

– Tim Rutherford-Johnson