Janet Maguire might hold the record for blooming late as a composer. Born in Chicago in 1927, she has made her home in Europe nearly all her adult life. She studied with French 12-tone guru René Leibowitz and at the Darmstadt Summer School. She also studied with Xenakis, Nono, and Ligeti. She wrote about 25 major compositions in the 12-tone technique, found them all unsatisfactory, and gave up composition. It wasn’t until around 1990, in her 60s, that she finally felt she had discovered her authentic expressive voice, using the sounds of European avant-garde music but without recourse to any “system” or compositional “technique”. Her music frequently uses free rhythms, atonality, extended vocal and instrumental effects, and micro-intervals. While similar music by others often sounds impersonal and formulaic, a listener who is not blocked by a highly modernist musical vocabulary is apt to find that all seven pieces presented here give the impression of having genuine meaning that makes the unusual variety of sounds fascinating.
One of the two choral pieces on this disc, Per Acqua, and a string quartet called L’Altro Quartetto are particularly memorable. The former, a setting of a poem alluding to Odysseus’ journey past the Sirens, uses waves of vocal sound intended to reverberate in a large acoustic, and it was appropriately recorded in the Santa Maria della Pietà Church in Venice. The quartet also was recorded in a church and owes its fascination to its success in using the space to merge lyrical lines from the lower strings with contrasting avant-garde playing techniques in the violins. All of the playing and singing is first-rate and gives the impression of being fully committed to music that is certainly worth hearing. The sound, whether made in church or studio, is consistently excellent from venue to venue.
