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Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuires Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europes angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock serialisms warped geometries onto an evenly spaced grid, perfectly preserving serial musics multi-dimensionality while smoothing its wildest disjunctures and sharpest angles. If serialism is Montreals Habitat 67 modular housing complex, McGuires Pulse Music compositions are the primary-colored grids of Le Corbusiers LHabitation apartment complex an exuberant expression of the same materials and principles.

Every layer of pulses is made distinct through its timbre, register, and tempo. We hear them as a plurality, organized like stars in the sky. Every so often the sky rotates and the stars appear in a different arrangement. Our ear naturally starts to draw connections and, as it sweeps between one layer and another, what was discrete becomes continuous. Pulses become flows; quantitative reality becomes qualitative experience.

Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuires Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europes angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock serialisms warped geometries onto an evenly spaced grid, perfectly preserving serial musics multi-dimensionality while smoothing its wildest disjunctures and sharpest angles. If serialism is Montreals Habitat 67 modular housing complex, McGuires Pulse Music compositions are the primary-colored grids of Le Corbusiers LHabitation apartment complex an exuberant expression of the same materials and principles.

Every layer of pulses is made distinct through its timbre, register, and tempo. We hear them as a plurality, organized like stars in the sky. Every so often the sky rotates and the stars appear in a different arrangement. Our ear naturally starts to draw connections and, as it sweeps between one layer and another, what was discrete becomes continuous. Pulses become flows; quantitative reality becomes qualitative experience.
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Presented together for the first time, American composer John McGuires Pulse Music series (1975-1979) blurs the popular narrative that Minimalism was a reaction against Europes angular, intellectual, inscrutable high-modernism. McGuire, born in California, studied at Occidental College in Los Angeles and UC Berkeley before going to Europe to study with Karlheinz Stockhausen, Krzysztof Penderecki, and Gottfried Michael Koenig. His compositions lock serialisms warped geometries onto an evenly spaced grid, perfectly preserving serial musics multi-dimensionality while smoothing its wildest disjunctures and sharpest angles. If serialism is Montreals Habitat 67 modular housing complex, McGuires Pulse Music compositions are the primary-colored grids of Le Corbusiers LHabitation apartment complex an exuberant expression of the same materials and principles.

Every layer of pulses is made distinct through its timbre, register, and tempo. We hear them as a plurality, organized like stars in the sky. Every so often the sky rotates and the stars appear in a different arrangement. Our ear naturally starts to draw connections and, as it sweeps between one layer and another, what was discrete becomes continuous. Pulses become flows; quantitative reality becomes qualitative experience.
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