Janet Maguire


Janet Maguire is an American composer residing in Venice, Italy.

Biography

She is known particularly for her arrangement of the finale of Giacomo Puccini's Turandot, in which she exclusively used the sketches Puccini left for it at his death. Maguire is also known for her dramatic contemporary opera in three acts, Hérésie, and has worked in a wide variety of musical expressions throughout some fifty orchestral, chamber, solo, vocal, choral and stage works.
Born in Chicago and raised in New Rochelle, New York, Janet Maguire began musical studies at the age of six: on piano, French horn, and cornet. She completed a BA degree in Piano at Colorado College, then went to Paris to study composition with René Leibowitz for five years. They co-authored the book Thinking for Orchestra: Practical Exercises in Orchestration, and a book about the orchestration of some of Jacques Offenbach's works, Nuits Parisiennes, as well as Carl Maria von Weber's opera Die Drei Pintos. Several summers spent at the Darmstadt Ferienkurse influenced Maguire's style, as did the music of György Ligeti, Luigi Nono, and Karlheinz Stockhausen.
Maguire continues to develop independent paths in musical thought with the help of several musicians specializing in experimental music.
Maguire was the recipient of the 2008 Guggenheim Fellowship as well as a residence at Copland House in 2006.
Maguire was music critic for the Paris Herald Tribune while she lived in Paris. After moving to Venice, she founded there the association "Musica in Divenire", of which she was elected President, and organized concerts of new music. Her compositions have been heard throughout Italy and Germany, and in France, Spain, Ireland, the UK, the US, Austria, Canada, Argentina, Australia, Latvia and Bulgaria. New World Records issued a CD with seven of her works, and Albany Records released a CD with ten of her works in 2009.

List of works

Orchestral

Quartets