John McGrath

John McGrath is Senior Lecturer in Music at University of Surrey. His monograph, Samuel Beckett, Repetition and Modern Music (Routledge, 2018), has received positive reviews in Music & Letters, Wire Magazine, Psychology of Music, and the Irish Studies Review. McGrath is also a guitarist; recent appearances include a solo set at King’s Place, London, while his compositions have been aired and screened internationally. He is Deputy Director of the International Guitar Research Centre (IGRC) and has co-edited the collection 21st Century Guitar: Evolutions and Augmentations for Bloomsbury (2023).

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'The thing about the guitar is that it has to be constantly re-imagined, de-constructed, then re-constructed if it is to continue to be a vital force in music’s future landscapes. '21st Century Guitar' is the new grimoire in this quest for the instrument’s ongoing reinventions.' – Joe Satriani, guitarist

This important collection combines rigorous scholarship with knowledge gained from practical experience involving a wide range of musical explorations, from microtonal music to the use of augmented reality – a welcome and significant contribution to the literature on the guitar. – Kevin Dawe, author of The New Guitarscape (2010)

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“McGrath’s book is salutary in flagging the deliberately jarring tactics of the avant garde, and getting the reader to grasp what remains permanently uncanny about our pleasure in Beckett and Feldman’s exploration of both the playful humour and subtle queasiness to be found within their repetitive forms” – Drew Daniel, The Wire

“a valuable addition for the critical insights it provides through meticulous analyses.” Michael Palmese, Irish Studies Review

“Samuel Beckett's experiments at the intersection of music and literature are among the most unique and interesting of their kind. McGrath's study contributes new elements to our understanding of Beckett's work in this area, particularly in its potential to enrich the thinking of musicians and composers. Not "just" a book on Beckett, it makes Beckett the starting point for a number of fruitful meditations on repetition, representation, improvisation, and structural experimentation in the arts. The chapters on Morton Feldman and Scott Fields are especially welcome in this regard.” - Eric Prieto, University of California, Santa Barbara

"a wonderful new book ... McGrath dives deep into the musicality of Beckett’s work and how it has shaped certain aspects of modern music, focusing mainly on the works of Feldman and the guitarist Scott Fields. McGrath’s book isn’t the first to deal with music and Beckett, but it is an important step forward in that area." - David Menestres, Burning Ambulance