Joshua McGuire

Senior Lecturer in Musicianship

Joshua McGuire serves as Senior Lecturer in Musicianship at the Blair School of Music, where he teaches courses in Musicianship as well as Meditation for Musicians.

A leading opera librettist, McGuire has written librettos for The Secret of Luca (based on the novel by Ignazio Silone), and Roscoe (based on the novel by Pulitzer Prize winner William Kennedy), with music by Evan Mack, as well as #isoperadead, the first-ever opera for Twitter. More recently. his collaboration with Mack produced Lucinda y Las Flores de la Nochebuena, a children's opera commissioned by the Fresno State Opera Theatre. After premiering in 2016, the opera has since been staged for more than 15,000 children, including annual performances by Opera in the Heights (Houston) and the San Francisco Opera Guild. McGuire and Mack's one-act opera The Ghosts of Gatsby, based on the life of Zelda Fitzgerald, was commissioned by Samford University in 2018. Mack and McGuire are currently fulfilling a multi-company commission for a comedy titled Yeltsin in Texas!

In 2015, McGuire was commissioned to write a libretto for Washington National Opera's American Opera Initiative, and the resulting one-act opera, Alexandra, with music by David Clay Mettens, was premiered at the Kennedy Center. He is also the author of The Secret of Music: a look at the listening life, a book of nonfiction essays on music and mindfulness. McGuire is the recipient of fellowships from Yaddo and The Susan Shames Feinstein Librettist Fellowship at the American Center for New Works Development.

McGuire studied at the University of Cincinnati College-Conservatory of Music, where he pursued Master’s work in both guitar and orchestral conducting, holding assistantships in both areas. As an undergraduate at Vanderbilt University, he took the Bachelor of Music summa cum laude as well as High Honors in English Literature for his thesis on musical structures in the work of James Joyce.