Magic Music

For sheer persistence and musical integrity, it would be difficult to outdo Canadian songwriters Frank Phillet and Neil MacIver, the duo that, for all intents and purposes, is Magic Music. Over the course of their nearly 30-year partnership, the two men have continued to follow a committed course of musical development with mostly no commercial or record label support or interest. Phillet and MacIver hooked up musically for the first time in 1970, gaining their first professional work that year, the composition and performance of an original score for Bertolt Brecht's The Caucasian Chalk Circle commissioned by the University of Alberta. An original score for the play Up Against the Wall Oedipus by Marshall McLuan-colleague Wilfred Watson followed in 1971, as did two commissioned symphonic pieces for the University of Alberta Symphony Orchestra. Beginning in 1972, the duo began composing incidental music for radio and theater, a pursuit they have continued at various times over the course of their career. Their stock in trade, though, has always been songwriting, and Magic Music released their first single in 1975. Between 1975 and 1990, six other Magic Music singles and EPs were released on Attic and First International Records. The reason for the paucity of the band's output is the same reason that many idiosyncratic songwriters struggle to be heard: their songs "lack commercial potential," according to many of the record executives who turned the duo down. Phillet and MacIver have endured long periods during which they were rejected by any and all record labels, and, when they have managed an official release, they have tended, as might be guessed, to go nowhere. This is certainly not a result of a lack of ability. The two have had four of their songs recorded by other artists, including two Canadian hits, and have received the BMI Canada Certificate of Honor twice. Dark to Light, amazingly Magic Music's first full-length album, was created randomly over a lengthy period between 1985 and 1988 as the two could round up the money for studio time, and not mastered until 1995; and, like Phillet and MacIver's history, it is a study in perseverance. It is simply another step up on the duo's ladder, as they continue to create and perform music.