John Purser, The Herald

Vocal Music: Dreams for Marcie (1986)

The premiere of Dreams for Marcie…brought a welcome visit from one of Scotland’s brightest… émigré composers. The music is necessarily uncompromising but with a powerful dramatic potential. … A telling and secure performance…its many subtleties…deft touches suggesting the Caribbean in a fragment of time, or the ironic unison recitative of voice and violin for the retreating…members of the sect.
The logic of the story was reflected in a well controlled but unforced musical structure – the theme of the road an obvious point of reference. But McQueen’s idiom yields easily to the emotional needs of the moment and the concluding passages with bitter-sweet ostinato for the violins were disturbingly effective.”