14:00 - 16:30
With Louise Fryer. BBC SSO under Donald Runnicles in Golijov, Mozart, Bruckner, Debussy.
 Mauricio Kagel (1931 - 2008) |
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 Mauricio Kagel was born in Buenos Aires in 1931. A self-taught composer he began writing in 1950, seeking musical ideas that opposed the neoclassical style dictated by the Péron government. After an unsuccessful attempt to establish an electronic studio, in 1955 he became chorus director and rehearsal accompanist at the Teatro Colón and editor on cinema and photography for the journal Nueva Vision . In 1957 Kagel travelled to Germany on a DAAD student grant, settled in Cologne, and became involved in the local contemporary music scene as a member of the so-called 'second generation' of Darmstadt composers. Kagel lectured on the Darmstadt summer courses (1960-66, 1972-76) and conducted the Rheinland Chamber Orchestra in contemporary music concerts (1957-61). In 1969 he was named director of the Institute of New Music at the Rheinische Musickschule in Cologne and, as Stockhausen's successor, of the Cologne course in new music (until 1975). Kagel was one of the founders of the Ensemble for New Music in Cologne and has worked at the electronic studios in Cologne, Berlin and Utrecht. He continues to conduct many of his works and directs and produced his own films and radio plays. Most of Kagel's works have their structural basis in subversive rhetorical gestures such as paradox, disjunction and irony. Sound materials often involve unusual or exotic instruments or regular instruments used in unusual ways, as in Musick für Renaissance-Instrumente or Exotica . Sometimes a piece, as in the stage piece Tremens , suggests that Kagel is reflecting on his clinically supervised experience of LSD or mescaline. Although it is possible to trace broad influences from European and American avant-garde ideas current in the 1950s, few works are developed from any clear source other than his own imagination. He usually works on more than one piece at a time and works on various fragments of ideas over several years. Kagel's first famous works, the Sexteto de cuerdas , Anagrama and Transición 2 , exhibit a structured quasi-serial technique that is subverted by uncontrollable elements and exaggerated demands for precision, implying a subtle critique of formal control. The sophisticated counterpoint of techniques in the Sexteto attracted a great deal of attention at its première; so did the wide range of timbres and vocalisations of Anagrama , which influenced Stockhausen's Momente and later works by Berio. The first work that clearly shows Kagel's bent for radical theatre and the deconstruction of aesthetic systems was Sur scène , in which a lecture on the goals of contemporary music is sonically and logically distorted by disconnected fragments of instrumental sound, vocalisation and mime. Sonant (1960/...) established the concept of 'instrumental theatre' central to many of Kagel's later works. Instrumental theatre explicitly acknowledges the physical presence of the performers and requires them to present a rerepresentational dramatic meaning rather than 'absolute music'. Thus players make verbal comments and mime their own playing and that of others, or create sounds in dramatic contexts, highlighting various aspects of difficulty, mockery or confusion. Later works continue to create theatre out of sound (the contest between two celli, refereed by a percussionist, in Match ) or sometimes sound out of theatre (the clacking sounds that result from the choreography in Pas de cinq ). Another large category of works is essentially visual, such as Die Himmelsmechanik , a piece that consists of stage sets representing weather scenes. These works, with or without sound, lead towards Kagel's numerous films, which are considerably more than the documentaries of stage works they are sometimes taken for. The first of these films, Solo and Duo , are based on pieces by Dieter Schnebel, but the films of Kagel's own works Hallelujah and Ludwig Van take their original scores as only one of a number of symbolic elements competing with visual and textural elements for primacy. Many of these works are scored in a purely visual manner that owes almost nothing to traditional music notation. Hallelujah also exemplifies an approach followed in numerous works, that of the catalogue as work. Hallelujah is a collection of possible actions notated on separate cards. In these works the cards can be put together in a formal or informal manner to create the piece. The most important example of this technique is Staatstheater , Kagel's first opera and one of his most sharply anti-institutional works, which he called "not just a negation of opera, but of the whole tradition of music theatre." One of the most important of contemporary composers, Kagel's elaborate imagination, bizarre humour and ability to play with almost any idea or system has brought powerful and unexpected drama to the stage and concert hall. © Paul Attinelo Acustica (1968 - 70)  for experimental sound-producers and loudspeakersPerformed by Apartment House One of the fundamental thoughts behind this composition is expressed in the actual invention of the sound-sources: new instruments as self-evident supplements to currently existent sound-makers (together with experimental acoustical equipment, the manipulation of which presupposes a diverse musical faculty). The work consists of two, almost separate, plains; one constitutes the playback of a 4-track tape recorder with a fixed sequence, whereas the second derives from the playing of 2 to 5 musicians which can be varied from performance to performance in the construction of acoustic material and in the manner of interreaction. I have deliberately avoided combining both plains as I have always had the impression (also in my works which display similar problems) that the attempt to weld together electronic and instrumental music is more wishful thinking on the part of the listener than acoustical reality. (On the other hand, this blending is immediately attainable if the total sound comes from the loudspeaker). The four-track tape was produced in winter of 1969 in the electronic music studio of West German Radio, Cologne (WDR). The recording consists of purely electroacoustically produced material as well as recordings of instrumental and vocal sounds. The voices of Alfred Feussner and William Pearson are also to be heard in the tape part. The point of departure for this tape-composition was to compound, as homogeneously as possible, two categories of sounds, dissimilar in the nature of their production (a combination which seemed to me over-simplified when produced by means of a metamorphosis of the concrete recordings by filtering, ring modulation and alteration of the tape playback). It should rather be achieved by similar treatment of instruments and electronic sound-production. The original instrumental part of the work was written on approximately 200 filing-cards, in the top right-hand corner of which the relevant main-instrument is indicated by a symbol. Neither the order of the cards nor the manner of ensemble is specified, every action is, however, exactly predetermined. The performers always decide the point of their entries; this freedom demands, however, a perfect mastery of text and context. Thus the performers achieve more than a mere reproduction of their parts, as they incorporate influences from one another in their playing as if they were their own audience. Acustica is written in memory of Alfred Feussner, my early-departed friend. (Mauricio Kagel) Acustica is perhaps the most refined example of Kagel's work within his invented genre of 'instrumental theatre'. The score notes that 'the piece calls for unorthodox musicians who are prepared to extend the frontiers of their craft' since few of the 'experimental sound devices' specified are conventional instruments and where conventional instruments are included they are to be played in extraordinary ways. Each instrumental action is, however, meticulously notated and the creation and/or modification of instruments are also shown in diagrams and photographs. What the score does not specify is the order in which the individual instrumental events are to be played; Kagel suggests instead that each performer should select the events that they want to perform and then discover in rehearsal how best to order them in combination both with the pre-recorded material and with the sounds of the other players. If the result owes obvious debts both to John Cage and to the theatre of the absurd, its subversive critique of received ideas on what constitutes music and musical instruments is above all typical of Kagel, contemporary master of irony. © Christopher Fox Lines That Go Outside the Boxes: Mauricio Kagel by Paul Attinello  Borges, that most exciting of modern Spanish writers, showed us fantastic beasts, libraries with endless staircases leading up and down to infinity, and a man writing every word of Don Quixote as though it is a new book. At least one of his students learned from him that the unexpected can tell us who we are, that paradoxes are productive, and that humor can be a very serious vocation: the brilliant, sarcastic, charming, arrogant, multitalented, and extremely tall Mauricio Kagel. Most of Kagel's early works, written when he was a restless young polymath in Buenos Aires, tend to experiment with the notation and production of music, with film and time, and with increasingly unexpected transposition of elements from one medium into another. His first famous works from the years after he arrived in Germany, the Sexteto de cuerdas , Anagrama and Transición II, involve a structured quasi-serial technique that is subverted by uncontrollable elements and exaggerated demands for precision, implying a sharp but subtle critique of formal control and structured systems. Many of these works initially look 'normal' on the page (if, for you, normal musical scores include those by Boulez and Stockhausen), but a closer look reveals complex surprises. Among my favorites are those passages in Transición II where the players must spin little dials they have cut out and attached to their scores to figure out their next pitches. This all seems fairly precise, but as of course they are dragging dots across lines of score at constantly changing angles that have little or nothing to do with actual pitch, they end up creating a very detailed, very difficult serial score out of operations that are actually playfully chaotic. Kagel later wrote articles on this technique, calling it 'rotation' and treating it half-seriously as an innovative serial technique - but the constant ironies of his writing suggest that he was aware from the first of the slightly parodic aspect of this idea which, like so many of others in his work, both illuminates and ridicules whole worlds of endeavor. As Kagel settled into his rather lengthy stride in the 1960s, he began producing an extraordinary variety of meticulously constructed works in every possible genre, and in some that seemed impossible at the time. Although surface techniques in each work vary enormously - even more so because the technique of each work tends to be a concerted attack on any possible expectations the performers or audience might have - there are underlying concepts and values that are remarkably consistent over the decades. Since Kagel has always dedicated himself to the possibilities of anarchism and liberation, so most of his works focus on opening up the new and the radical; they generally do this by creating some system of subversive gestures of paradox, disjunction, and irony. The sound materials often involve unusual or exotic instruments, or regular instruments employed in unusual ways; major examples include Exotica , which uses a variety of non-Western instruments played by Westerners in tribal makeup, or Music for Renaissance Instruments, which suggests the liberated nightmares of an early music ensemble. The sprawling landscape of Acustica for experimental sound objects and loudspeakers was assembled between 1968 and 1970, while real political change seemed imminent and while Kagel was writing his first and most radical anti-opera Staatstheater . Acustica has many pages, as does Staatstheater, each of which is a separate, flexible module of musical and theatrical activity. These works aren't really scores in the traditional sense as much as they are catalogues of possibilities - instruments are given new sounds by being altered (a ukelele gets a paper clip across the strings); instruments like whistles and castanets, traditionally 'below the salt', are given solo roles; and objects that one would hardly expect to see jostling for space on a concert stage are given entirely new roles - a walkie-talkie reorients antennae like a dowsing rod, and a damaged bellows wheezes percussively. As with many of Kagel's works, this is not only a catalogue of experiments, but also a deconstruction of an entire field of activity. Such 'instrumental theatre' (Kagel's own term, for which he has become famous) shows us what we don't know about music, by using methods typical of deconstruction - taking the margins to the center and the center to the margins, inverting basic concepts and hierarchies, and essentially forcing an entire system of ideas to implode, thus showing its limitations and what we are missing when we follow it too dogmatically. Staatstheater does the same things in different ways - the opera soloists are forced to sing an ensemble, the chorus has a "debut" of sixty simultaneous solos, the ballet is for non-dancers, and the entire forces of the traditional opera house do calisthenics over enormously amplified chords at the end. After such a performance, it would be impossible for the denizens of the opera house to take their positions for granted - the prima donna looks over her shoulder at her understudy, the janitor looks askance at the conductor, and the oppression implicit in tradition begins to show cracks in its façade. In the same way, performers who participate in Acustica may find the keys of their normal instruments feeling slightly odd or restrictive; the ways they define themselves, as performers or composers or technicians, might start to loosen from their moorings. Later that same week, they may find themselves thinking differently about the busker they pass in the tube station, or they may try something new while playing a Beethoven sonata; they may even wonder if they should be talking about their music, or possibly drawing it instead. And the audience might start to wonder why they're sitting night after night in darkened rooms, watching other people make music happen: why don't I get to do that? What else could I be doing with music, or even about music? And of course, ultimately, as you sit there reading about all this, perhaps you cannot help wondering: what else might I be missing? |
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