Mauricio Kagel entered the world in Buenos Aires, Argentina, and emerged among the most versatile, inventive, and incisive composers active during the latter half of the twentieth century. Training covered piano, theory, violoncello, organ, singing, and conducting, while composition remained entirely self-directed. University years also encompassed sustained study of philosophy and literature, and his professional activities eventually extended into film and theater.
Early positions drew simultaneously on this range of skills. In the early 1950s he served as advisor to the Agrupación Nueva Musica of Buenos Aires and helped establish the Cinémathèque Argentine; he later conducted the Chamber Opera and Theater in Colón. Concerts of new music with the Rhineland Chamber Orchestra occupied him in the late 1950s, after which he appeared as visiting lecturer in Darmstadt. During the 1960s Kagel toured the United States as lecturer and taught briefly at the University of Buffalo. Returning to Europe, he lectured at the Berlin Film and Television Academy, then succeeded Stockhausen as director of the Institute of New Music at the Rheinsiche Musikschule. He maintained an ongoing presence at the West German Radio electronic music studio and realized several of his own films and plays. Boundaries between categories frequently dissolve in the work of such a multifaceted artist. Theatrical and cinematic pieces often adopt musical forms as structural foundations, while his notion of instrumental theater treats every physical gesture of the performers as integral to the composition. Post-structuralist inclinations kept him from fixed identification with either dadaist or anticomposer labels on one side or modernist affiliations on the other; rather than dismantling tradition to erect replacements, his approach sustained a continual reassessment of what qualifies as music in the present.
Kagel’s catalog accordingly encompasses serialism, expressionism, musique concrète, Dada, and aleatoria. Even the earliest scores reflect this exploratory stance. Palimstesos (1950) employs word dissociation and transformed speech patterns, procedures pursued further in Anagrama (1955-1958). The later work derives its generative material from a Latin palindrome, converting the sonic properties of words into compositional elements while diminishing or distorting semantic content; the alphabetic letters themselves also determine pitches, given their correspondence to musical notes.
Collage procedures appear in numerous pieces, among them Music for Renaissance Instruments and the score for the film Ludwig Van. Echoes of Satie and Cage, and possibly Partch, surface in Der Schall and Unter Strom, chamber works scored for an assortment of archaic, newly invented, or non-musical instruments such as cash registers and horns. These sonorities are nevertheless organized with deliberate rigor; as Kagel observed, “an essential aspect of my work is strict composition with elements which are not themselves pure.”
