Mauricio Kagel

Perhaps phases or periods are not the way to describe the composition of my theatrical works. Each piece raises a new problem for me; it is a link in a chain; no work attempts to improve on the one that preceded it. I believe above all in the continuity of thought.¹

In these terms Mauricio Kagel described his work: as a continual act of reinvention, an ongoing meditation on what composition might be, or become. If his oeuvre possesses a single throughline, it is heterogeneity. Nothing in music, for him, was off-limits. He probed every material and form, examining the concert format with a new gaze, critiquing the way it had become fixed and outmoded.

Across the decades, he released a parade of works that refuse to resemble one another: Sur Scène (1959-1960), Antithese (1962), Staatstheater (1970), Blue’s Blue (1979), Die Stücke der Windrose (1989-1994), L’art bruit (1995), Quirinus Liebeskuss (2000-2001), Doppelsextett für Ensemble (2000-2001), and Divertimiento? (2006). All take different, and even opposing, forms, from musical theater to “pure” instrumental works to film.

Looking over Kagel’s oeuvre, one becomes quickly conscripted into his notion of “the continuity of thought.” However different the pieces may appear, Kagel’s vision is reflected in a few key constants: the act of composing and its results; the constraints of notation and material; and the relationship between a work’s form and the concert format itself. The most distinct expression of this last emerges in his concept of “instrumental theater.”

Kagel was magnetized to discrepancy, between a composition’s design and its audible outcome, and among the cast of materials he enlisted: sounds, gestures, and figures. At any point, he could filter these materials through a set of constraints that govern time and sound space, and even the physical space of performance. In Kagel’s hands, nothing stayed still, whether a phoneme, a specific sound world, or a contraption posing as a new instrument.

He amplified the innate theatricality of musical performance, letting it spill outward from the score into presentation. Onstage, gestures are decontextualized, detached from direct signification, reminding listeners of the absurdity of their own role in the spectacle. His theatricality, laced with caustic humor, is a constant provocation: “When I am derisive, I am so professional in my derision that it produces… pain.”²

“Hörbarkeit”: audibility or legi-/visi-bility?

Kagel began his career as a composer in Argentina, where he embraced an eclectic outlook influenced by Juan Carlos Paz’s Agrupación Nueva Música, the Buenos Aires film scene, and the writings of Jorge Luis Borges. Early works such as Sextet (1953, rev. 1957) reveal a composer fluent in twelve-tone technique and already conversant in the serialist language then cresting across the Atlantic.

At the same time, he was drawn to the emerging experiments of musique concrète. In Música para la Torre (1954), he synchronized magnetic tape with the flicker of lights on a steel tower.

By the time he arrived in Cologne in 1957, he could hardly be considered a newcomer to the scene. His sketches for Anagrama (1957-1958) show both how thoroughly he had absorbed the serialist ethos, as well as how quickly he had begun to question it after he came into contact with colleagues at Darmstadt. Soon he became interested in not only how music is written, but with how musical structures are perceived.

In a 1960 talk broadcast on Cologne radio and titled “Hörbarkeit von Seriellem” (“The Audibility of the Series”), Kagel opened with a statement that captured these questions: “We wish to present a problem to the listener that is of the utmost importance for the contemporary composer: the audibility of the musical system.”³

This line of inquiry appears throughout Kagel’s work:

In an article on the perceptibility of the serial pathway, I pointed out the inaudibility inherent in certain composition processes and serialist principles. The distinction between audible and inaudible processes and sequences is the true raison d’être of my text. For me, audibility means any acoustic event in which the listener can recognize the composer’s intention to characterize the material according to certain formal criteria.⁴

Kagel’s thinking takes shape in the space he creates between improvisation, apparent irrationality, and the intricate compositional designs that provoke these events. In the film Antithese, for example, he prepared a production timesheet noting every posture to be taken by the actor Alfred Feussner: sitting, standing, lying on the ground, and so forth. Elsewhere, action is arranged hierarchically: in Sur Scène, actions and interruptions are ordered and reordered like the interconnected playing of the cellists in Match (1964).

In Exotica (1972), a work “dedicated to the sixth sense,” Kagel instructs the musicians to perform on multiple non-European instruments with which they are unfamiliar. The score is meticulously written, yet it deliberately withholds any clue to what the final sound might be. Its outcome depends on the performers’ commitment to their own vocal and instrumental gestures.

Other works, most famously Staatstheater, leave open the possibility of free ordering, allowing the performers to reorder sections or reshuffle pages of the score. Kagel himself could also impose order through a system of permutations, as he did with the voices’ rhythmic structures.⁵

The result is a stage world where sound, image, and gesture arrive shorn of obvious cause and effect, leaving the audience unsettled by the very form of the piece. Paradoxically, some of the clearest illustrations of this strategy come from works without overt theatrical elements, such as his string quartets. Quartets III and IV (1986-1987 and 1993, respectively) orbit around Kagel’s preoccupation with the act of composition itself. Musical figures lifted from the Viennese quartet tradition serve as raw material, subjected to subtle forms of subversion. Without abandoning formal rigor, Kagel’s writing aims to disrupt the internal logic of the work, as well as the very act of perceiving it. The spectator is invited to reconsider their own listening and their own gaze, as if from outside themselves — distanced (Verfremdung) in the Brechtian sense.

Constraints and hybridizations of method

One early consequence of the gulf Kagel perceived between the act of composing and the object it produced was a regeneration of both his materials and his methods. The musique concrète experiments of the 1950s⁶ had prompted a new conception of sound as object — an idea developed in Cologne’s electronic music studios, whose work, in some ways, built on the foundations of the serialist aesthetic project. At the same moment, John Cage’s concerts were emerging in the midst of a broader aesthetic shift toward open forms and indeterminacy. They opened the way for an entire generation of composers and critics to invent new musical symbols and notation, liberating performance from the grip of traditional symbols and expectations.

When he arrived in Germany, Kagel took full advantage of this emancipation of musical writing. Performance had expanded to include extra-musical elements, and the very form of the score was also changing. In Transition II (1959), performers configured their own scores using cutouts mounted on rotating disks. In Mimetics (Metapiece) (1961), the pianist is free to select different chords and playing techniques at will for the interludes. In Staatstheater, performers receive drawings that direct how they should physically interact with their instruments and the stage set. One section, Kontra'Danse, includes diagrams for how the performers should stand.

Kagel was forever testing the boundaries of what could count as musical material. He often set himself constraints that reached well beyond music’s traditional borders. He composed serially starting from a Latin palindrome in Anagrama, wrote under the influence of drugs in Tremens (1963-1965), turned to Renaissance instruments for Musik für Renaissance Instrumente (1966), re-composed Beethoven in Ludwig van (1970). He mined Robert Schumann’s diary for Mitternachtsstük (1981), composed a competition piece from the terms of the composition itself in Morceau de concours (1971, rev. 1992), built an opera on Romantic lieder in Aus Deutschland (1975-1980), and wrote an entire chamber work, Double sextuor (2000-2001), using only two meters, 2/4 and 3/8.

These self-imposed constraints always circled back to a central concern: perception in composition processes. They were oriented according to ongoing formal thought, which occurred in two phases. First came cutting and assembly, a kind of taxonomic ordering; then came the search for transition within the discourse.

The opening stage is, in essence, an extrapolation of serial technique: any material can be reduced to a set of discrete units or “entities” in the mathematical sense. Several pages of Acustica (1968-1970) offer variations of different playing techniques for a single instrument, proposing a mini-encyclopedia of acoustic and gestural possibilities. Early drafts of the piece reveal that Kagel took inspiration from ethnomusicologist Curt Sachs’s organology classifications. In Ludwig van, he samples sequences he considered to be archetypal of Beethoven’s music. In his late quartets, he orders a series of figures borrowed from the Viennese tradition.

Because of his tendency to sample from familiar forms, and notably for his unabashed use of conventionally classifiable chords that break with the avant-garde, his purely instrumental pieces like the cycle Die Stücke der Windrose (1989-1994) have sometimes been cast as postmodern. Kagel defended himself:

I don’t believe that the new is a negation of the old; to the contrary, it is an accentuation of the possibilities of formulating unknown aspects of what is known in new ways. In other words: ‘new’ music is not new because it was written today, but because it makes audible new aspects of a ‘musical’ dimension that itself always remains the same.⁷

These parameters fed only the earliest stage of composition. The next stage — re-composition — functioned like a palimpsest, laying new material over the initial structures. Kagel filtered each formulation through the others, stacking and splicing until the system that generated the music was all but hidden. Out of this process emerged the finished work, and, with it, formal transition.

In Transición I (for tape, 1960) and II (for piano, percussion, and two tapes, 1958-1959), structure is built on transitory phenomena, as if modeled on linguistic shifts. Kagel returned to this technique in Anagrama, generating singular moments by superimposing different structural treatments of the same material, applying the same structural treatment to different materials, or, finally, imposing a last layer of sonic or gestural coherence devised expressly for that purpose.

Into this environment, Kagel began to treat performance itself as a compositional parameter: what he called the “monstration” of performance. This involved a thickening of musical events: gestures that produced sound, and gestures with no functional meaning at all, were folding into the fabric of the piece. Each instant is weighted by the gesture or visual associated with it.

Theatricality and the creation of spectacle

Visual techniques, theatricality, humor, and gesture are among the most recognizable markers of Kagel’s work. But they are hardly decorative: they are the visible crest of a far deeper investigation into what music is. These elements shape a performance by carving contrasts between temporal elements. Within the same span of time, an event’s form can alter how it is experienced. A comic gesture or situation, dropped at just the right moment, can generate a distinct sense of time and rhythm. Pierre Boulez observed:

Kagel […] tries, with the help of a musical structure, to organize musically elements that are not necessarily musical — such as lived moments. Of course, one might ask oneself whether a divergence between the method and the material exists as a result of this. He resolves the problem with irony, with humor. I’m sure that the use of irony is absolutely necessary to make this divergence functional.⁸

That “divergence,” as Boulez called it, arises in the gaps between a work’s internal coherence, whether sonic or structural, and its actual realization. The resulting tension is not a flaw; it is the space where Kagel happily operates. He brought this sensibility to the concert itself, interrogating the role of performer, sound, and the meaning (humorous or otherwise) of what transpires onstage.

Out of this inquiry came the genre “instrumental theater,” a term Kagel began using in 1960.⁹ He aimed to reinvent the concert format and the act of performance. His tools were simple: the stage; movement and gesture; the transformation of the performer into an actor; and, finally, relationship with the audience. These became his arenas for rewriting, a theater of situations, where the spectator is invited to develop a critical gaze, to watch themselves watching.

With a subversive wink, Kagel distorted and reorganized genres, forms, instruments, and even the musicians themselves. His inspiration drew from the experimentalism of Cage, Dieter Schnebel, La Monte Young, and Gerard Hoffnung. A major cultural institution even became his subject: the Hamburg Opera, in Staatstheater. One of his major compositions, Staatstheater stands as a rare reflection on the performance space itself. In one scene, a performer appears with their face compressed by a transparent mask. In another, titled “Virginity,” a group of men play drums attached to the body of a young woman; and in the scene “Repertoire,” artificial legs are manipulated erotically to an electroacoustic soundtrack. Kagel builds a monster: a montage of scavenged fragments rendered unsettling simply because rigorous composition succeeds in binding them together.

“With Kagel there is always tragedy filtered through sarcasm and irony, and that touches me deeply,” Georges Aperghis observed. “Whatever he does, there is always drama, and that is an essential truth of his work.”¹⁰

Theatricality and the spectacular, along with Kagel’s obsession with listening and audibility, permeate everything he wrote, even his ostensibly “pure” works (an adjective all but useless in the universe of Staatstheater). His compositions span almost every possible medium and relationship: lecture format in Sur Scène (1959-60) and Der Tribun (1979); alienation between musician and instrument in Sonant (1960), Pandoras-box (1960-1961), Metapiece (1961), and Zwei-Mann Orchester (1973); theatrical performance in Probe (1971) and Journal de théâtre (1965-1967); staging, lighting, and projection in Prima vista (1964) and Camera Oscura (1965). He branched into visual performance and pantomime in Match, Acustica, Kommentar-Extempore (1965), Ex-Position (1978), and Bestiarium (1976, film version in 2000). He explored theater with dramatic intrigue and text in Mare Nostrum (1973-1975), La trahison orale (1983), and Die Erschöpfung der Welt (1973-1978); turned to oratorio in La passion selon Saint Bach (1981-1985) and Aus Deutschland; and made films, including Ludwig van.

He put it simply:

Words are not adequate vehicles for my thoughts. By contrast, sounds, musical structures — even when they are not acoustically perceptible — are foundational. I am certain that I chose a career that, unlike others, can be adapted to many different disciplines.¹¹

Kagel pursued both his own concept of instrumental theater and broader musical theater (La trahison orale is exemplary), keeping a teasing ambiguity between the act of listening and the work itself that is being heard. He muddies the boundaries of form, balancing what is at the forefront onstage with what flickers in finer detail. Central roles are given to visual elements and humor — a biting, almost involuntary humor, the kind that erupts when one witnesses something excruciatingly awkward.

His oeuvre resists being parsed piece by piece. It is better understood as a long, restless inquiry, an effort to unsettle the very idea of musical “language.” His music is best understood as a set of operations designed to yield forms not yet known, the result of active, critical thought. As Kagel himself observed:

Writing music entails constant confrontation with the ‘sincerity’ of an acoustic message. To create it, our spirit of invention requires us to follow winding paths that often shatter what is established in musical life.¹²

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^{1. Mauricio Kagel, Tam-Tam, edited by Jean-Jacques Nattiez, Paris, Christian Bourgois, 1983, p. 128. ↩}

^{2. Mauricio Kagel, “Une panique créateur II,” Musique en jeu, No. 11, 1973, p. 58. ↩}

^{3. Mauricio Kagel, “Hörbarkeit vom Seriellem,” Musikalisches Nachtprogramm, WDR (West Deutsche Rundfunk), Cologne, 1960, unpublished transcribed text, WDR Archives, Cologne. ↩}

^{4. Kagel, Tam-Tam, p. 76. ↩}

^{5. See Matthias Rebstock, Komposition zwischen Musik und Theater, Das instrumentale Theater von Mauricio Kagel zwischen 1959 und 1965, vol. 6 coll. Sinefonia, Hofheim, Wolke Verlag, 2007, p. 336-337. ↩}

^{6. Before going to Cologne, Kagel applied unsuccessfully for a grant to join the Club d’Essai and Pierre Schaeffer’s team in 1953: Bjorn Heile, The Music of Mauricio Kagel, London, Ashgate, 2006, p. 15-16. ↩}

^{7. Kagel, Tam-Tam, p. 99. ↩}

^{8. Pierre Boulez, “Interview with Zoltan Pesko,” Musique en jeu, No. 14, 1974, p. 99. ↩}

^{9. “Le théâtre instrumental” was performed for the first time in France in February 1961 at the premiere of Sonant/1960.... The expression “instrumental theater” appears to have been used for the first time in 1958 by Heinz-Klaus Metzger, describing a performance of Cage’s Music Walk. (In 1987, Kagel dedicated a piece to Cage titled Ce-A-Ge-E). Kagel first used the term “instrumental theater” in 1960 on NorddeutscheRundfunk (NDR) to describe Sonant, the text of which was published in German in Neue Musik in 1961. Mauricio Kagel, “Über das instrumentale Theater,” in Neue Musik, No. 3, 1961, p. 3-9, translated into French as “Le théâtre instrumental,” in La musique et ses problèmes contemporains 1953-1963, translated by Antoine Goléa, for the collection Cahiers de la compagnie Renaud Barrault, Paris, René Julliard, 1963, p. 285-299 and reprinted in Tam-Tam, p. 105-118. ↩}

^{10. Georges Aperghis, “Interview with Philippe Albéra” in Musiques en création, Geneva, Contrechamps, 1997, p. 24. ↩}

^{11. Kagel, Tam-Tam, p. 127. ↩}

^{12. Kagel, Tam-Tam, p. 101. ↩}