Mauricio Kagel

Template:Short description Template:Wikidata image Mauricio Raúl Kagel (; 24 December 1931 – 18 September 2008) was an Argentine-German composer and academic teacher.

Life and career

Early life and education

Mauricio Raúl Kagel was born on 24 December 1931 in Buenos Aires, Argentina, into an Ashkenazi Jewish family that had fled Russia in the 1920s. He studied music, history of literature, and philosophy in Buenos Aires. In 1957 he moved to Cologne, West Germany, where he lived until his death.

As teacher

From 1960 to 1966 and from 1972 to 1976 Kagel taught at the Darmstädter Ferienkurse. He also taught from 1964–65 at the University at Buffalo as the visiting Slee Professor of music theory. At the Berlin Film and Television Academy, he was a guest lecturer from 1967 on. In 1968, Kagel was the director of the Scandinavian Courses for New Music in Gothenburg and from 1969–74 he served as the director of the Cologne Courses for New Music, succeeding Karlheinz Stockhausen. He was a professor for new music theatre at the Köln Hochschule from 1974–97.

Among his students were Moya Henderson, Kevin Volans, Maria de Alvear, Carola Bauckholt, Branimir Krstić, David Sawer, Template:Ill, Juan Maria Solare, Norma Tyer, Gerald Barry, Martyn Harry, and Chao-Ming Tung. Template:See LMST

As composer

Some of his pieces give specific theatrical instructions to the performers, such as to adopt certain facial expressions while playing, to make their stage entrances in a particular way, or to physically interact with other performers. For this reason commentators at times related his work to the theatre of the absurd. He has been regarded by music historians as deploying a critical intelligence interrogating the position of music in society. He was also active in the fields of film and photography. In 1991 Kagel was invited by Walter Fink to be the second composer featured in the annual Komponistenporträt of the Rheingau Musik Festival. In 2000 he received the Ernst von Siemens Music Prize.

Music

Staatstheater (1970) remains, probably, Kagel's best-known work. He described it as a "ballet for non-dancers",

1. REDIRECT Template:Quote without source although it is in many ways more like an opera; the devices it uses as musical instruments include chamber pots and enema equipment.

Similar is the radio play Ein Aufnahmezustand (1969) which is about the incidents surrounding the recording of a radio play. In Con voce (With Voice), a masked trio silently mimes playing instruments. Match (1964) is a "tennis game" for cellists with a percussionist as umpire, also the subject of one of Kagel's films and perhaps the best-known of his works of instrumental theatre.

Kagel also wrote a large number of more conventional orchestral and chamber pieces. Many of these make references to music of the past by, among others, Beethoven, Brahms, Bach and Liszt.

Films

Kagel also made films, with one of the best known being Ludwig van (1970), a critical interrogation of the uses of Beethoven's music made during the bicentenary of that composer's birth. In it, a reproduction of Beethoven's studio is seen, as part of a fictive visit of the Beethoven House in Bonn. Everything in it is papered with sheet music of Beethoven's pieces. The soundtrack of the film is a piano playing the music as it appears in each shot. Because the music has been wrapped around curves and edges, it is somewhat distorted, but Beethovenian motifs can still be heard. In other parts, the film contains parodies of radio or TV broadcasts connected with the "Beethoven Year 1770". Kagel later turned the film into a piece of sheet music itself which could be performed in a concert without the film—the score consists of close-ups of various areas of the studio, which are to be interpreted by the performing pianist.

References

Sources

• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Anon. n.d. "Mauricio Kagel, 1931–2008". Mauricio Kagel website. (Accessed 21 September 2010).
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Attinello, Paul. 2001. "Kagel, Mauricio." The New Grove Dictionary of Music and Musicians, second edition, edited by Stanley Sadie and John Tyrrell. London: Macmillan Publishers.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Decarsin, François. 1985. "Liszt's Nuages gris and Kagel's Unguis incarnatus est: A Model and Its Issue", translated by Jonathan Dunsby. Music Analysis 4, no. 3:259–63.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Griffiths, Paul. 1978. A Concise History of Modern Music: From Debussy to Boulez. London: Thames and Hudson. Template:ISBN. (Originally published as A Concise History of Avant-garde Music: from Debussy to Boulez. New York: Oxford University Press, 1978. Template:ISBN (cloth), Template:ISBN (pbk.). Reissued as Modern Music: A Concise History from Debussy to Boulez. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1985. Template:ISBN. Revised edition, as Modern Music: A Concise History. New York: Thames and Hudson, 1994. Template:ISBN.)
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Griffiths, Paul. 1981. "Unnecessary Music: Kagel at 50". Musical Times 122:811–12.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Grimshaw, Jeremy. 2009 "[[[:Template:Allmusic]] Mauricio Kagel]". Allmusic website (accessed 24 January 2010).
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Kennedy, Michael, and Joyce Bourne Kennedy (eds.). 2006. "Kagel, Mauricio". The Oxford Dictionary of Music, second edition, revised. Oxford, Toronto, New York: Oxford University Press. Template:ISBN.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Warnaby, John. 1986. "Bach according to Kagel: St Bach Passion". Tempo, no.156:38–39.

Further reading

• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Heile, Björn. 2006. The Music of Mauricio Kagel. Aldershot, Hants; Burlington, VT: Ashgate. Template:ISBN.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Klüppelholz, Werner. 1981. Mauricio Kagel 1970–1980. Cologne: DuMont Buchverlag. Template:ISBN.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Kunkel, Michael, and Martina Papiro (eds.). 2009. Der Schall: Mauricio Kagels Instrumentarium. Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Nonnenmann, Rainer. 2008. "Komponist Mauricio Kagel gestorben". Kölner Stadt-Anzeiger (18 September). (Accessed 18 September 2008).
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Reich, Wieland. 1995. Mauricio Kagel: Sankt-Bach-Passion: Kompositionstechnik und didaktische Perspektiven. Saarbrücken: Pfau-Verlag. Template:ISBN.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Schnebel, Dieter. 1970. Mauricio Kagel: Musik, Thater, Film. Cologne: M. DuMont Schauberg.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Steenhuisen, Paul. 2009. "Interview with Mauricio Kagel". In Sonic Mosaics: Conversations with Composers. Edmonton: University of Alberta Press. Template:ISBN.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Tadday, Ulrich. 2004. Mauricio Kagel. Munich: Edition Text + Kritik. Template:ISBN.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Young, Logan K. 2011. Mauricio Kagel: A Semic Life. Washington, D.C.: T(W)E(L)V(E)! BOOKS. Template:ISBN.
• <cite class="citation wikicite" id=>Zarius, Karl-Heinz. 1977. Staatstheater von Mauricio Kagel: Grenze und Ubergang. Vienna: Universal Edition. Template:ISBN.

External links

• Mauricio Kagel website, biography
• Mauricio Kagel biography and works on the UE website (publisher)
• Mauricio Kagel site by Björn Heile
• Kagel Biography by BBC Radio 3 programme Cut and Splice.
• Mauricio Kagel at UbuWeb Film presents various Kagel films, including the full version of Ludwig Van, available for free download.
• Kagel's Acustica at the Avant Garde Project has FLAC files made from a high-quality LP transcription available for free download.
• Edition Peters: Mauricio Kagel October 1998.
• Interview: There Will Always Be Questions Enough Mauricio Kagel in conversation with Max Nyffeler.
• UbuWeb: Mauricio Kagel featuring Der Schall (1968) and ACUSTICA for experimental sound-producers and loud-speakers.
• Washington Post obit by Anne Midgette.
• Guardian obit by Adrian Jack.
• New York Times obituary by William Grimes.
• Interview with Mauricio Kagel, 2 November 1992