The Music of Mauricio Kagel (review)

This is the first monograph in English devoted to the music of Mauricio Kagel, a major figure of the European musical avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Buenos Aires in 1931 and self-taught as a composer, Kagel immigrated to Cologne, Germany in 1957 where he received international recognition for his music. Although he possessed a varied compositional palette that included aspects of integral serialism, indeterminancy, and classical electronic music, Kagel focused on visual and theatrical elements in his works as a means to critique modern attitudes toward music. For him, improvisation was a means whereby performers could uncover new sounds and theatrical modes of expression, making musical performance, in essence, a dramatic event. Besides being active as a composer, conductor, lecturer, and professor since 1958, Kagel has been writing and directing television films since 1965, and authoring radio dramas (Hörspiele) since 1969. He has garnered numerous awards, honors, and prizes, among which include the Koussevitzky Prize (1965), the Mozart Medaille of Frankfurt (1983), the French Order des arts et des lettres (1995), the Erasmus Prize (1998), Prix Maurice Ravel (1999), Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis (2000), and the Rolf Schock Prize for Music (2005).

In this important book, Björn Heile examines Kagel's development as a composer and the musical aesthetics driving his work. He notes Kagel's expansion of the conceptual boundaries of music through both an elaborate imagination and a subversive humor bordering on the bizarre. Characteristic of Kagel's style is the absurd combination of strict compositional technique and playful rhetorical gestures involving irony and paradox. Kagel is, in short, a musical satirist who examines the various ways in which society views music, whether as a commercial product, a significant component of a religious experience, or the subject of scholarly expertise.

Heile states that The Music of Mauricio Kagel is both a traditional monograph with pieces examined in chronological order as well as a series of essays on different aspects of Kagel's musical style (p. 5). One can either read the book, Heile maintains, from cover to cover as a critical investigation of Kagel's music or use it as a reference work. In the former case, readers will find that Heile has outlined the different elements of Kagel's musical style in an impressive manner, skillfully placing them in their wider critical contexts. In this reviewer's opinion, readers will also react favorably to how Heile has revealed the breadth of Kagel's imagination and the multiple contexts informing his work.

After outlining the goals and structure of The Music of Mauricio Kagel in an introduction ("In Search of Kagel"), Heile reveals the remarkable range of Kagel's creativity in six chapters. In the first ("Buenos Aires"), the author explores the roots of Kagel's compositional aesthetics—especially his fascination with how musical expression can be achieved through diverse media and extra- musical contexts—by examining the composer's formative years in Buenos Aires. In particular, Heile notes the pivotal influence of Jorge Luis Borges, Kagel's English teacher at the Colegio Libre de Estudios Superiores and a great South American writer in his own right. For Heile, Borges's impact on Kagel can be seen in the latter's "preoccupations with labyrinths, encyclopedias, cabbalistic concepts and techniques, and the idea of parallel realities governed by strange rules" (p. 11).

Chapter 2 ("Beginnings in Cologne: Serialism, Aleatory Technique and Electronics"), deals with Kagel's early years in Cologne as a devotee of serialism, aleatoric techniques, and electronic music. In this chapter, Heile looks at two significant early works, Anagrama, for voice and instruments (1958), and Transición II (1959), a piece for piano and two tape recorders to be realized by a pianist and percussionist. Although he characterizes Anagrama as a response to serialism's quest for integrating language into music where all...