From Deutsche Grammophon 137 010: Mauricio Kagel: Hallelujah (1967) exists in the most differing forms and versions: as film or as absolute music for singing and/or speaking voice. This recording presents the work as an a- cappella-choir for 16 singing soloists, who occasionally blow on organ pipes. It consists on the one hand of 16 solo parts which are treated independently, and on the other hand of 8 tutti sections, the order of which is free: the above remark about the differing forms of the work thus also refers to its actual form. Kagel's compositorial techniques are often secretly based on Jewish theology: musical analysis can occasionally trace analogies to, for instance, the 49 stages of meaning in the explanation of every place In the Torah as taught by talmudic tradition. The composition Hallelujah might be entirely understood as a masterpiece of rabbinical expounding. Of course, Hallelujah, song of praise, is in view of the state of the world today an expression of utter scorn. Kagel expresses this by a perfidious christianising, by the fiction of forced conversion, as it were, whose mimesis is always prepared to revolt against the "reyes catolicos" wherever they reign. In this sense the composer says: "It is mainly sung in a sort of promising dog- Latin". There is no need to state that the work, with its countless innovations, is a choral piece without precedence. However, its principal characteristic is formulated here: if Schoenberg once defined composing as the strict final honouring of the obligations to which the author is committed when he writes his first note, Kagel's Hallelujah constitutes a progressive, yet orthodox, annulment: from the purely compositional-technical aspect it is a Kol Nidre for a Yom Kippur without atonement. From Bestellnummer DMR 1022-24: MAURICIO KAGEL Mauricio Kagel was born in Bueneos Aires in 1931. Since 1958 he has lived in Cologne. Kagel is an uncommonly productive and versatile composer. Both of these features, however, have always given cause for comment: his productivity, though directed at seemingly incidental matters, has always managed to be right on the mark, and his versatility, however confusing or disjoint, has always seemed to strike common denominators - or at least denominators which till then were anything but common. As he says of himself: "One invests so many ideas when composing that one hopes other people will hear them." He received lasting impressions during his youth in Argentina where, in exile, many cultural influences coalesced which we Europeans still tend to separate along national lines. The Teatro Colón had Italian, French, German and Argentinian seasons. The German conductors Fritz Busch and Erich Kleiber in particular had a formative influence on Kagel, then a young repetitor and assistant conductor. He presented his earliest, compositions in the Agrupación Nueva Música, a concert series founded by Juan Carlos Paz which, from 1937, offered works by Schoenberg, Berg and Webern as well as Eisler, Krenek, Wellesz, Apostel and finally Stravinsky, Bartók, Hindemith and Hába, all alongside music by North and South American composers. As co- founder of the Argentinian Cinématèque, Kagel became intimately familiar with the films of Murnau, Lang, Pabst, Buñuel, Dalí, Cocteau, Pudovsky and Eisenstein. His awareness of literature was awakened above all by Jorge Luis Borges and Witold Gombrowicz. Two quotations from these writers are especially telling: "Incidentally, I almost always find art more moving when it is revealed imperfectly, accidentally, in fragments - when, so to speak, it only intimates its presence, allowing me to sense its existence beyond the clumsiness of interpretation. I prefer to hear Chopin coming from an upstairs window along the street than with all the antics of the concert hall." (Gombrowicz) "I close my eyes and see a flock of birds. The vision lasts no more than a second: I have no idea how many birds I saw. Was their number determinate or not? The question of God's existence is contained in this problem. If God exists, then the number of birds was determinate, for God will know how many birds I saw. If God does not exist the number is indeterminate, for no one could have counted them. In this case I saw, say, less than ten birds and more than one, but not nine, nor eight, nor seven, nor six, nor five, nor four, nor three, nor two. I saw a number between ten and one which cannot be eight, seven, six, five etc. An integer of this sort is inconceivable: therefore God exists." (Borges) Nor should we forget that Buenos Aires, as Juan Allende- Blin put it, is the "capital of the tango . . . this dance of the suburbs, this mixture of tragedy and involuntary comedy, of sentimentality and alienation, of Strindberg and Heintje, of crime and naivety". Thus equipped, Kagel arrived in Germany, where he invented "instrumental theatre", created stage works ("Staatstheater", "Mare Nostrum", "Die Erschöpfung der Welt", "Aus Deutschland"), made films ("Match", "Solo", "Duo", "Hallelujah"), cultivated "acoustic theology" ("Phantasie fur Orgel und obligati", "Chorbuch"), probed tradition ("Ludwig van", "Variationen ohne Fuge", "1898"), dabbled in commercial music ("Kantrimiusik", "Tango Alemán", "Blue's Blue"), tackled political subject-matter ("Die Umkehrung Amerikas", "Der Tribun") and wrote music for non- professionals ("Probe", "Umzug", "Klangwehr", "Exotica"). He is also active as a conductor and stage director of his own works, and teaches at the Cologne Musikhöchschule, where his class in music theatre continues to conduct experiments with noteworthy results. Programm (Programme) The work entitled "Programm" was given its premiere in 1972 by Cologne Radio. It comprises 11 short, self-contained compositions scored for various ensembles. Each piece was followed by an open discussion with the audience. As Kagel wrote by way of explanation: "The form of the concert could be compared to a Singspiel, except that the verbal intermezzi do not serve to delineate the plot but rather provide a common basis of communication for all concerned". At the premiere, the audience was placed in two halls, the musicians going from one hall to the other. Each hall contained a television screen which, during the discussion, transmitted what was taking place in the other. However, what it transmitted was always something previously heard (past) or about to be heard (future). Thus the piece formed a gigantic canon, for in a canon past, present and future are heard simultaneously, the listener exercising both his memory and his powers of prediction. This is the form originally intended for the piece, though of course separate performances are also permitted. Kagel's novel idea, however, is to urge the listener to relate percept (music) and concept (discussion). Here the advantage of the professional musician is more apparent than real: he simply fingers his instrument and thinks that there is nothing more to be said. As Kagel remarked: "I believe it would be worthwhile to try to consider the questions from the audience as part of the musical presentation." The same applies to this recording. So, let's start the discussion - and that means taking an objective look at our preconceptions. Recitativarie (Recitative-Aria for singing harpsichordist) Kagel wrote of "Recitativarie": "For this composition I prepared a collage of extraneous texts, once again secularizing my literary ambitions by restricting my selection to the verses of J. S. Bach's (371) chorale harmonizations." The recitative is accompanied by chord sequences from Chopin's 8th Nocturne op. 48 no. 1 with variants by Kagel. The aria is based on an excerpt from the Freylinghausen Gesangbuch of 1714, "Hast du Gott, so hat's nicht Noth". The text is filtered, producing new permutations of meaning such as "Du Gott, so ... nicht" or "Hast du . . . so hat's Noth". The performer mounts the platform with tiny, rapid, mincing steps after having first emitted a horrifying scream just outside the door. He directs his outstretched hand toward the harpsichord, then freezes for a moment in front of the instrument in a posture of prayer, eyes uplifted, all the while reciting the text. Suddenly, crying "Now!", he sits down and begins playing with arteriosclerotic movements, using the left arm only. Die Mutation (The Mutation for men's choir and obligate piano) The pianist plays Prelude no. 44 in a-minor from Bach's "Well-tempered Clavier". The chorus is divided into a singing and a speaking group, each with many solo parts. The singing chorus takes its initial pitch from the music played by the piano. As in "Recitativarie", the texts are taken from the 371 chorale harmonizations and from cantata titles. Towards the end, quotations from Alban Berg's "Wozzeck" are heard: "Lasset die Kleinen zu mir kommen" ("Suffer the little children to come unto me") and the "hopp, hopp" sung by the orphan boy, still unaware of her plight. As Kagel wrote: "This ambiguity stands at the root of each remark on the subject of faith. It was refreshing to project the changes of context onto a fixed structure instead of manipulating the prelude. In conjunction with this 'expressionist' music by Bach, the cantata titles kindle a series of associations and new permutations of meaning in the listener." Charakterstück (Character Piece for zither quartet) The character piece was a minor 19th-century form which enjoyed widespread popularity. As Kagel once remarked: "My metier is the legacy of the 19th century." The scoring alone reveals several distinct characters: the bright, tinny sound of the quint zither, here with prominent glissandi; the descant zither as the more or less normal instrument in this genre; the elegy zither in tenor register; and the bass zither, which is entrusted with slow-moving, profound phrases. Nevertheless, all four instruments combine in such a manner that they sound like a single large instrument, this causing their individual characters to merge. The same thing happens with the tempo. At first it is "moderate", not exactly a distinctive character as tempos go; at the end, in a pot-pourri of everything that has preceded, the tempo changes every two bars (fast - slow - moderate - very fast - very slow), which in turn in not exactly conducive to conveying a single character. Lastly, every instrument plays in two keys simultaneously, from beginning to end. Assuming that each key has a recognizable character, the question of character is already made ambivalent within each individual instrument. In the Romantic Era, each. character piece expressed at most a single character and, if need be, the contrasts inherent to that character. Kagel, on the other hand, systematically undermines the emergence and predominance of a single character, thus unmasking our fondness for characterization as mere posturing. For either one has character and is compelled, with Luther, to say "I can do no other", or one strives for character and thereby admits its absence. Finally - fetching touch - the entire piece is written for amateur musicians. Only amateurs can give it a characterization which is genuine, and hence unattainable by professionals. This genuineness overshadows any other characters which we might sense in the piece. This, at any rate, is my opinion. Werner Klüppelholz, on the other hand, could write: "For all its efforts at alienation, the composition ossifies into a peculiar rigidity, eclipsed by the featureless subterranean twilight which it inhabits. The character pieces have no character. Without stooping to the level of 'Gebrauchsmusik', they are meant to function as a medium of communication, and doubtless for this very reason are not performed. Kagel has extended a helping hand to amateurs only to find no takers." Yet Kagel's intention was quite different. As he wrote in April 1972: "If we compare the comments of musicians from our top orchestras and those of amateurs, who must wait till the end of the work-day before taking up their instruments and deciphering unfamiliar music, we notice intriguing affinities in the behaviour pattern of rejection. Texts of a leftist, cultural-political stamp are practically useless for separating progressive and reactionary tendencies. In this area, inexperience is sometimes tantamount to a special kind of defense mechanism. I believe that interested composers could help to connect the various layers beneath the surface of musical society. To do so, it is not necessary to stress the transcendental humanism of music, nor to set political tracts. But it is necessary, first of all, to have pieces to play." Siegfriedp' for cello Kagel wrote: "This piece is based on the series E, G, F, D, A, which is constantly varied in register. This continuous process of variation poses great difficulties for a string instrument. It is scarcely possible to render the notated text without resorting to harmonics. Thus, I have listed in complete tabular form 75 different was of fingering the five aforementioned pitches as harmonics, and made this table an integral part of the composition. (The table is my contribution to an anti-spectacular virtuoso style.)" The piece is, simply, a portrait of the cellist s-i-E-G-F-r-i- e-D p-A-l-m. One special line in the score calls for "oral devices" such as breathing, groaning, humming or singing. This is by no means merely an added ingredient, but rather an indispensable aid in producing music which is at once difficult (the performer may take pride in this) and yet un- demonstrative (calling for selfless exertions on the performer's part in the art of playing harmonics). The audience will reward his efforts with thunderous applause (admiration) and deep emotion (pity)." Gerd Zacher (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson) From Bestellnummer DMR 1028-30: MAURICIO KAGEL Mauricio Kagel was born in 1931 in Buenos Aires, where he received his musical training and studied literature and philosophy at the university. He then worked in Buenos Aires in an avant-garde group - the "Agrupación Nueva Música" - and conducted at the Teatro Colón. In 1957 he moved to Europe, since which time he has lived in Cologne. In 1961 he founded the Cologne Ensemble for New Music. Besides his work as a composer, including terms in electronic studios in Cologne, Munich, Utrecht and elsewhere, he undertook long concert tours and held courses and lectures in various European states and in the USA. Until 1975 he was Stockhausen's successor as director of the Cologne Courses for New Music, where he teaches such topics as music and radio plays, music and images, music therapy, children's instruments and other unconventional subjects on the periphery of music life. Since 1974 he has been professor of "new music theatre" at the Cologne Musikhochschule. To form a complete picture of Kagel's critical stance toward post-war avant-garde music, and toward European art music as a whole, one must examine his early experience of heterogeneous cultural traditions in Argentina. Here, in his own words, he adopted a basic attitude of "intellectual anti- chauvinism . . . since the active figures in the Argentine intelligentsia, which I joined as a youth, do not see a clear distinction between national culture and European culture." ("Melos", no. 10, 1966). The modern awareness in Latin America is neither nationalistic nor European. Hence Kagel, though well-versed in European culture, entered a musical scene in 1957 which must have puzzled him with its eurocentricity. He has never lost this sense of detachment, and it nourishes the innovative urge behind his music. This also explains why Kagel's treatment of the apparently hallowed values of European art music have always shocked his audience, even as late as the 1970s. When Kagel entered the West German avant-garde he found himself confronted by the apparent depletion of serialism. Of all composers, he was perhaps the most through and systematic in reacting to this state of affairs by expanding the concept of material. During his first decade in the Federal Republic he concentrated, most of all, on integrating visual elements of all sorts into his works, thereby taking a leading role in the emergence of a new genre, "instrumental theatre". His "Sonant" for guitar, harp, double bass and membranophones, "Pandorasbox" for bandoneon, his chamber theatre piece "Sur Scène", his stage compositions "Pas de cinq", "Camera obscura" and "Himmelsmechanik" (Celestial Mechanism) - all these and other works figured in various ways in his visualization of music. His experience gained in the audio-visual medium culminated in a full-length stage piece "Staatstheater", which was premiered in Hamburg in 1971 and in a certain sense forms a watershed in Kagel's evolution as a composer. In practically all of his works Kagel seeks to break down established boundaries. By incorporating optical elements, as reflected e.g. in his several film projects, he eventually arrived at a practice which might be called "medial composition", in which the composer not merely produces sound structures which stand out from their surroundings as a "work", but also creates channels of communication and functional connections, modes of social and cultural behaviour, by drawing on the potentials of the media. He achieved this in the 11 short pieces with the title "Programm" which, at their Cologne premiere in 1972, were performed simultaneously in two halls linked by public address systems, creating what the composer called "Gespräche mit Kammermusik" (Discussions with Chamber Music). The same principle pervades his "Ex-Position" for athletes, "Klangwehr" for marching wind band, and the posturings of jazz listeners in "Blue's Blue". In works of this sort composition often merges into "de-composition", in which obsolete structures of communication and perception are dismantled in a spirit of critique. This accounts for Kagel's inclination to use a medium not only as a means of reproduction and distribution, but also as an object in itself, as material for his composition: he wishes to compose, not for, but with the radio, cinema or television. His early films with the actor Alfred Feussner, his radio play "Guten Morgen" (Good Morning) made up of advertising jingles, and "RRRRRR . .., eine Radio-Phantasie" represent steps in this direction. His fondness for using every conceivable cultural phenomenon, traditional genre and form of presentation, past and present, as raw material for his compositions makes it possible to interpret Kagel's recent works as models of historicism with a critical slant. They are music about music, musical essays written with virtuoso exactitude and an unmistakable personal stamp, a composer's attempts to redefine terms such as originality and subjectivity which have fallen on hard times in an age in which all ideas and traditions lie ready to hand. Fürst Igor, Strawinsky (Prince Igor, Stravinsky) "Fürst Igor, Strawinsky" was commissioned for the Biennale in Venice on the occasion of the centenary of Stravinsky's birth. It received its premiere performance in the church on the cemetery-island San Michele, where Stravinsky is buried. As hinted in Kagel's note for the Biennale programme, the sacred, theatrical ambience of this location was a lasting source of inspiration to the composer, who is especially susceptible to spectular sites. However, it proved impossible to carry out Kagel's original vision of a funeral procession of gondolas transporting the audience to the performance: a thunderstorm erupted at precisely the wrong moment, bringing this cortege to nought. All that remained was the concert in the cemetery chapel. The piece is scored for a chamber ensemble of bass voice, English horn, French horn, tuba, viola and two percussionists. The instruments lie in the middle and low registers, creating a plush, darkening sound. Besides the conventional percussion instruments, there is also a series of unusual sound-producing devices of indefinite pitch such as iron chains, cocoanut shells, the roaring of lions, wooden planks, an anvil, ratchets and metal tubs. These too have largely a muffled timbre. Kagel - who once referred to timbre as the "paramount material" of a work - here proceeds from a precisely conceived sound-image with associations related to the meaning of the composition. This sound-image is expressed not only in the choice of instruments, but also in the numerous performance instructions included in the score with the aim of making the composer's intentions as unambiguous as possible. The text derives from Borodin's opera "Prince Igor". Apart from a few repetitions to heighten the expression and a cut required for the sake of compression, the composer retains the whole of the text to Igor's aria in Act 2, in which the captive Prince sings of his despair at his own fate and that of prostrate Russia. A comparison of Kagel's setting and Borodin's original, however revealing of Kagel's methods, cannot be undertaken here. However, we can at least give a rough sketch of the way in which the picture of Igor changes in this re-composition. In Borodin's work the Prince, though imprisoned, is still in possession of his traits as a ruler, while Kagel's work reduces him to a complainer who has sacrificed, if not his dignity, at least any sense of his station. He gives free rein to his feelings in a Lamento with pronounced elements of self-castigation; ultimately, his deep despair borders on insanity. This is apparent, for example, in a key passage beginning with the words "geschändet ist mein Ruhm" (my fame has been desecrated), to which Kagel devotes three times as much time as Borodin, and also in the dynamic and expressive climax of the work, just after the half-way point, where the soloist, at the words "und dafür gibt man mir die Schuld" (and I am held guilty of this), is told to break out into "desperate, distorted laughter". In the long crescendo which precedes this climax the voice part, which had previously been notated precisely, is rendered only in approximate pitch-curves - the inner turmoil bursts the form. Although this piece is unusually expressive by Kagel's standards, it cannot simply be pigeon-holed as an "expressive composition". Kagel's espressivo capsizes into the grotesque. One sign of this is the nagging, crazed, laughing sounds required of the instruments; another is the direction to the soloist during the preceding crescendo to be "excessively dramatic", and Kagel's helpful suggestion that he try to caricature classical Japanese theatre. Seriousness and irony, tragedy and ridiculousness merge in this paradoxical piece, and Kagel makes use of the shifting expression like a mask behind which lie his feelings, now hidden, now exposed. It is not only in the pun of the title, in the neo-classical figures such as scalar passages and parallel 7th chords, but also in this masquerade that Kagel reveals his spiritual affinity with the secretive dedicatee of his piece. Max Nyffeler (Translation: J. Bradford Robinson) Mauricio Kagel: Speech delivered on 5 October 1982 in the Chiesa di San Michele in Isola, located in San Michele Cemetery, Venice, on the occasion of the world premiere of "Fürst Igor, Strawinsky". Dear Friends and Strangers, The news of Stravinsky's burial in Venice gave me pause at the time to consider whether a touch of the master's irony might also be buried in this wish of his. He was so fond of the damp - especially of that kind which is surrounded by glass - that it must have given him untold pleasure to have found his final resting place in this unique city where dampness is ever-present. We, too, who honour his memory today in our jovial manner, should take satisfaction in his decision: Stravinsky is ideally preserved in Venice, and forever within easy reach of one of the most crucial necessities of his former daily existence. And yet - what ambiguity! For it was precisely in the dryness, the objectivity of his music that Stravinsky - that grandseigneur of the mind and body, never content unless food and service were of the highest calibre - discovered that dimension which enabled him to turn his eye inward with such infinite profundity. His works are living documents of an apparent dichotomy. Passion and computation, unfettered inspiration and rational ingenuity, the sacred and the heathen - all mutually fertilize each other to produce an oeuvre which is well described by several expressions from the musicians' lingua franca :sempre con passione ma senza rubato; con molta tenerezza ma non piangendo; con piacere, mai a piacere; musica pratica ma non tanto, musica poetica al piu possibile, musica viva da capo al fine. For me, it is of course a great distinction to honour Stravinsky on this occasion and in this public forum. I belong to a generation of composers who were left with the unpleasant legacy of a family feud to which, pro or contra, we had in fact nothing new to contribute. The choice posited in Schoenberg's canon "Tonal oder Atonal" has long, indeed has always been a question of sensibility and intelligent application rather than a hard and fast principle. Today, we no longer bother our heads by confusing a method of composition with the aesthetic of craftsmanship. I hope this will remain so in music history for a long time to come. Stravinsky had much to offer all of us who practice music as a mental discipline. For this reason, we composers - who view the possibility of musical expression as a confirmation for many things that make our lives worth living - are very much in his debt. The very existence of a classical composer - particularly (sarcasm notwithstanding) a "classical modern" composer - is a clear challenge to anyone dedicated to the discovery of new, present worlds of music. It is my firm hope that my "Fürst Igor, Strawinsky" will prove to our honoured forebear that a goodly portion of his 'attitude and doctrine consisted nor merely of contradictions and opposites, but also of a high-minded twinkling of the eye. In this sense my work is intended as an homage, without ambiguity: senza doppio (colpo) di lingua.