Mauricio Kagel In spite of its innovative vocal sounds, Anagrama by Adrian Jack is "pure" music, and Kagel continued to compose - with increasing frequency - pure music Friday September 19 2008 throughout his life. But his whole output, which includes film as well as various forms of "music An artist's originality depends less on ingenious theatre" (a combination of scenic action and invention than a strongly personal point of view. music) or "instrumental theatre" (where musicians , who has died aged 76, held a take on the role of actors as they play), is, in unique position in music of the last half century. essence, concerned with comic reflections on the decay of tradition. Irony and cinematic techniques in music had been used by Satie and Debussy While widely celebrated elsewhere, in Britain he long before Kagel was born, but despite the remained perhaps the least well known of the example of , no composer has so great post-second world war avant garde systematically explored the absurd aspects, not composers. Only was comparably just of classical music, but of the whole culture under-exposed; , Pierre industry. Boulez, , György Ligeti and all, to some extent, reached a wider public. There is hardly an aspect of contemporary culture that Kagel has not playfully pulled to bits and reassembled like a Heath-Robinson contraption: Kagel's originality reflects his status as an "early music" was desiccated in Musik für outsider. Born in , he came from an Renaissance-Instrumente (1966), and ballet Argentine-Jewish family of leftist political views. turned inside-out in Staathstheater (1970), He did not study music at university or Country Music and Nostalgia affectionately conservatory, but privately with several teachers - travestied in Kantrimiusik (1975), colonialism none for composition, incidentally - and he (characteristically reversed as non-Europeans studied philosophy and literature at the University invading the Mediterranean) lampooned in Mare of Buenos Aires, where the poet and short-story- Nostrum (1975; revised in 1997), the circus writer Jorge Luis Borges was one of his lecturers. celebrated in Variété (1977) and totalitarianism Kagel became a repetiteur at the famous Teatro caricatured in Der Tribun (1979) - a harangue Colón in Buenos Aires, and music adviser at the which is perhaps too much like the real thing. university, as well as being editor of cinema and More recently, The Pieces of the Compass Rose photography for the journal Nueva Visión. (1988-94) reflect the paradoxes of "world music" with amiable nonchalance. Film remained a practical interest after Kagel moved to in 1957 on a West German There have also been tributes-with-a-difference to government scholarship. He lived there for the other composers: the film Ludwig Van celebrated rest of his life, with frequent trips abroad as a the bicentenary of Beethoven's birth in 1970 with guest professor or artist-in-residence. a burlesque representation of the kitsch cultural tourist industry in which, effectively, Beethoven By the mid-1950s Cologne was one of the great became a mere consumer product. In Variationen centres of avant garde musical experiment, where ohne Fuge (1972), Brahms and Handel once more Stockhausen was king, but Kagel came to join battle, as they had, very differently, in succeed, or replace, him as a magnet for aspiring Brahms's Variations and Fugue on a Theme of composers at the Hochschule, and instituted a Handel. Stravinsky is grist to Kagel's mill in Fürst new course in . Igor (1982), and Debussy in Interview Avec D (1994), in both of which Kagel re-creates, in Although Kagel had no formal education in ghostly form, music of the past, bearing a relation composition, he acquired a mastery of new vocal to it much like Miss Havisham to her wedding and instrumental techniques with surprising day. speed. Anagrama, a large-scale piece for singers, speaking chorus and instrumental For the tercentenary of JS Bach's birth in 1985, , was written only one year after Kagel's Kagel composed his Sankt-Bach Passion - a arrival in Cologne and remains one of the most perfectly respectful re-enactment of Bach's own striking and inventive pieces of its time; it may life in the manner of one of Bach's Gospel even have had an influence on Stockhausen's settings. Kagel characteristically quipped, "No one and Berio's Laborintus II. believes in God any more, but everyone believes in Bach," a half-truth, as he would surely have The very specific requirements of the early theatre admitted. pieces may well pose an archaeological puzzle in the future, but there is a If this suggests something like "postmodernism", large enough corpus of precisely and traditionally the term had not been invented until long after notated music with strong poetic resonance to Kagel had established his particular brand of ensure Kagel a highly honoured place in any cultural criticism. But with 1978, which he wrote pantheon. for the 75th anniversary of the leading German recording company, , Kagel is survived by his wife Ursula and daughters Kagel's music took a new turning in which he Pamela and Debora. seemed to kick over the traces of the postwar avant-garde. The music had regular (ish) rhythms Mauricio Kagel, composer, born December 24 1931; died and a certain sense of key centre, or tonality (of a September 18 2008 sort). The deliberately gruff and dirty sound, the chug-chug rhythms suggesting ailing machinery, (Source: have remained characteristic of his music ever http://www.guardian.co.uk/music/2008/sep/19 since. Oliver Knussen, who has conducted a fair /obituary.mauricio.kagel) amount of Kagel's music both with the London Sinfonietta and abroad, comments that his scores are extremely precise - and certainly, if Kagel's music moves with all the grace of an ugly duckling, it is none the less minutely calculated. Nor is it easy to imitate, though his influence as a teacher has been absorbed on deeper levels by several of his pupils - , Chris Newman and David Sawer among them.

In , the Netherlands and France, his music was repeatedly featured in major festivals. This did not make him any more attractive to the BBC, even though he was one of the leading creators of the Hörspiel - a term indicating not so much a radio play as the sort of indefinable radiogenic creation featured in Radio 3's series, Between the Ears. As far as recordings go, Deutsche Grammophon and later the Paris-based company Disques Montaigne released discs of Kagel's music almost as a matter of course, often in collaboration with West German Radio.

In 2001 the in London courageously mounted a big overview of the composer's work, with student performers. Before that, in the 1990s, the Almeida Festival in north London promoted some of the big concert pieces, as well as Variété (with circus artists from Hoxton) and Eine Brise (with 111 cyclists). This last work resurfaced on the Suffolk coast when Thomas Adès made Kagel a featured composer in the 2003 Aldeburgh festival. But there are many pieces in which musicians have to act and do all sorts of things they were never trained to do. These demand a certain kind of intensity and deadly earnestness to make them effective; something perhaps more often found in Germany.