At his home in Cologne, Mauricio Kagel worked in a large, garden-facing room, with shelves right the way up its high walls to carry books, scores, recordings—all of western literary and musical culture, one might have thought. This was his world, a legacy to be honored, certainly, but also viewed with surprise and wry amusement, and considered in fresh ways. Perhaps it was coming from Buenos Aires that gave him an outsider’s take, or perhaps it was an ingrained curiosity, or a particular product of the widespread rethinking that happened after the Second World War, during the years of his adolescence, but he was always acutely responsive to what others took for granted: the norms, the conventions, the unspoken assumptions—including those shared by the avantgarde he joined when he arrived in Europe in 1957. Tonight’s pieces, typically, ask us what we mean by an instrument, a gesture, a performance, a tradition; in exposing our prejudices, they offer both humor and a rare new beauty.

Further information is available on the official website, www.mauricio-kagel.com. A strong series of recordings on the Winter & Winter label includes the Trio from tonight’s program but not Dressur or, unsurprisingly, Eine Brise. Naive Montaigne also has an excellent Kagel catalog.

Dressur (1976-7)

Kagel in the sixties produced a sequence of works whose performers become characters in wordless dramas. Atem, for instance, has a solo wind player in the role of an aged musician repeatedly trying out a phrase while on the verge of expiring. In Match, two cellists are engaged in a competition, moderated by a percussionist. Part of the point is to reset instrumental performance as drama, but part of the point, also, is to remind us that any and every instrumental performance is already a drama, dependent on a variety of factors: the rituals of tradition, the demands of the music business, the psychological and physiological state of the performer.

Dressur is a continuation of such endeavors on Kagel’s part, a work in which the circus, more often a rich source of metaphor for human domination and masquerade, is called upon for its example of bizarre tasks being faithfully executed. “Dressur” in German means animal training, or an act performed by trained animals: in this case, three percussion players. Kagel wrote the piece in 1976-7, providing a score that prescribes in detail not only the wide range of sound sources—nearly all made of wood; some of them unusual, or employed in unusual ways—but also the musicians’ actions. Since those actions—and the music and drama they make—speak louder than words, no further commentary is necessary.

Eine Brise (1996)

The title of this 1996 piece means “A Breeze”: something light and evanescent, with the subtitle “Transient Action for 111 Cyclists.” Such an ensemble rivals in size a Mahlerian orchestra, even if the length of the performance and the expertise demanded are on quite a different scale. Kagel’s score indicates the formation the performers must adopt, as well as the sounds they have to make as they breeze by their audience to create this special moment.

Trio (1985)

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The iconoclastic theater of Dressur and Eine Brise was not Kagel’s only means of expression. Sometimes he wanted to tuck himself into bed more closely with his inheritance, if still with a degree of ironic incredulity. Such a work is this Trio of 1984-5, an encounter not only with a favored classical genre but also, as so often in his music, with less noble traditions: the dance, café, and movie-theater music of his home town. Each of the three movements is made of interlocking sections, some of which, in the finale, have the musicians moving at their own tempos. The work plays for a little under half an hour.

Kagel’s own note explains the background:

“In composing a piano trio, I fulfilled a long-fostered desire. This is a genre which, like the string quartet tradition, can slightly intimidate any composer. I too waited patiently but anxiously to make my own contribution. The pre-history of the piece is closely tied to my musical epic about the devil, La Trahison orale (Oral Treason), which I wrote in 1981-3. When conceiving this work, I had already decided to compose character pieces, relatively short numbers with a particular mood, which could be compared gesturally to songs without words. It may seem strange that today one can once again compose music with this kind of literary background; yet the development of music history shows that things don’t go in a straight line, but are stirred and tangled up by aesthetic needs.

“I didn’t specify an instrumentation for Trahison orale; instead, I produced a sort of piano score, since this seemed to me the most suitable way of realizing what I had in mind. One of the essential lessons we can learn from the Romantic era is the primacy of musical substance over specific timbres. So long as the power of imagination is sufficiently impressive, it can be truly expressed by a variety of sonic resources. From the very start, I had in mind a paraphrase of my musical epic for the classical combination of violin, cello, and piano. I now worked this up as a three-movement composition, with a hint of a rondo about it. One might compare this piano trio to a polyphonic web of character pieces, in which prominent features keep emerging, following through, stopping abruptly, coming up from the background to the surface, and slowly disappearing. Nevertheless, this is absolute music in the classic sense—concealing the true causes of the absolute.”

Program note © Paul Griffiths

Born in Wales, Paul Griffiths has written books on music, novels and librettos.  Among the first are The Penguin Companion to Classical Music and The Substance of Things Heard, a selection from the reviews and essays he produced during more than thirty years as a music critic in London and New York.