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...trj...
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« on: 15:22:21, 18-09-2008 » |
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martle
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« Reply #1 on: 15:45:45, 18-09-2008 » |
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Oh no! I had no idea this might have been on the cards (despite being Bjorn's colleague!). What a(nother) sad loss! A hugely inventive, iconoclastic and influential man.
RIP
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Green. Always green.
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richard barrett
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« Reply #2 on: 19:00:33, 18-09-2008 » |
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That's very sad; it seems that he'd been ill for some time. So few of the composers I "grew up with" are left now, and Kagel was one of the most important: Acustica, Staatstheater, 1898, Musik für Renaissance-Instrumente, Hallelujah and especially Der Schall left indelible impressions on me back then , and later there was his second string quartet and piano trio, Vox humana, Aus Deutschland, Les idées fixes and much else. His later music sometimes gets a bit prosaic for my liking, and seemingly jokey where the earlier work was disquieting, but as a body of work it's incomparable. I don't think his work was so well known in the UK though, despite fairly regular (and IMO not awfully idiomatic) performances by the London Sinfonietta. I don't recall seeing any of his orchestral music or larger music-theatre pieces put on here. |
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pim_derks
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« Reply #3 on: 19:12:21, 18-09-2008 » |
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This is sad news indeed.  I wasn't a great Kagel fan but I remember hearing (and seeing!) many interesting pieces by this composer. RIP Mauricio Kagel |
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"People hate anything well made. It gives them a guilty conscience." John Betjeman
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richard barrett
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« Reply #4 on: 19:19:36, 18-09-2008 » |
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Pim, did you see Aus Deutschland at Theater Carré (Holland Festival 1997)? That was a highlight of my theatre- and concert-going during my Dutch years.
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pim_derks
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« Reply #5 on: 19:22:23, 18-09-2008 » |
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Pim, did you see Aus Deutschland at Theater Carré (Holland Festival 1997)? No, but I saw it on television. Cherry Duyns's Kagel documentary must be around on VHS somewhere in this house. They did a concert version of Aus Deutschland in Amsterdam somewhere in the 1980s. I don't know if that performance has been recorded. |
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« Last Edit: 19:24:42, 18-09-2008 by pim_derks »
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"People hate anything well made. It gives them a guilty conscience." John Betjeman
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harmonyharmony
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« Reply #6 on: 22:43:52, 18-09-2008 » |
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Thanks for posting this, trj.
I've enjoyed an awful lot of Kagel's music (and disliked some too!) live and on radio, and enjoyed discovering pieces like Acustica (which I intend to give a spin tomorrow morning) through the Avant Garde Project. I seem to remember that there are some videos on ubu.com that I will be investigating tomorrow.
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'is this all we can do?' anonymous student of the University of Berkeley, California quoted in H. Draper, 'The new student revolt' (New York: Grove Press, 1965) http://www.myspace.com/itensemble |
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #7 on: 04:40:17, 19-09-2008 » |
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We found out yesterday before our concert in Krakow. He was a big part of our ensemble's life over the last few years - we'd done lots of concerts and tours of his music with him conducting and his humour is something we'd all soaked up to the point we hardly notice it... until of course in the middle of a rehearsal someone comes out with one of his typical quips and suddenly we realise he's not there any more. We managed to get one of the little pieces ( Unguis incarnatus est) from the early '70s emailed from the office and put it in the programme yesterday - a little Liszt quote gets worked up into a frenzy of pedal-smashing on the piano and a bass instrument (bass clarinet yesterday) plays a few enigmatic noises at the edge of the stage (I hid behind some speakers since there wasn't a proper offstage). Then at the end there's a huge crescendo just on the piano pedals, the pianist screams 'Liszt' and the other player 'tsziL-----------'. Disturbing indeed and the effect is out of all proportion to its means (pretty much the opposite of, ahem, the composer officially on the programme). I last played it at the University in Köln for some Kagel 75th birthday festivities and the horrified silence after the scream died away was broken by Kagel's own exclamation of 'Mein Gott!'. (We also had a trio with the tempo marking crotchet=52 on the programme yesterday. We played it at crotchet=51 for the occasion.  ) I have him to thank for some of my own finest on-stage memories. We toured some of the Windrose pieces to Vilnius, Riga and Tallinn with him a couple of years ago - they again don't look like much on paper but his presence turned them into something magical, we know them like the backs of our respective hands by now and the Tallinn concert is I think probably the best concert I've ever played. (There was a rather lovely prank involving a bulb of garlic and the percussionist's harmonica which I think I've told before...) We also played his Mitternachtstük in Berlin a little while back, which is a setting for choir and a few instruments of some of Schumann's early writings - he came up with something quite incredible to set a narration involving a few characters in a church where sounds come out of nowhere, turn themselves into seventh chords and vanish. That's Schumann's description in the text but it's what Kagel did of course and since I don't play in that song (it's for choir, harmonium and voice) I was sitting in the middle of it just floating away. We had plenty of projects still in planning - don't know which of them will happen now of course since we have no idea which pieces he finished. I don't know if I can explain here what he meant to me and us but I miss him terribly. |
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Robert Dahm
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« Reply #8 on: 04:54:51, 19-09-2008 » |
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Thanks, Ollie, for sharing. Very touching. I can't imagine what it must be like to experience the cessation of a creative output in as intimate manner as you are describing.
RIP
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Ron Dough
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« Reply #9 on: 09:12:48, 19-09-2008 » |
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I must admit that Kagel is is all but uncharted territory for me (although I could immediately recall LP sleeves with his name on in my mind's eye), but reading personal memories like Ollie's brings the news out of the general into a more personal sphere, and fills out his character in a way that emphasises the loss.
Many thanks for sharing that here, Oz.
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pim_derks
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« Reply #10 on: 10:37:16, 19-09-2008 » |
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"People hate anything well made. It gives them a guilty conscience." John Betjeman
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time_is_now
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« Reply #11 on: 16:11:28, 19-09-2008 » |
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Thanks, Ollie. Funnily enough I heard Unguis incarnatus est for the first time last week - it's on a reissued Siegfried Palm cello recital on DG that I've had for 3 or 4 years but never listened to fully before.
Wish I could have heard some of the Windrose concerts, too. I have the Montaigne recording of the first few of those pieces but have always had the sense that there's more to be explored there.
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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oliver sudden
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« Reply #12 on: 21:47:02, 19-09-2008 » |
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t_i_n, there's so much that's visual in the Windrose pieces that I've hardly ever managed to make it through one on CD. There isn't just the fact that each piece ends with the entire band looking in the direction of the corresponding compass point (as seen from their perspective, so to the right or left or up rather than east or west or north - the subjectivity of the directions from the observer's point of view as compared to their objective placement on the globe is pretty much what the pieces are 'about') - there's also the various mad and indispensable exotica in the percussion department used to evoke the various directions (cushions, a conch, Pan pipes, wooden water drums, a banjo, a bullroarer, a tree branch), many of which are inherently visual, and various lighting things which might seem pretty daggy in themselves but are so much of what for me makes Kagel Kagel. They're concert pieces.
We wanted to film them with him (he'd promised Reinbert de Leeuw he wouldn't do a CD of them as conductor with another group but a DVD would be another matter) but of course it's too late now. The musical material is also so much tied up with all that - folk music from various points of the globe but also things which clearly had personal connotations for Kagel (which he never explained explicitly), which is a big part of why it was so magical to play the pieces with him. He wasn't the most reliable of conductors by the time I got to know him but it really didn't matter - we knew the things well enough to play them without him, practically. Another thing I can't begin to describe is the way the look on his face brought all that across to us without him needing to tell us the specifics. He had an incredible joy in his own music - he was able to say things like "ach, das ist so schöne Musik" to us without it coming across as the slightest bit arrogant. We're hoping to put Osten in our next concert in Köln - that's one we can certainly play without conductor now. We did Westen in Montreux with him just after the New Orleans floods - that's one which ends with a mad ragtime and a tree trunk being chopped to smithereens (the splinters used to regularly end up in the piano). Maybe you can imagine how playing that in that context seemed to feel connected to some kind of broader humanity than concert pieces tend to feel.
He had so many little phrases which are part of our daily vocabulary now whoever the conductor - "ich folge Sie", "das is' es", "ich verkürze", little things which are for us inseparable from a guttural, Argentinian-accented voice, two enormous hands which would fly far above his head for every upbeat and a distant but incredibly touching humour. Always Sie but always first names, which is strictly speaking not quite right but somehow completely appropriate.
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time_is_now
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« Reply #13 on: 21:59:09, 19-09-2008 » |
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You mentioned the Sie thing before, Ollie, but it somehow didn't occur to me at the time that of course this is how Argentinian Spanish works (no tu, only vosotros).
I was just talking to a composer friend on the phone, who hadn't heard the news, and told me a funny story Kagel had told him about being sent to show his music to Manuel de Falla as a teenager (Falla was then in exile in Argentina). Apparently Kagel was so nervous he played right through the piece he'd taken, turning his own pages at the piano, and when he got to the end Falla said 'That was very good, but wouldn't it have been easier to play with the music the right way up?'
As my friend pointed out, this scenario could almost be from a Kagel piece itself!
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« Last Edit: 22:48:00, 19-09-2008 by time_is_now »
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The city is a process which always veers away from the form envisaged and desired, ... whose revenge upon its architects and planners undoes every dream of mastery. It is [also] one of the sites where Dasein is assigned the impossible task of putting right what can never be put right. - Rob Lapsley
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harmonyharmony
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« Reply #14 on: 22:43:23, 19-09-2008 » |
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I like the Windrose pieces (those that I've heard and seen).
Thanks for your reminiscences Ollie and please tell us more.
My only experience of Kagel in the flesh was at the RAM Kagel festival a few years ago, at which he didn't speak much (to the public at least - it may have been different for the performers).
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'is this all we can do?' anonymous student of the University of Berkeley, California quoted in H. Draper, 'The new student revolt' (New York: Grove Press, 1965) http://www.myspace.com/itensemble |
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