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.
I'm familiar with Kagel's work almost exclusively through recordings, and there's always an unavoidable sense that there is a huge component of what the piece actually
is that is missing from that experience.
The only Kagel that I've had the pleasure to witness live was
Match, performed as part of a Libra concert by Geoff Gartner, Friedrich Gauwerky and Peter Neville. I think it might even have been the first Kagel I'd heard. This was some years ago, now, and I remember it being one of those almost absurdly eye-opening experiences (that I'm sure all of us have in formative years) where it became suddenly apparent to me that there were composers working light-years beyond the fringe of what my received understanding of 'contemporary' music was, and that their work was luminous, incendiary. Not only that, but they'd been doing it for fifty years!
