Mauricio Kagel

The compositions of Mauricio Kagel (1931 – 2008) were never limited to purely acoustic components: movement in time and space, play and interchange with light were all aspects of his oeuvre. From early on in his career, he referred to his work as “Instrumental Theatre”. As such, the musicians are not only producers of sound and tone, but also actors, whose facial expressions and gestures play as important a role as their positions in the performances space – migrating, moving around, using only their bodies, they are able to transmit an entirely concrete storyline without ever having to make a sound. These rather formal criteria of Kagel’s work go hand-in-hand with the more content-related aspects of his style. Kagel possessed the rare ability to not only reflect on himself and the environment, his and our actions, but to represent his findings and observations in his compositions. In this sense, he was a political musician, a visionary who used means of disassociation to reveal an alternate reality, stripping bare the usual ambience of objects, conditions, reactions and feelings, presenting them naked, so to speak, isolated and unvarnished. In doing so, Kagel’s material becomes transparent, and in this sense he is to be understood as a reifying successor to Richard Wagner.