Mauricio Kagel: Match Für 3 Spieler/Musik Für Renaissance-Instrumente (Avant Garde)
Purchased at Preserving Records
I was contemplating why I, as a musician and listener, have taken such particular interest in particular composers and performers, and have ignored or neglected others. I was about to write "we" but it seems to me I can only speak for my own experience.
There are the obvious reasons: something about the person's work appeals to us personally. That composer (and I'll just stick to that term specifically) has a particular voice or even body of work that resonates with me in some way. I've written about Morton Feldman and Olivier Messiaen on this blog multiple times, and there's something about each man's work that just....does it for me. Each are highly different, each are in many of their works immediately identifiable. And their music doesn't affect mine in any sort of direct way; if anything, I know enough to know that if I tried to draw directly on their music, I'd only sound like a pale or even bad version of what they do. And I don't like every work that either composer has written, which in itself I think is a good thing. It means that in some respect they didn't write the same work over and over.
Something else occurred to me. There are so many composers and musicians whose work is worthy of my time and attention, that I can't possibly pay attention to everyone. That's a case where a recording on a particular label can be very helpful, because I will notice anything that's on DG's Avant Garde imprint
I know the name Mauricio Kagel. I know very little about him, and have only one or two other recordings of his music. Coincidentally, I had been studying one of his scores prior to purchasing this LP a few weeks. Well, studying is maybe too strong a word. I looked over a copy Acoustica at our university library, for loudspeakers and unusual acoustical sources. I was interested in its non-linearity, of a composition not defined by beginning-middle-end, but as a set of resources for constructing a performance.
Match (1964) for cello and two percussionists comes off as a disjunct, post-War and possibly Darmstadt-style composition. I don't say that as a critique, I like some of that generation of European avant garde composers. I imagine it must be lively to see performed (and I wonder who might perform such as this in this era) and there's a sense on the recording of it having a bit of an absurd side. Aggressive cello playing (the score must be crazy) but also a vocal shout, a policeman's whistle, in addition to the more standard percussives and marimba.
Musik (1965/66) opens with a ghostly chord played by the all pre-Baroque instrumental ensemble. It sounds like an effective use of instruments that largely lack the richness of more modern instruments. Both works are textural as opposed to melodic. I did take the time to look up the score online through school, and as I suspected it's thoroughly written out on staves, unlike Acoustica. There are also many instructions. Not only on the pages of introduction leading into the score, but also in the score itself. I don't really need to read through them.
It reminds me of an observation a student once shared with me regarding Stockhausen's music. He said that Karlheinz would make the circumstances of performance so difficult, that it probably meant his works get played less frequently than they might. I think any composer has the right to define or ask for anything they want, but it does get to be pretty ridiculous in scores such as these.
I like the latter work in particular. It's a kind of rolling, escalating/deescalating sound world. The question is, do I now dive deeper into Kagel's work? Maybe casually, but I don't expect a shelf full of Kagel recordings alongside the masses of Feldman, Ligeti, Messiaen, and Cage recordings I've acquired.
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