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On teaching composition
JMS: When I studied with you (in 1996), my resumé, my summary, was that
you tried to investigate, as a psychoanalyst, what is what one really
wants to do and then to encourage one to do it. ‘What do you want to
compose? Such and such a thing. Well, so go and do it.’ Do you recognize
this synthetic statement as your own? Besides, recently, on the phone,
a last interview with mauricio kagel 9
MK: Why not? But that was one part of the question. The other part,
which also interests me, is how to correct mistakes. For me the
relevant thing concerning what is an error and what not, was
resolved through the questions I raised regarding the métier
(craftsmanship). In this sense I am really very severe, because I
know that thereby I can help the pupil. If the pupil acquires a good
métier, he will be at least out of danger in the periods in which he
has a creative crisis. Because the métier helps, compensates for, a
certain kind of vacuum, of void, that happens automatically in a
composer’s life. There are moments in which he can’t produce
what he wants to produce. In German one says, of the writer’s
profession, Schreibblockade, writer’s block. They can’t fill their
empty pages. And they get scared. In composition exactly the
same thing happens. There have been great composers that didn’t
write for eight or ten years. Schoenberg is a good example.
JMS: But as an incubation phase of something quite new?
MK: Yes, perhaps, but not solely: certain composers quit at a certain age
and it’s over, they can’t go on. Rossini. It was not only gluttony, in
order to have lunch three times a day and eat dinner four times. It
was an inner thing.
JMS: Verdi is a particular case of this.
MK: Yes, but Verdi regenerates. Incredible. The métier has also a great
importance, but he regenerates by researching things he didn’t
know, that he had never done. That is the extraordinary aspect
of Verdi. It is not an output of the mature period, as usually said,
but a totally young and new output. As is Varèse, of course. This
discussion would lead us too far.
There are certain things I have insisted upon. The métier
doesn’t uniquely consist of not writing notes that don’t exist in an
instrument, but of trying to make sure that instruments be used
congenially – e.g., if one writes for violin, don’t think in terms of
the tuba. This is a quite crass example. I never tried – not even by
mistake – to compel a pupil to avoid [parallel] fifths or octaves and
all that kind of thing, for the biggest composers were the first to
betray the Academy. They were not been academicians, because
they knew the academic aspect. Debussy is a classic example.
JMS: The concept of mistake is what I would like to elucidate. Would it be
compositional mistake, as a student, to disregard my sincerity? That’s
the kind of mistake I refer to.
MK: That would be for me a very grave mistake. I’ve had very
different pupils, but I was rarely wrong in the Einschätzung, in the
estimation of the possibilities of a pupil. Of course, being sincere
is arduous, is a very difficult task. Because sincerity might also
lead, as last consequence, to recognizing that one can’t write
music. One doesn’t want that kind of life.
In musical composition it’s a little bit as in painting and in other
artistic disciplines. It is too easy to say ‘I am a composer’ or ‘I am
a painter’. It’s too easy, and the danger is that the foundations that
support the conviction of being a composer might be very brittle.
JMS: Due to personality or talent issues?
MK: To talent issues. And to personality as well. If a pupil realizes that
his talent is less than his working euphoria. That exists: a student
is very hard-working and with that he compensates for the lack of
talent, while those who have a natural talent are often somewhat
12 tempo
1
The Hochschule für Musik Köln (Cologne), where Kagel taught New Musical Theater between
1974 and 1996.
a last interview with mauricio kagel 13
MK: For me, induction, in the most brutal sense of the word, is to
create an obligation. The less brutal sense, as also used in physics,
means that which is permeable, that which can take us to the
object. It is a way of helping the pupil so that he discovers his
possibilities. To induce him to discover his own possibilities, to
think in grammatical terms. In this sense I use the word.
JMS: So not in the sense of Logic, of drawing general conclusions starting
from particular data as a mechanism opposed to deduction.
MK: No. To deduce is very important, but it should come later.
Induction in the sense of creating an impulse. Neither generalizing
nor obligating. Demonstrate to him that he has further
possibilities than those that he has put down on paper [in the
work he has brought].
JMS: And is that hypothetical situation that I described familiar to you? A
student comes with X-ideas, you see in these ideas much more than what
the student sees, and you say him ‘out of these ideas one can derive a
grammar that one should develop and whose first postulates are this and
that’.
MK: This seems essential to me. We are circling a subject that is the
ABC of my pedagogy, and it is the way to show the different
qualities of musical thinking as structure. I am not talking about
structuralism – structuralism existed since 300 years before
Structuralism. No, but showing that we are able to construct a
sound language. But the price is that we must go much further
than the first impulses. With those, one doesn’t get a piece. I once
wrote that I am sure that every composer knows how a new piece
begins, but none of them knows how it will end.3 I am very happy
that it should be unknown. The first impulse is ‘I want that’, but
after one minute one must begin to compose. And that is the
most difficult problem: what is to be done with that material. In
which way do you accept that this material should become an
expressive, structured language? To what degree do you want to
engager [involve yourself]?
When the electric organ was re-discovered, in my generation,
a series of pieces appeared where the composer did nothing more
than pressing a key, and then he could go to drink tea or coffee:
the piece was a single sound held ad infinitum. And that was a
composition. You can accept that or not, but the consequences
were that several composers entirely abandoned the idea of
composing, and the price was that the first 20 seconds of a piece
were exactly the same as the last 20 seconds, 30 minutes later.
They abandoned the idea that one has to compose, because
sounds arrived without the need to articulate them. It is an
important thing in the history of music, but that can only last for
a certain period, it can’t extend longer.
JMS: Are you referring to works with very long sounds, literally,4 or to
automated composition methods?5
MK: The former. Where the listener may think, after a certain number
of minutes or seconds, ‘I already know this’: and it is actually not
going to change until the end.
3
Later I wrote him this defiant remark: ‘Except the chan-chan of a tango, everybody is sure
about that ending’.
4
One thinks of La Monte Young, of course.
5
From the ‘prison of doing sonata forms’ that Debussy criticized, up to certain serial
methods.
16 tempo
Musical education
JMS: In the notes to the score of your piece 1898 I find the following comment:
‘The purpose of these tape recordings, among others, is to demonstrate
that what is needed is not “reliable” musical education but the very
a last interview with mauricio kagel 17
6
1898 is a work for children’s voices and instruments composed in 1973, commissioned by
Deutsche Grammophon in commemoration of its 75th anniversary (1898–1973). The com-
position’s harmonic world alludes to that turn of the century, a time ‘where one inhales
tonally and exhales atonally’ (MK).
18 tempo
JMS: Then, university tuition doesn’t aim to produce ruptures, in fact, which
are the constant in the evolution of musical thought – if one can talk
about evolution.
MK: They don’t totally try to achieve a rupture, but it’s a kind of
continuity dolce.
JMS: Is it like writing ‘in the manner of ’?
MK: Yes, it is. I have done that too. Thank God I’ve studied counterpoint.
Because when one sees my scores, one notices to what extent
there is a very classical artisanship supporting me, which allowed
me this kind of unconventional, unorthodox expressiveness. One
sees immediately that the scores are not written by somebody
lacking in high craftsmanship.
7
Actually Nordrhein-Westphalen is not a province but a Bundesland, a federal state.
8
Glorious archaism. It is of course the bicycle’s bell. (Though Robin Maconie points out that
some bicycles do have small klaxons – horns with rubber bulbs – as scored for in Ligeti’s Le
Grand Macabre and Stockhausen’s Jahreslauf – Ed.)
9
Kagel refers to a ‘historic legend’ that I still can’t identify, perhaps linked to the story of Saint
Ursula. (The number of virgins supposed to have been martyred with St Ursula has ranged
from one [the Saint herself] up to 11,000 – see http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Saint_Ursula
– Ed.)
10
Ein musikalischer Spass, KV 522 (1787) by Mozart, where he succeeds in concentrating all
imaginable compositional mistakes, mimicking the dilettante composers of his era. It’s
actually a sextet, not a quartet.
a last interview with mauricio kagel 19
11
For instance the string quartet of 1925, Ouvertüre zum ‘Fliegenden Holländer’ wie sie eine schl-
echte Kurkapelle morgens um 7 am Brunnen spielt, i.e., Overture to ‘The flying Dutchman’ as sight-
read by a poor spa orchestra at the village well at 7 a.m.
12
At some point, Kagel commented to me with enormous respect on the impressive quality
of the musicians that faced this Festival Kagel, particularly that of the Ensemble Süden con-
ducted on that occasion by Marcelo Delgado. On 23 October 2005 he sent me this fax, ask-
ing me to forward it by e-mail to Daniel Serale (the percussionist of the ensemble): ‘Dear
Serale, I have just listened to the four pieces of the cycle The Compass Rose which CD you
sent me these days. I hurry to send you these lines before departing again, because I was
very much impressed by the performance level. The musicality of all the performers and
their virtuosity – when the score demands it – are just remarkable. Thousand thanks to all of
you. Cordiales saludos, MK’. The underlining is by Kagel himself.
13
Another important unanswered question arises. I was thinking to ask Kagel to correlate this
concept – Eine Brise as a ‘scene that doesn’t develop’ – with his criticism of composing static
pieces based on ‘long notes’, where the idea of non-development, non-evolution, also pos-
sesses thematic status.
14
Once I asked him about the musicological classification of his ancient (108-minute) work
Música para la torre (Music for the tower), premièred in Mendoza (Argentina) at the incredi-
bly early date of 1953/54: is it a sound installation, or electroacoustic music? Kagel answered
‘it’s a mixture’.
20 tempo
Legitimacy
JMS: Some question the legitimacy of teaching composition (not of the
profession, but of the possibility of it being transmitted). Even some
composition teachers believe that ultimately composition can’t be
transmitted. Being almost an autodidact, you surely have a particular
position.
a last interview with mauricio kagel 21
15
A wonderful interference with English: he actually said ‘tablas redondas’; while in Spanish it
should be ‘mesas redondas’.
22 tempo
Curiosity
Anyway I must say that I have always been … some say a black
sheep, others a white fly. I’ve always kept myself out of the
established streams of a certain thought. Because, right up
to today, I am tremendously curious. Curiosity is one of the
most inventive things that exists. One invents curiosity. In itself,
curiosity doesn’t exist. It’s like music, one invents music, as I told
you before.
JMS: One invents curiosity, but doesn’t it exist as a natural impulse?
MK: Yes, up to a certain degree, when your curiosity is satisfied with
just a few bits of information. But when you put activate curiosity,
with a certain mechanism, it isn’t the normal curiosity any more.
You are inventing it.
16
Rudolf Frisius, German musicologist, world specialist in Stockhausen, Cage, Pierre Henry,
Kagel; he wrote about (and knew) innumerable personages of the musical avant-garde.
a last interview with mauricio kagel 23
Identity
JMS: So I’ll ask you three things and you choose which you want to answer.18
a) Identity, as a composer
b) Recalling Adorno writing that one can’t write poetry after Auschwitz:
can one write music after (or at the same time as) Guantánamo?
c) A more technical aspect, related to ruptures. Do you still use what you
called ‘serial tonality’?
MK: The first subject interests me a lot. Above all because our talk will
be published in Argentina,19 in South America, and having been
born in that continent I am concerned with some of the problems
that still exist there.
It is terribly difficult to talk about identity, because a single
identity doesn’t exist. Everybody has a heap of identities.20 You
are born in a place that you don’t choose, you are given a religion
you don’t choose and have a family that you also don’t choose.
Those three things are tremendously important in the course
of your life. The fact of being born in an X-country obliges you
to have a dialog with all the complexity that a country is. And a
country without contradictions doesn’t exist. All countries have
the stigma, the seal of contradiction. Which can be very creative.
17
In musical contexts, this word is used a good bit in German, much less in the original
Spanish. It refers to the branch of geology that studies the geological structures produced
by the deformation of the earth crust, those structures that rocks acquire after having been
formed, as well as the processes that originate them. In a metaphorical sense, it refers to the
shaping (and distorting) forces of music. The big difference with a similar concept, that of
the architecture of a piece, is that the notion of tectonic is dynamic: it refers to masses and
forces in movement.
18
I highlight that the only one of the three subjects that Kagel didn’t approach was the specifi-
cally technical one, maybe because the others are reflections applicable to any composer and
any style.
19
A first version of this interview was published in VOXes, the magazine of the University of
Lanús (December 2008).
20
‘Fragmentary identities’ says Kagel during an interview with Max Nyffeler on 22 or 23
March 2000, ‘There will always be questions enough’, published in the journal Lettre, Vol. 51
(4/2000); see also http://www.beckmesser.de/komponisten/kagel/int-e.html
24 tempo
JMS: And the composer who writes contemporary music and who isn’t
interested in either tango nor folklore as language? Often, opposed
to the notion of musical identity (in South America) is the discussion
concerning when music is not European anymore, i.e., whether we are
not composing a European music but just in another place on the earth.
Whether we are not just copying foreign models. In other words, the
contraposition between identity, understood as music of our land, and
epigonism, as music of other people’s land (including a ‘bartóked’
Argentine folklore).
MK: One of the problems of South America and of Argentina,
when trying to set up an Argentine musical language, is that
500 years of composing and performance traditions are missing
in the country – from 1500 to 2000. All that one finds in Italy
automatically. Without that musical evolution one cannot talk
about an Argentine school. Even a mediocre Italian composer has
in himself the cantabile, because he was born with it. He listened
to Verdi and all that music that was always sung. He sits down,
and if he doesn’t write a cantabile he feels that he doesn’t manage
to express himself. One cannot invent that missing 500 years’
composition overnight. Maybe in 2300 there will be an Argentine
Argentine music. Patience, persistence, conviction, invention
are necessary. In literature it worked, because before people talk
about globalization, literature had reached it. The themes may
be Argentine or North American or French. But there is a level
of narrative which is universal and has not to do exactly with the
country, but with literary quality.
Let’s finish, I am tired.
JMS: Just a coda scherzante. Does there exist a ‘Kagel in pure state’?
MK: I don’t believe in purity. Purity è cosa mentale.26 Like hygiene.
Hygiene doesn’t exist. If you are interested in the subject, you
notice that in places where hygiene is absolutely necessary, as in a
hospital, the contradiction is that at the same time there is a crust
… not of dirt, but of carelessness that leads to non-hygiene.
Basta! Turn that thing off!
26
An allusion to Leonardo da Vinci’s sentence ‘l’arte è cosa mentale’.
Reproduced with permission of the copyright owner. Further reproduction prohibited without permission.