8 Tempo 63 (250) 8–26 © 2009 Cambridge University Press

doi:10.1017/S0040298209000333 Printed in the United Kingdom

curiosity is limitless: a last

interview with mauricio kagel
Maurico Kagel (photo: Juan Maria Solare)

Juan María Solare

This conversation with Mauricio Kagel took place on 16 April 2008 in

the studio of Kagel’s house in Cologne. Just by looking at the shelves
one could learn a lot, seeing how Kagel organized his scores. Each
box included everything related to a single work (or group of works),
including the ‘Ur-Manuskript’ (primordial manuscript), as he called it, as
well as the working copy with the corrections that arose during rehear-
sals and the contract with the publishing house. The studio enclosed an
unsophisticated upright piano, a huge desk and a corner to receive visits
like mine.
Although the talk was mainly in Spanish (both Kagel’s and the inter-
viewer’s mother tongue), Kagel loved to intermingle languages, not so
much because certain words in other tongues have a more precise mean-
ing than in Spanish, but because they invoke a world of very precise
connotations. And besides, because it was not in vain he spent his last
50 years in Germany. In such cases I have left such words in the original
language and include a translation. It might be interesting to mention
a detail: when a certain word didn’t come to Kagel in Spanish, the first
language that came to his mouth was French, not always German. His
accent, even in Spanish, also had French traces.
There are certain Spanish expressions that could be improved (such
as ‘gran porciento’ instead of ‘alto porcentaje’; or ‘ir en las cavernas’,
a German grammatical structure filled with Spanish vocabulary).
In Kagel’s language (and also in his musical one) interferences played a
structural role. I have attempted to achieve the impression that you are
talking with ‘Mauro’ himself.
On the evening of 18 September 2008 I was – at last – finishing the
transcription of these two hours of conversation. It was then that I
received the news of Kagel’s death, precisely after writing the words ‘la
curiosidad es ilimitada’: curiosity is limitless. I believe this is an adequate
title for this interview, one of the last that Kagel gave, and certainly the
longest of his last months.
This transcription phase should have been followed by an intense
editing phase by Kagel himself. He was extremely meticulous (as I could
verify when we translated his Mare Nostrum into Spanish at the begin-
ning of 2006). Tens of questions remain unanswered; but anyhow, the
reader can be absolutely sure that my solutions to doubtful linguistic
situations haven’t been improvised and are grounded both in respect
– and in daring.

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

you mentioned induction (inducción) as one of your pedagogic guide-

lines.
MK: I actually believe that pedagogy can be summarized in a few
words. Even the high pedagogy. It’s a pity to see how many books
are written on that subject and how thick they are, because many
pages are needless. I am talking now about musical composition,
not about other things, because the methods and the attitude
of both the teacher and the pupil may change according to the
profession. Teaching musical composition must be based, above
all, upon the investigation of the mental structure of the pupil.
Whether he has intrinsic musical qualities or not. Whether he
works or not. Whether he has a sort of genial attitude, in the
sense of the disorder in his work, or is methodical. There is a
series of very important parameters that the teacher must try to
know little by little. He should manage to get the pupil to open
himself a great deal and show his interior. Composing occurs in
a great deal between I and I (entre yo y yo). Not in dialogue with
other persons, but in a dialogical monologue with oneself.
And why do I talk about induction (inducción)? Because the
pupil’s problems are very acute, and the teacher ought to know
what happens. First, the teacher must insist greatly on the
quantity of work that a pupil should do. Because the general
tendency is to do much less than necessary. Not due to laziness,
but because the pupil also needs time to mature his ideas. But
if the teacher concedes him too much time, he will build up a
very unrealistic idea about the working rhythm that he is going
to have to keep up. The quantity of work is extremely important,
and even if not everything is of good quality, it establishes the
method of sitting down and obliging him to express himself. He
must learn that, when he is a serious professional and accepts a
commission, the work must be ready before day X. Once I said,
somehow ironically, that without deadlines there would exist no
music history. We are all under the pressure of delivering things
on time. That’s unavoidable and one must learn to do it.
This is one thing. For me, the most important and elemental
pedagogy has always been trying to ensure that the pupil discovers
his possibilities, with a high percentage of sincerity. Because
a composer’s profession is to invent, and under the concept of
invention, in music, there is psychology, all kind of paravents
(partitions), of Kulissen (backdrops). A scenery that we invent
based on no-inventions as professional duties and such things. We
also invent the mise en scène of music internally. For good and for
bad. And it has nothing to do with reality: it is our own reality,
totally invented; a little bit, as always, inheriting the Romantic
idiom. Composing means to invent things that don’t exist. Music
doesn’t exist, neither in the street nor in books: we are inventing a
sound-world with a language. Whether it is known or unknown
is unimportant. We are inventing something that doesn’t exist
and that has to do with human expression, with language. As it is
a non-verbal language, the ambiguity of invention is very large.
My strongest duty has always been to help the pupil to discover
his own potential, with the highest percentage of sincerity. Once
I was asked, in a Congress in Sweden, what advice I could give
to young composers. I said: sincerity. Not to run after fashions,
or after what critics want to write about contemporary music,
nor after the music that scores successes at festivals, but doing
10 tempo

as in Speleology, the science of exploring caves: to go very deep

inside and say this is what I want. It is absolutely irrelevant if it is
a successful language or not. But ‘this is what I want to do’. That
is the way.
JMS: You mentioned that a teacher must inquire about the psychology, about
the mental structure of a student, and discovering whether he/she is
musical. In which sense and to what extent may it be said that a person
isn’t musical? When can it be stated that this young person hasn’t
any talent? – is it possible to answer this question, or it is an absurd
field of inquiry? The related question refers to making criticisms – to
say, for example, ‘this work that you are showing me has mistakes’. I
am asking you, in short, about the concept of mistake, the critic in the
teacher’s role, and about your verdict on ‘talent’ (in quotation marks,
because it is a slippery concept).
MK: I agree, but anyway there are composers with whom you are
over and over again amazed by the quality of transitions: how
the sections are imbricated. Not only the harmonic quality, but
the subtleness of the message. There are composers that are less
refined. I think that music has to do, actually, with refinement.
JMS: Can one generalize? Even among major composers, can’t one mention
‘rough’ ones? Consider Prokofiev or certain works of Stravinsky. I
myself refer to coarseness as the antithesis of subtlety. Or do you not
mean that kind of refinement?
MK: No, I don’t mean that kind of refinement. Let’s take two examples.
Ravel and Reger. In Ravel I am always amazed about how he finds
a way of using material that for you – as listener – is familiar
because it is very well-formulated, and how he uses it again, and
gives it an anti-patina. It is a kind of music that doesn’t get old.
And Reger is a robust composer who isn’t interested in that kind
of subtlety, he isn’t interested in getting his themes through the
meat mincer. This is a quite robust thing that you will not find in
Ravel. It doesn’t mean that Reger is less musical altogether; but
essentially he is much less refined. That is one of the aspects of
musicality.
Of course, whether a composer listens to his music inside
himself or not, that’s another thing that has to do with musicality,
to a certain extent. There is a sort of pre-invention before
invention. When I accept a work, a commission, often I don’t
know what I will write. But the mere fact of accepting something
sets into motion an inner mechanism which is not strictly musical
but has a series of both musical and non-musical elements. At that
stage I’m still not inventing music; it’s a sort of pre-invention. For
me it is the most beautiful moment of my profession, because
the rest is working. That invention before the invention is an
extraordinary thing, a moment of a great purity and intensity.

JMS: Is there some almost sporting aspect, the idea of a challenge?

MK: Sure. I never thought it; but sporting in the sense that you accept
you have to run behind the carrot in order to some day deliver the
finished piece.
JMS: In the sense of the adrenaline that accumulates before going on stage.
MK: Yes, in that sense.
JMS: These are my own words rather than yours, something that an
interviewer shouldn’t do.
 a last interview with mauricio kagel 11

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

reluctant to work hard. In the piano class [when I studied] there

were two persons with an extraordinary talent; I didn’t have that
talent. And later after some years they abandoned that path,
because they didn’t work, they didn’t take care of it. Everything
flowed, the fingers run by themselves. This is one kind of problem
that is of course known in other disciplines.
JMS: How does one recognize the lack of talent? In the quality of ideas?
MK: That is one thing, absolutely. Musical composition is based also
upon a very important dimension, the associative. It doesn’t
have to do exactly with music, but with the construction of a
language, with the invention of a syntax, of a musical grammar.
Everybody has the same dominant, subdominant and tonic, and
then a composer arrives who rethinks all that harmonic reference
system and succeeds in formulating new things. What is really
extraordinary is that we have already 200 years of pre-established
harmony, and people go on inventing. Why? The answer is related
to a sound language. Then, something that the teacher can give to
the student, if the teacher is interested in that and has understood
the nature of the problem, is showing the pupil that he must
express himself within a language which is coherent in respect
of what he is planning. That is related to musical syntax. Here
begins the most delicate part: how this language is constructed.
And there I must help, because this is new for the pupil. Help and
show him possibilities.
I must say that I have never talked about my own music at
the Musikhochschule.1 I never showed my music as an example
of anything. When students asked: what did you do, how, with
what – then I informed them. I have always avoided, consistently,
putting my music forward as an example. Of course, what
interests me are the problems of the sound language, of the
coherent invention within a given system.
JMS: That given system is the one that is brought in by the student?
MK: Yes. Over the years I did something quite interesting: having the
students invent musical comics.
JMS: As in Stripsody (1966) by Cathy Berberian?
MK: Yes, but I did it before her. They must do musical cartoons and
describe what happens. The drawing wasn’t important, but what
happened.
JMS: The script, the libretto.
MK: Don’t forget that I was teaching Music Theater. And why
cartoons? Because in that way they had to construct stories,
plots. And the relation between the description of something,
and a sounding fact that occurs because a determinate thing has
happened, that already has to do with theater. The cartoon is also
related to theater. In the cinema, the Americans have a person
drawing each scene [the Storyboard]. It’s a kind of Drehbuch, of
cinematographic script, but only with drawings. So the director
can see ‘this is the shot; thus, thus and thus’. This is related to
comics and to the construction of a plot.
JMS: Plot in the sense of a sound dramaturgy, even if the piece at the end
isn’t visual.

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: Of course! Thus I enabled many pupils to develop their theatrical

sense. It wasn’t very orthodox, but very fruitful.
JMS: Did you propose other kind of exercises? Do you have a sort of reservoir,
an alphabet of exercises that you used to gave your students?
MK: Yes, I had more than 40, 45. I didn’t count them. I always changed
the focus, the angle.
JMS: Can you recall another one?
MK: Yes. Something that interested me a lot was to set up a dialog
where each person has an instrument in each hand, and one
instrument (this is very subjective) is telling him the truth and
the other one not. Truth and ‘non-truth’ (I don’t want to say ‘lie’)
exchange their role. The pupil’s first question is ‘what is truth?’.
How do you discover what is truth, musically speaking? And the
answer is that the music must be so eindeutig, so unequivocal –
as it generally isn’t. Music is a realist art: it invents its reality. It’s
a realist art, and is equivocal. Three persons listen to the same
work, or 30 or 300, and you will hear a lot of different opinions.
Then, what is ‘truth’? Truth, in this exercise, is the clarity with
which a person expresses himself through music. If he expresses
himself with pain, the reason might be someone’s death, or that
his liver aches. But if it is pain, I must try to feel that pain through
the music. This is terribly difficult, because we are not used to
think that way concerning music. But this puts the pupil in a
very uncomfortable situation, because he has to decide to express
himself. And often – this is related to youth – the pupil is fearful,
he draws back. He isn’t used to opening himself up.
With this exercise I obtained amazing results. There, one
couldn’t lie any more. When they said the truth, I had to feel it,
without them explaining the reason with words. I had to realize
what they were thinking, what was going on in that person –
through the music, of course.
JMS: And the non-truth?
MK: The non-truth had to do with figurations: cascades of
Vorschlagsnoten (grace notes), elegant writing.
JMS: Conventions.
MK: Yes. But even then, using a timeworn language, I was interested in
discovering to what extent he could be mannerist. Mannerism is
a very important thing. Somehow all of us who write music are
mannerist.2 That is to say: if one doesn’t speak the truth (I want
to avoid saying ‘lie’), then I must be convinced of it. That is also
very difficult, because then the pupil is forced to create a mask for
himself. He could also write fugues, at that moment.
JMS: Between both poles (truth and non-truth) one can see the issue as
degrees of verisimilitude.
MK: Yes, of course, that’s it. And why did I do that? Because the pupil,
later, when he is out of short trousers, when he gets out of school,
he has to force himself to write with the power of complete
conviction. Only such works have a chance. Fundamentally, it
means to broaden the range of personalities that one has.
2
A relevant afterthought that will remain unanswered was: ‘Do you mean mannerism in the
sense of “writing à la manière de”, i.e. with a considerable dose of imitation and reference to
someone else’s models? Or do you highlight the artifactitious aspects of Mannerism?’ I tend
to suppose that he meant the former. My basis for this is a previous phone conversation
during which Kagel said to me ‘clichés are our treasure’, for they are pieces of information
within the listener’s knowledge, but to which we – as composers – have access.
14 tempo

You spoke at the beginning of psychoanalysis. I will never

speak about that, because what I do has nothing to do with
psychoanalysis. Nevertheless, it has to do with investigating the
structure of the student’s personality. That is very different from
studying composition in the classical manner. If I had done that,
I would have suffered a great deal, because I would have had the
impression I was deceiving the student. I want something else.
Teaching composition traditionally is much easier, in a way,
because one must not be so engagé (engaged). Besides, each pupil
has personal problems. Some are alone, some have emotional,
family, housing or health problems. I must listen to all that. Not
that I’m in the role of a father, but several pupils had nobody to
discuss all that with. Music was a part of their whole personality,
of their needs. And I made this all my life.
JMS: Did you write down these 40 or 50 exercises?
MK: Many are written down, others I have always changed and
combined with others. But they are not published. I have to sit
down and formulate them. From writing a problem for me to
formulating it methodically is a lot of work. And now, of course, I
can’t do it. But it would interest me to do it some day.
JMS: How do you exert criticism on the work that a student brings you?
MK: Criticism occurs, for me, at two levels. One level is that the pupil
accepts that my voice has importance for him. I say this because
there are pupils who get very aggressive when being corrected.
It’s a delicate thing, where the approach is often wrong. They
believe that, if their work gets corrected, it’s a sort of attack
against their creative personality. This is completely wrong; the
pupil ought to accept criticism, when criticism is unbiased. There
are also slightly cruel teachers, and the pupil accepts that. Or they
are tremendously authoritarian: in fact among teachers there is a
rather broad range of species.
JMS: Even the militantly authoritarian, who are convinced that ‘what doesn’t
kill makes you stronger’.
MK: All that is very far from my personality. I say this on two levels.
One is to say something without hurting: the horizon, the goal,
the point one wants to reach isn’t hurting, but emending. And
the other is that the teacher, if he has his own doubts, must say
so openly. If he had his doubts whether the solution the pupil
has found to a certain problem is the best or not. And in this
discussion, whereby one tries to gain a deeper understanding why
such and such was done, both learn: teacher and pupil. When the
pupil becomes aware of those doubts he is very happy, because in
a way the teacher comes down off the pedestal, catching up with
the pupil, and it is a dialog between brothers. It’s a very beautiful
moment. When it happens, one must do it. The teacher has to say
‘I have doubts whether this is better or worse’, and explain why. In
that discussion they will find the method.
JMS: I agree, since I conceive a composition student as a colleague with less
experience; but a colleague none the less, not in an almost military
hierarchy. Let’s consider now this setup: a pupil arrives with a vocabulary
of his own, sincere ideas. You discover that these ideas, these vocables,
have to integrate in a grammar; and it is as if you say to the pupil ‘I will
teach you your own grammar, for these ideas are part of something more
general that you are not seeing due to lack of experience’. Is this what
you refer to by the term induction (inducción)?
 a last interview with mauricio kagel 15

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

JMS: Does Vexations by Erik Satie fit into this category?

MK: The newness of Vexations is so extraordinary, its anarchic
dimension is so fundamental that I can’t accept that it does.
To begin with, it’s not a single sound, it’s a motif. Then, all the
music-social implications of Vexations are far too extraordinary,
one can’t put it under the same umbrella. But we are deviating.
JMS: A comment you made when I was studying with you was ‘don’t pay
attention to whether you imagine something is feasible or not, at least
in a first stage, because that may be a brake on the imagination’. The
subject is thus: self-criticism and feasibility as possible saboteurs of the
imaginative power.
MK: That is related to the exercises. First of all, I used to give out a very
large amount of work. Why? Because it was the most direct way
to get the pupil to squeeze his brain. To panic him, almost. I don’t
say that with cruelty, I say it with benevolence. In order to oil his
imagination. The imagination doesn’t work by itself. Cocteau
said about thinking: the brain is a muscle, it needs training. And
the gentle aspect of the exercise was that I said it didn’t matter
whether it was possible to perform the result or not. But this
aspect was actually a poisoned chalice, because our attitude is
usually that one must do possible things, not impossible ones.
Nevertheless, the impossible plays a role in every composition
and the composer filters the impossible and turns it into the
possible. It is like a water filter, where you put in dirty water and
you obtain clean water below, and the waste remains. In several
compositions I find that ‘I want to do this’ (a structure, an X-
situation), and I realize that it is unobtainable. Then I begin to
think ‘how to do it’, how can I make it attainable without betraying
my original impulse.
I shook hands with the pupil, so that he puts his imagination
into operation and doesn’t pay attention to practicability, but at
the same time it is a fight with practicability.
JMS: I can confirm from my experience with you. You asked me that for the
next class I should do ten exercises of a certain kind; initially I thought I
couldn’t, but in the end of course I could. This was extremely important
for me because it gave me absolute confidence in my wings; but not
because you told me ‘you can, Solare’, but because I realized that I could
really do it.
MK: Yes, you see the result. It has to do with the robustness of a
composer’s personality, which is almost always rather fragile.
Not only the student is fragile, the teacher is as well. It’s about
verstärken, fortifying the psychic condition of the composer. The
composer can be very vulnerable, due to very little things, that
will nevertheless hinder his work and searching enormously. One
of those is ‘ah, I can do it’, ‘I can do ten exercises in a week’ and
with a quality that I accept. Because the pupil knows that if he
works poorly, the teacher – I – will notice it. And he doesn’t want
that. All this very important in order to fortify his convictions, to
know what he is, or is not, capable of.

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

opposite: an unorthodox system of changeable, ambivalent invitations

to express oneself acoustically – rather than “musically”’. I underline
now the word ambivalent.6
MK: Yes, I used today the word. Music in itself is ambivalent. I give
you one example, although there are many. In tremendously
heartbreaking music, Mozart doesn’t use the minor mode, but
the major. This heroic, positive mode is suddenly, in a certain
dramatic context, much more moving, more expressive than
the minor, which is the mode of moaning and sorrow. For me
it is a classical example of ambivalence in music. The possibility of
constructing ambivalences.
JMS: An ambivalence that implies polysemy, or contradiction?
MK: Both. But polysemy in any case, for musical semantics are very
narrow. The palette, the spectrum of possibilities in music that are
clearly semantic, is thin. But the range of contradictions may be
much larger.
JMS: This is in composition. And in musical education, concretely in that of
the professional composer? Through the concept of ambivalence do you
allude to the opposite of an academic teaching? What one looks for in
university or conservatory education isn’t precisely ambivalence, but to
‘be answerable to’ something approved by time.
MK: Academic teaching is, up to a certain point, positive. It’s not about
denying everything that is possible through the academy, i.e., a
great deal of the métier (craftsmanship). The danger is to believe
that merely reconstructing things of the past is the composer’s per-
sonal contribution. It has nothing to do with that. At the end of
the 1970s, some composers began to write like Schubert, in order
to say ‘modern music can also be this’, and people who loved
Schubert found this new Schubert horrible. And in this case it is
better to listen to the original composer.
Academic teaching has, as its goal, a positive prolongation
of the past. And that goes against all laws of music history. The
history of music is always a sort of breaking, of rupture with a
given system. That is how every new period happened. And the
rupture is the negation of a system. At the same time, the positive
elements of the past system are discovered. The 12-tone music
together with rhythms à la Brahms. The musical thought is totally
new, but a total rupture can’t exist.
JMS: That is what Boulez criticized in Schoenberg: not having been as
revolutionary as he could or even should have been.
MK: But also in Boulez one finds these things. Extreme serial music,
receiving the name sonata. Not an invented name, or taken from
Astronomy or Literature, but sonata. Of course, the listener who
wants to find the construction of a sonata – first theme, second
theme, the conflict between both themes – doesn’t ever hear that.
But he is hearing a sonata. Or the Sonatina for piano and flute.
What I want to state is to what degree the rupture is difficult, and
has very subtle roots.

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.

The craftsmanship – A breeze

JMS: It’s interesting that you mention precisely this aspect, because it is
curiously what some people criticize in works of yours such as Eine
Brise. When it was performed in Buenos Aires in 2006, some – not only
amateurs with less background in 20th-century music, but specialized
journalists – commented that it was a boutade, a gag or not much
more than a joke; they wondered where was the craftsmanship of the
composer behind this work. I ask this in a way provocatively.
MK: Ultimately I don’t fear what people say. That allows me to do Eine
Brise with a great freedom, and with a great happiness to see what
it will unchain. There are reasons that allow me to do this kind of
work. For instance, the work was premièred in Münster, and the
education minister of the province7 Nordrhein-Westphalen told
me that once each year all the Musikhochschulen of this province
do a sort of congress and show what they did in that year con-
cerning composition. It was quite late and I told her that I could
not compose a new work, but there are two interesting facts: that
in Münster it rains very often, and that there are thousands of
bicycles, because university students use the bicycle due to the
geography of the city. A little bit like in Holland. Then I said ‘I
want to do a piece where students cycle, sing, whistle and play
the bicycle’s claxon.8 And if God helps me, it will rain’. And so it
was. There were 111 bicyclists, which is the number of virgins of
Cologne’s church, martyrs that were slaughtered.9
There is an intrinsic humor in this work – I don’t know whether
to call it work – Eine Brise. Humor is a swearword in musical life.
It practically doesn’t exist. There is no tradition of humor, of
irony, in serious music. Of course there are [examples] here and
there, but they are exceptions. The quartet of the musikalischer
Spass.10 With [the fingers of] two hands you have all the classic

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

examples. A piece of Hindemith,11 another one of Shostakovich,

and that’s it. Humor is very rare, because composers, generally
speaking, take themselves very seriously. Very seriously. They are
very afraid they won’t be taken seriously. Which makes them very
much lächerlich, ridiculous. I don’t want to generalize, but there
are numerous examples of composers who take themselves so
seriously that they turn ridiculous. While it is only he who knows
how to laugh who can weep. I never had a fear of laughter. And it
never bothered me that other people laugh at my things, for time
confirmed to me that I was doing what I ought to do. Eine Brise in
Buenos Aires was for me extraordinary. There were almost 3,000
people in the street seeing a cortêge of cyclists passing by making
sounds; in 60 or 90 seconds the thing was over. They stopped the
traffic for that, there was a mise en scène. Then, people got into the
theater [Teatro Colón] and everybody was happy. I didn’t induce
them in a negative way to put on a mask of gravity: ‘Kagel is back
here and everything is very serious’. No; but the music afterwards
was terribly serious. There is a dialectical aspect in this.
JMS: Do you have other, say, neo-dadaist works? Works where the main
concern isn’t counterpoint or where the craftsmanship is in foreground,
but a dramatic situation where the craftsmanship can’t be measured
with criteria of the 19th century, where there is another kind of
craftsmanship?
MK: But look at the score of Eine Brise. To set up such a situation
can’t just be done by saying ‘ride a bicycle, run as fast as possible’
and that’s it. No, it’s a very serious thing, the formulation of the
composition, for it to have a certain conviction for the one who
performs it.12
I always go back to doing things that interest me, I don’t know
whether they are dadaist or not. It’s very easy to talk about
Dadaism or Surrealism. They are scenes that don’t develop, that
aren’t eager to become a developed work, with one theme after
the other.13 I didn’t compose [this kind of work] as much as I
would have like to. It’s a sort of installation, but not like those
sound installations you see in museums. It’s an installation that
has to do with the power of imagination.14
JMS: Installation because there is no evolution in this sound sculpture.
MK: Yes, because it is installed. The scene is installed.

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

Visually and acoustically

JMS: One of your stylistic particularities is to conceive at the same time
visually and acoustically. How does one train, how do you induce this
ability, this capability, in a composition student?
MK: Well, I already told you about the comics. I invented something
that my colleagues initially didn’t understand, yet afterwards
they realized that it was correct. When I was the president of
the triumvirate of admission of new composition students, in
Cologne, I could propose the exercises, what the candidate ought
to do. I asked those that came to the New Music Theater class to
describe the plot of an opera that they have seen and they love.
Through the way they wrote that, I could realize several other
facets of the composer. What did he filter, what was he able to
describe again? And of course one cannot describe the music.
Music is indescribable, but everything else, yes: the plot, the
dynamic forces between persons, the tensions. All this has to
do with the visual dramaturgy, not the musical one. It’s difficult
to say ‘here is a very loud chord’, etc. That didn’t interest me.
The description interested me. Why? Either if one does opera or
musical theater in the classical sense, taking good – or mediocre
– literature and setting it to music; or if one does new musical
theater or experimental things, as a composer you are narrating
things all the time. This has to do with the Umsetzung [conversion,
transfer], with the ability of umsetzen [transplanting, putting
something elsewhere, putting something into practice] that
serves both for the music, for the musical language that you will
use, and for the sound visualization and to optical visualization.
To narrate, to tell a story.
JMS: Ergo the fact that a narration uses acoustic or visual means is
irrelevant.
MK: Yes. Hence I was interested that a future pupil describe a
complete plot. What did he retain? Because of this I insisted that
he should pick an opera he loved. Not one that I prescribed for
him. ‘Describe La Bohème to me’: that would be cruel and would
have led nowhere.
JMS: Could you do that right now? Which operas do you love?
MK: Boris Godunoff. Fantastic.
JMS: I would have expected you to mention one of Mozart.
MK: Yes, that’s my whole life’s love, but Boris invented Expressionism.
It’s Mussorgsky who invented it.
JMS: Do you know that a piece of psychological research has found that the
Mozart opera which attracts you most is supposed to reflect specific
facets of your personality; in sum, which is the color of the coach that
one deserves?
MK: (looks sceptical)

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

MK: I believe that a composer’s life essentially run its course in

loneliness. There are no interlocutors. When I was a teacher, I
insisted a great deal: ‘take full advantage of the years that you
are at the Musikhochschule, because they are true paradises; here
you can listen to what others say about you’. After the concerts I
organized round tables15 that ran over six or seven hours, where
everyone said what he thought about a colleague’s work. And
everyone had to present reasons. There were never tensions in
my class, they were open, no quarrels or gossips. Everybody knew
that the attitude was constructive, not negative. When one left
the Musikhochschule, all that is over. Loneliness is really the most
important word in a composer’s life. He doesn’t have anybody to
talk to. His family will come after a concert: ‘yes, yes, it was very
good’ and that’s it; the possibility of deepening, of knowing what
wasn’t right, doesn’t exist any longer.
JMS: And the opinion of colleagues?
MK: What colleagues say should be taken with care. At the beginning
I told you that the function of a teacher is to be an interlocutor.
This is how one learns: by talking. Opening oneself to a person
you trust. The interesting point is that the teacher constantly
learns from the pupil. Because there are questions so intricately
simple that the teacher is forced to rethink things that for him
are obvious. It happened to me, Schoenberg wrote about the
same phenomenon, other teachers too. Why do these two chords
sound well in continuity? One has to go back to an ABC of the
métier and, in finding the reasons, the teacher learns too. That is
a major pleasure you get from teaching, which is a very arduous
and tiring task.
That’s the point: the teacher is the most intimate interlocutor
that a pupil has. Just talking during four years, without writing
music, he will learn a lot.
JMS: As when Schoenberg said that seeing how Mahler tied his cravat, one
would learn more composition than in four years at the Conservatory.
Or when Cage played chess with Duchamp: they didn’t talk about art
but Cage learned anyhow.
MK: The ABC of all this is that both Schoenberg and Cage had the
antennae to discover, in the way in which Mahler did his tie, the
artistic background. This kind of deduction is only valid if the
one who makes it has an enormous talent and sensitivity for that.
JMS: Reading writings or interviews with Cage, he often states that ‘based
on so-and-so’s remark, this or that idea occurred to me’. And one thinks
that he invented such an equation, or such a syllogism. Did so-and-so
have the intention of conveying a specific message, or did X-idea cross
Cage’s mind based on an innocent remark – a trigger that he interpreted
as he wanted? In other words: does one learn from Mahler’s tie or does
one learn what one is looking at in Mahler?
MK: One learns what one wants to learn. That is very intimately
related to the ability to analyse. I was never interested in an
analysis which isn’t eminently subjective. Analyzing is a very
positive thing, if you know what you want to find.

15
A wonderful interference with English: he actually said ‘tablas redondas’; while in Spanish it
should be ‘mesas redondas’.
22 tempo

Kagel with Cage

JMS: For a long time I wanted to ask you this. Once, Frisius16 told me a story
in which you and Cage are in a snowy place; in a bar is a jukebox playing
pop music, and outside are some skaters that, by chance, happen to move
to the same rhythm of the music (which they didn’t hear). I would like
to know what consequences you both found in this. For Cage it is clear:
a non-intentionality of synchronizing independent events, that anyway
leads to a simultaneity for our perception. But the Kagelian aesthetic
doesn’t go in this direction.
MK: I remember that totally. Cage’s position is as you’ve just
described. In contrast to Cage’s attitude, I needed to find points
of concordance that were feasible to develop or destroy. They
have to do with the construction of language. It’s not in vain that
my teaching methods are related to my compositional interests.
That is honest. It wouldn’t be honest to split my personality as a
composer from my teaching. What I did is a transfer: I transferred
all kinds of structural and linguistic searching; transferred it
under the form of exercises so that the pupils could also make use
of that broadening of possibilities. In a way I milked my brain, I
put it in the service of pedagogy.
Cage believed in chance, in hazard. I have rather thought during
my whole life that chance has given premises. In mathematics,
that is true all the time. Chance in a chemically pure form doesn’t
exist. This is my position. One can use elements of chance but,
knowing that, one pre-constructs chance. Sometimes, regarding
the aleatoric element in music in the 1960s, I talk about corriger
la fortune. This is said when you are playing cards and ‘correct’
certain things. It isn’t very honest, but that lack of honesty was
quotidian in the métier of the composers that made aleatoric
music. What interested me is saying ‘well, it isn’t necessary to cor-
regir la fortune, but setting luck in such a way that chance can be
neither improved nor worsened’. For corriger la fortune seemed a
lack of honesty. That was the difference about the skaters.
The episode was in [North] America. I lived in Stony Point, in
the state of New York, with Cage, Tudor and an artists’ colony.
Terribly cold. Everything frozen.

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

JMS: Is it about self-inoculating curiosity? Is it like saying ‘I am going to find

ten answers to a problem that I have just invented’?
MK: Yes, for instance. In the Nouveau roman, in France of the 1970s,
there was a very interesting trait. Perhaps five or six pages
describing what kind of dishes were on a table. There were two
cups of tea, biscuits and a teapot. But between the teapot and the
biscuits there was a gap of six millimeters. Between the biscuits
and the cup there were eight centimeters. The color was such
and such, the left corner was decolorized. The decolorized color
was yellow, and that yellow corresponded with a table leg. That
description – which is also an invention – has to do with curiosity.
And curiosity can have no limits, is limitless. Until today I have
a tectonic17 curiosity: see my scores. And this has been a movens,
a very deep motivation of my doing. Thereupon it was very
difficult to know what I was going to do next, which path I would
take. Afterwards one finds lines of force, of course, a posteriori.
That helped me enormously to develop new ideas. Sometimes I
read I have ‘a limitless invention’. It doesn’t surprise me; but the
limitless invention is my curiosity.
Let’s finish!

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

Concerning religion: even if you don’t practice it, you can’t

deny it. It has elements that they gave to you and at some times
(speaking as a composer) are fascinating. Without the Church, a
great deal of the music we love wouldn’t exist. In that sense I am
very grateful that the Church played that role. And one of the
first questions I asked myself as a young man, when listening (for
instance) to the St. Matthew Passion, is to what extent Bach was a
believer.21 To which degree one can obtain religiosity musically,
writing a music that reaches the heart, or if there is a whole
complex of codices that allow you to write sacred music.
The third one is family. The whole world about family: what
can help you, what can hinder you, what can daze you, make you
happy or unhappy. All this you inherit. They are conflicts and
oases that last a whole lifespan. The only thing you choose is your
friends. Maybe your reading. The music you want to hear.
That’s why I speak rather about a complex of different layers
of identity. And many of the hard knocks that we receive in
today’s world, that help to underline and to armor that identity,
and which are so important for the individual’s independence –
those sorts of conflicts often aren’t real, but constructed.

Auschwitz and Guantánamo

The issue about Guantánamo interests me too. I believe that
Adorno’s phrase,22 though very beautiful, isn’t precise. Because a
poet that’s born today or was born ten years ago, or a composer
or a painter, they don’t know Auschwitz. But if you talk to them
about Auschwitz as climax of a crime, the phrase is true. One
must think what happened in Africa, when France or England
were colonialist powers. One must think what happened in South
America under the Spaniards. And before, what happened with
the Inquisition. And before the Inquisition one must think what
happened between the Turks and Europe. That has no end. The
pain one finds in History has never impeded painting good pic-
tures, writing good literature and good music. When one com-
pares historic periods that are leading to war and one sees the
works that were written. Before the war of 1914–18, in the effer-
vescence of 1914, extraordinary works were written. Even dur-
ing the war, the composers that could, wrote music. Stravinsky as
well. There is a German word that condenses all this: Weltschmerz,
feeling sorrow on account of the world.23 That is impossible. It
leads to political parties with romantic ideas (to the right or to the
left), with a Romanticism that isn’t constructive. I think that it’s
impossible to stop the construction of art, of music, of human
invention, as a consequence of events that had a big historical
repercussion but that have been somehow digested – whether
well or badly – by humankind.
21
When speaking about his St. Bach Passion (1985), Kagel comments that ‘Possibly not all
musicians believe in God, but in Bach, all of them’.
22
‘Nach Auschwitz ein Gedicht zu schreiben, ist barbarisch’ (writing a poem after Auschwitz
is barbaric), Theodor Adorno, Prismen: Kulturkritik und Gesellschaft (Berlin/Frankfurt:
Suhrkampf, 1955).
23
World-pain or world-weariness, melancholy motivated by life’s disappointments. Weltschmerz
is a term coined in the 18th century by the German philosopher Jean Paul and denotes the
kind of feeling experienced by someone who understands that physical reality (the world)
can never satisfy the demands of the mind (such as happiness). It is also used – and in this is
how Kagel applied it – with respect to the sadness originated empathically when thinking
about the evils of the world.
 a last interview with mauricio kagel 25

And Guantánamo is another example of this. A great country

that commits the error of initiating a war that worsens and ruins
incredibly that other country, due to economic reasons. A great
deal of the world doesn’t accept it, but they don’t do anything
really strong to put the situation to an end. The economy is the
great secret, not art, in generating an historical fact.

Identity again – tango and folklore

JMS: With regards to what you said about identity: these three factors seem
modifiable. One can change one’s country (you did it), one can convert
to another religion. With the family it is more difficult, even if one kills
them all.
MK: I would like to say it more casually, but I don’t find the words:
I began to understand certain facts and lines of force of South
America and of Argentina only when I came to Europe. To
such an extent that, if I was living there, I wouldn’t be able to. In
Argentina they consider me a European, and here they consider
me an Argentine. It’s very funny, but it isn’t true, neither here nor
there. I have a polychrome culture. Just as there is polytonality, so
also polyculture exists for me.
I wanted to talk about identity because it is one of the
problems that constantly ‘eat away’ at the Latin Americans; I can
talk especially of Argentines, but you find the problem in Chile
or in Brazil as well. What is Argentine music? I think that the best
of serious Argentine music is the tango. Serious, not Unterhaltung
(entertainment or light music). That is really the most serious.
You could object ‘well, one can’t write tangos all the time, it can’t
be the only source of inspiration’. I would reply ‘no, of course
not’. Only that tango, due to the emotional and expressive
capacity and the incredible quality of certain tango musicians
and of the arrangements,24 is the most evident example of a sort of
mystical union between a musical genre and popular taste. And
that relationship, for the composers that write new music, is a sort
of Damoklesschwert (sword of Damocles). Because there is, so far,
no large audience for new music. So there’s no real opportunity for
a composer to make a career of it. But at least if you really want
to write that kind of music, you have complete freedom to write
what you want. Because you know that you will not have a big
public to help or hinder you. I see it dialectically.
Whereas Argentine folklore, when usurped by the type of
composition that uses neoclassical elements, Bartókian and
Stravinskyan or Debussyan, is totally insipid. I prefer to listen to
authentic folkloric music. While tango doesn’t exist as ‘authen-
tic music’ [in a ‘pure state’], because it has been evolving all the
time. You listen to tango of 1910, in those terrible recordings of
the beginning of recording, through Canaro25 and all the myriad
of composers and arrangers. And it’s absolutely amazing: tango
has been constantly developing, it has been a dynamic language.
Whereas folklore is a static language. I put it this way in order
to clarify what I mean. Of course there are certain dynamic ele-
ments in folklore and static ones in tango.
24
Said with French accent, not English.
25
In a previous conversation, Kagel told me that his preferred tanguero was Francisco Canaro,
‘because his music is straight’ (he used the English word). At that time (mid-2006) Kagel had
just arrived from Buenos Aires with a considerable booty of tango CDs.
26 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’.
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