Mauricio Kagel, Still Abusing Institutions, at Carnegie Hall

I generally try not to write about concerts before they happen, but I’m going to stick my neck out and say that if you miss the Mauricio Kagel show this Saturday night at Carnegie Hall, you’re most likely missing the most provocative event of this concert season. I can say this with some reassurance: Kagel has been kicking it hard for the last 40 years and, unlike aging rock stars or classical composers who grow more complicit with the passing years, Kagel continues to bite the hand that feeds him as he approaches his 70th birthday.

Kagel questions the musical conventions that we all take for granted: whether it’s the dimming of the lights before a performance, the way in which the orchestra is seated or the manner in which musicians mouth their instruments, everything is up for grabs. Over the years, he’s used an amazingly rich and twisted vocabulary to get his point across: he’s built homemade instruments (Acustica), made Western ensembles play fake world music on non-Western instruments (Exotica), had choruses of children purposely sing out of tune (1898), required small groups of musicians to imitate scratchy old blues records (Blue’s Blue) and has scored musicians to fake heart attacks and collapse on the floor in the middle of performances (Unter Strom). He even proposed that the bicentennial of Beethoven’s birth in 1970 should be marked by an abstention from performance of the master’s works.

Onstage as well, nothing Kagel does is ordinary. Each live performance–which functions both as concert and musical theater–scrutinizes the political structure of the venue in which it’s housed. With the recent upheavals and employee dissatisfaction at Carnegie Hall due to the appointment of a new executive director, Franz Xaver Ohnesorg, Kagel’s piece couldn’t come at a more perfect time. The title of the piece, Kidnapping in the Concert Hall, metaphorically sums up the way many are feeling about Carnegie these days. The Times reported last month that this fall alone, five of the hall’s top execs have quit or been fired. They’re upset with Ohnesorg’s demanding leadership style and are up in arms over his proposal to do away with part of a warren of artists’ studios within the Carnegie compound. The feelings have boiled over to the point where a bunch of swastikas have been scratched into the door of Mr. Ohnesorg’s private box in the concert hall.

Kagel’s piece seems to underscore the situation. In it, the better part of the orchestra that’s supposed to perform (the Schoenberg Ensemble) gets kidnapped before the show and is held at gunpoint in a small rehearsal room somewhere in the Carnegie complex. But the conductor (Reinbert de Leeuw), expressing the showbiz convention that the show must go on, finds the stage populated with just a few lucky members of the orchestra who happened not to be kidnapped. De Leeuw pretends that nothing is wrong and begins to conduct the skeleton crew as he normally would; needless to say, it sounds awful. Within moments, a phone rings onstage and the conductor begins negotiating with the kidnapper to get his players back. Along the course of the evening, Carnegie Hall gets stormed by the police, the lights in the hall go black, there’re gunshots and swearing, loud explosions in the lobby and helicopters buzzing outside the concert hall. Not your typical Saturday night at the Pops.

Carnegie’s p.r. office tells me that tickets aren’t selling swiftly. They report, however, that those who know about Kagel are bubbling over with enthusiasm–for a Kagel performance in this city is incredibly rare, particularly one of this scale. The problem is that most people don’t know who he is.

Born in Argentina in 1931, Kagel moved to Cologne in 1957 and soon found himself in the center of the Darmstadt crowd. By the 1960s, he was carving out his own path, blending music, film and theater. While it was rare to see performances of his in the States, he was well represented on LP by a contract with Deutsche Grammophon. But today, with much of his work out of print, Kagel’s been left out of the loop with the recent rediscovery and new awareness of the 20th-century avant-garde. Certainly he has nowhere near the profile of his contemporaries Stockhausen, Xenakis and Berio.

I think it has to do with Kagel’s cross-disciplinary approach to music–he’s as much of a theater director and filmmaker (a bunch of his films shown at Pratt recently were spectacular examples of film as music) as he is a composer. And he’s had no disciples–with maybe the exception of John Zorn–but Kagel’s range, complexity and theatricality humble even Zorn’s prodigious output.

Audio documentation alone fails to capture so much of what’s going on during the playing of his music. As a result, the recordings of his music can be deceiving and often pass for banal. Take a new rerelease of his string quartets, Pan String Quartets I, II, III (Montaigne Naïve), beautifully performed by the Arditti. In the first quartet, Kagel makes the players jam their string instruments chock-full of matches, paper clips, knitting needles, strips of paper, scotch tape and a raft of other household objects. He then requires the instruments to be played like other instruments: the violin, for instance, is supposed to be plucked and strummed like a mandolin. At various moments, the violinist must play his part with his left hand encased in a leather glove.

Kagel includes numerous instructions for various physical activities to happen during the recording session. They have to play while walking, and at one point the first violinist has to "creep up behind the viola" and surprise him. They point at their chairs, play offstage and force one another into staring contests. The Arditti are perfectionists–nobody plays better–and the result is a precise performance that is scored to end in failure. And no two performances can ever be identical, something that must frustrate classical perfectionists. Obviously much of this action is invisible and doesn’t come across on the recording. Call it conceptual music: it’s only after reading the liner notes that you think this is the coolest concept you’ve ever heard. And only then do you hear the music differently.

It’s refreshing to see Kagel still questioning what’s considered proper in classical music, particularly at a time when places like Carnegie Hall are becoming ever more detached from musical culture at large. The avant composers of the 1960s were busy busting down the conventions of the concert hall–something that’s happening again today–but this time around, it’s coming from the rock world. When Sonic Youth are bringing hordes of kids into 20th-century classical music by releasing CDs packed with works by John Cage, Nicolas Slonimsky and Steve Reich, it’s a wake-up call for our more staid classical institutions.

Kagel echoes these sentiments: in a statement about Kidnapping, he says, "In a time when the boundaries between the genres of musical style are becoming increasingly loose, it is a great chance for me to make, with this composition, a contribution to the further development of new performance forms." In light of recent developments, it’s funny how timely this classic avant-gardist stance seems.

Back in 1974, a few of Kagel’s theatrical works were presented at Carnegie Hall. Tom Johnson, writing for the Village Voice, described the antics: bare-chested men climbed ladders while strumming guitars onstage, someone crossed the stage trying to play trombone with his foot stuck in the slide; another musician played the cymbal as if it were a yoyo; someone hit himself in the face with an egg beater; a player appeared onstage wearing LPs over his face, then proceeded to scratch the discs with his fingernail, and so on. Kidnapping purports to do all this and more, with a bigger cast; this time, Kagel wants the audience to be part of the act: "I think the public always has a sense of being voyeuristic, and this is a piece about acoustic voyeurism. If this fiction is well done–if for a few minutes they believe the piece is true–then I will have succeeded. Fiction, when well done, is the best reality you can get."