Tuesday, March 15, 2022

Kagelfest! A Tribute to Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008)

March 15, 2022
Magale Recital Hall
Natchitoches, Louisiana
7:00 pm Lecture by Dr. Dunn
7:30 pm Recital


Mirum (1965)
Taylor Carrell, tuba

General Bass (1972)
Paul Christopher, cello

Schattenklange (1995)
I. Adagio
II. Presto
III. Langsamer Walzer
Trevor Davis, bass clarinet

Dressur for wood percussion (1977)
Gregory Lyons, percussion
Mel Mobley, percussion
Oliver Molina, percussion

Many thanks to Corbin Covher for his help in creating the set for Dressur. 






















When the Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel (1931-
2008) arrived in West Germany in 1957, the European 
avant-garde was in its heyday. It was the presence of 
Karlheinz Stockhausen, quickly becoming the leader 
among German avant-gardists, which had drawn Kagel to 
Cologne, as it had also drawn György Ligeti and Cornelius 
Cardew that same year. Indeed Stockhausen had just 
completed his celebrated electronic piece, Gesang der 
Jünglinge, which would eventually win him a spot on the 
cover of The Beatles’ Sgt. Pepper album, and, throughout 
1957, he was busily finishing his next groundbreaking 
work, Gruppen for three orchestras. Kagel immediately 
plunged himself into this circle of innovators by writing 
articles for Stockhausen’s journal Die Reihe and 
contributing to the new music broadcasts of WDR radio. 
Most significantly though, from 1958, he would attend the 
Darmstadt summer courses where the international 
avant-garde annually convened and, within a few years, 
began lecturing there himself. Ultimately, throughout his 
life, his compositions would be featured regularly at 
Darmstadt as well as at the equally important 
Donaueschingen Festival and at other new music venues 
worldwide. Yet, as far as aesthetics were concerned, Kagel 
refused to blindly accept integral serialism, the idiom
which Stockhausen, Pierre Boulez, and their colleagues
had established in the early 1950s. They of course had 
been intrigued by the philosophy of American 
experimentalist John Cage—had even invited him to 
lecture at their Darmstadt stronghold—but they remained 
hesitant to borrow too much from him. In other words, 
Stockhausen and Boulez never became “experimental”
composers themselves. They always worked within a 
conventional definition of music as something concerned 
with sound and the structuring of sound, no matter how
much they expanded this definition from within.

Kagel, however, might be considered a true
experimentalist, regardless of his acceptance into the 
European avant-garde. For Kagel, music was action, and 
the entire activities of composition and performance were 
the music, not merely the sounds created through these 
activities. Performers, for example, might comment 
verbally or visually on the difficulty of playing particular 
lines; moreover, anything which happens, either on-stage 
or off, within the time allotted for the piece, is considered 
part of the piece. Performance essentially becomes a kind 
of theatre where sounds can occur, but also might not. 
Kagel’s opera Staatstheater, which premiered in 1971, is a
summation of this music theatre. Although Staatstheater
includes all the traditional performers of opera (i.e. 
soloists, a chorus, dancers, and instrumentalists), it denies 
them any of the conventions to which they are 
accustomed. Soloists are forced to sing in ensembles; 
chorus members must sing solos; a ballet is performed by 
non-dancers; and there is no pit in which to segregate
instrumentalists. The opera also lacks a libretto, a proper 
score, and stage décor, so that what actually happens on 
stage is what happens and not a representation of 
something else. In effect, the suspension of disbelief that
has always been the very essence of theatre is no longer 
necessary nor even possible. It would be as if we accepted 
Wagner’s valkyries to be the average women, 
masquerading in horned helmets and armor whom we 
know them to be and ignored the fiction unfolding on 
stage which we are taught from childhood to accept. Or, 
more accurately, if this fiction were to vanish altogether.
(As a side note, Ligeti’s Le Grand Macabre and Philip 
Glass’s Einstein on the Beach, operas composed in the mid1970s, 
each adapt some aspects of Kagel’s Staatstheater.)

Staatstheater also demonstrates another important 
aspect of Kagel’s idiom: how he engages with music 
history, or, we might say, how the activity of composition 
becomes part of the music. In Staatstheater, Kagelsets out 
to create an opera which at once can really be called an 
opera, but which also denies nearly all the conventions
accumulated by opera. Something similar happens in
Kagel’s Exotica when musicians trained in the Western 
tradition are instructed to take up unfamiliar, 
nonWestern instruments and create sounds with them. Or, 
when in Variationen ohne Fuge, the corpse of Brahms 
appears and interrogates the musicians as they play an 
unknown version of his music. Kagel, unlike so many avant
gardists who were dismissive of the musical past, 
acknowledges the past, but also calls it into question. The 
music then becomes referential as the activity of 
composition extends beyond the musical sounds notated 
on paper to the overall situation which Kagel outlines. To 
this end, Kagel commented in a 2004 interview with Paul 
Steenhuisen, “The past is a very important dimension of 
the present, but it’s not the present. You can’t neglect the 
past. We are composers today because there is a lot of 
music written before us, and we have to be aware of this.”
Simultaneously, as Kagel deconstructs the musical world 
around him, he constructs his own bizarre reality where 
contradictions are perfectly acceptable, even the norm. 
This is possible because Kagel does not spew dogma, like 
so many avant-gardists, but approaches each composition 
with his peculiar sense of humor, less interested in 
expounding a system than in seeing where a profound 
experiment might lead.

Tonight we encounter four compositions by Mauricio 
Kagel. The first, Mirum for solo tuba, dates from 1965. Its 
score consists of a series of disconnected musical staves 
which Björn Heile in his biography of Kagel likens to “a 
compendium of the possibilities of monody.” In his view,
the score is essentially a catalog of musical phrases which
a solo, monophonic instrument like the tuba can play. That 
the phrases are disconnected visually is reinforced aurally
by the large amounts of silence between motives which 
are also notated, although imprecisely. Critic Andrew 
Clements gives a less neutral take than Heile in an article
for The Guardian. Clements outlines the theatrical 
scenario of Mirum as follows: “A soloist tries desperately 
to turn his elephantine instrument into something that can 
sing and assert itself. Eventually he gives up, delivers a 
poem to the audience about the beauties of the tuba, and 
stalks out of the hall.” While Heile also comments on the 
theatrical element, he describes no plight by the frustrated 
musician who evidently made an unfortunate choice of 
instruments somewhere along the way. The poem 
mentioned by Clements integrates the familiar Latin text
that Kagel puns in the title of his piece. Tuba mirum 
spargens sonum and the several lines which follow belong 
to the Roman Catholic Requiem, or Mass for the Dead, and 
specifically its Dies irae sequence. They translate as, “The 
horn will send its wondrous sound throughout the Earth’s 
sepulchers and gather all before the throne.” Clearly 
Mirum conjures a different result, especially if we accept
Clements’ interpretation, as even the tubist gets frustrated
with his sound and marches offstage.

After Mirum, we hear General Bass, a work composed 
from 1971 to 1972 and described as suitable for any 
instrument capable of producing continuous sounds in the 
prescribed range. That range is low, as the title implies, but 
this does not mean that instruments must produce sounds 
in this range exclusively. Indeed the score mentions organ, 
cello, and bandoneon, an instrument similar to the 
accordion, as ideal; and all of these instruments can also 
player higher than the notated music. Emphasis is also on 
continuity, and the score advises against woodwind and 
brass instruments like the bassoon and trombone whose 
players would have to take breaths and interrupt the long, 
slow phrases which Kagel seeks. Although General Bass
can be played by one solo instrument, the score indicates 
that two or more instruments can play in alternation, 
switching with each other at rests. If played by one 
instrument, however, the performer should occasionally 
adjust his own timbre so as to create the feeling of 
polyphony all by itself. Although Kagel leaves these 
largescale elements for the players to determine, he is 
more insistent on the mood and content of the piece. No 
pathos is to be added while pitches and dynamics are also 
to be followed to the letter. The content is mostly slow and 
mood unexpressive, but this gives the performers and 
listeners alike the chance to really focus and experience 
the nuances of the sounds created. The theatrical aspect 
arises from this forced listening space which, like Cage’s 
infamous “silent” piece, 4’33”, is actually much livelier 
than one would expect from the sparse notation.

The next work on our program was the latest to have been 
composed. Schattenklänge, three pieces for bass clarinet, 
was written in 1995 and dedicated to the composer 
Luciano Berio, another fixture of the European avantgarde 
at mid-century and a close friend to Kagel. In his 
preface to the score, Kagel offers two options for 
performing this composition: either plainly, without 
theatre, as a concert piece, or with the performer 
standing, behind a white screen. In this second, more 
elaborate setup, spotlights are to illuminate the player, so 
that his movements are cast on the screen. This scenario 
helps explain the title of the composition, which means 
“shadow sounds,” but so does the nocturnal timbre of the 
bass clarinet itself. Kagel also instructs that the intensity of 
the spotlights should change, but gradually and without 
reference to the faster actions of the music. Each of the 
three pieces addresses different kinds of sounds. The first 
contrasts sustained notes colored by trills, flutter tongue, 
or breathy playing with rapid chains of notes. The second 
focuses on fast, very breathy arpeggios where the 
resulting mechanical noises of the instrument, avoided in 
more traditional music, are here given emphasis; the close 
of the second piece, in fact, obscures pitched sound 
altogether as percussive key clicks and air noises take over. 
The third piece shifts its attention to melodic fragments 
which contain large leaps and, consequently, seem to run 
haphazardly from one fragment to another. Evidently the 
purely musical exchanges of Schattenklänge create their 
own kind of theatre; its optional staging, however, grants 
this composition a more pervasive theatricality.

Last we witness Dressur, a percussion trio completed in 
1977 as part of Kagel’s instrumental theatre cycle, Quatre 
degrés. In his biography, Heile comments that this cycle is 
more concerned with popular culture than many of Kagel’s 
other works, noting that “he seems enthralled by the 
vitality of popular culture, but satirizes its often hackneyed 
sentiments, commodified clichés, and cheap sleaziness.” 
The title of Dressur, indeed, means dressage, the style of 
strict horse training. In Dressur, the three percussionists 
play on wooden instruments ranging from the 
conventional—a marimba, claves, castanets, and rattles—
to the absurd. The preface to the score makes for 
entertaining reading as Kagel insistently lists-off that each 
of these found instruments are made of wood: a (wooden) 
chair, (wooden) tables, multiple wooden balls, bamboo 
rattle (wooden wind chimes), elephant bell (block of 
wood), wooden whistle, nutcracker made of wood, and 
two pairs of wooden shoes all figure on his list.
Throughout, Kagel notates theatrical actions as closely as 
he does staved notes, creating a whole scenario in which 
each percussionist becomes a character. This scenario 
begins with the second percussionist who plays on the 
marimba a circus gallop, Erinnerung an Zirkus Renz, by 
Gustav Peter. The first percussionist seems irritated and, 
after only a few measures, begins picking up his chair and 
smashing it on the ground as if to interrupt. Later, Kagel’s 
instructions read, “lift chair above player two’s head with 
strong impulse—as if to attack.” The antics continue 
without the circus gallop, or its progenitor, ever meeting 
their demise and reach a climax with a mock fandango 
dance in the wooden shoes and shouts of “olé.”

© Jackson Harmeyer 2022

BIOGRAPHIES

Born and raised in Huntington, Texas, Taylor Carrell is currently a Senior Music Education
major at Northwestern State University, and he is also a member of the Spring 2022 NSU Wind
Symphony. Taylor Carrell currently studies tuba with Dr. Masahito Kuroda who serves as
Associate Professor of Euphonium/Tuba/Sound Technology at NSU.

Paul Christopher received his Bachelor of Music Education from the New England
Conservatory of Music and his Master of Music in Cello Performance from the University of
Memphis. In 2005 Mr. Christopher joined the string faculty at Northwestern State University of
Louisiana (NSU) where he currently serves as Associate Professor of Violoncello and Music
Theory. He has appeared as clinician, adjudicator, and guest artist throughout the United States
and internationally. Christopher’s articles have been published in American String Teacher, Bass
World, the Jacques Offenbach Society Newsletter and Strings. In 2017 he was awarded the
Mildred Hart Bailey Research Award in recognition of his exceptional scholarship as a faculty
member at NSU. In the summers of 1991-2014 Mr. Christopher performed as Assistant Principal
Cello with the Peter Britt Festival Orchestra in Jacksonville, Oregon.

Trevor Davis is Assistant Professor of Single Reeds and Director of Jazz Activities at Louisiana
Tech University. He is a Silverstein Artist and is an active clinician, adjudicator, and performer.
Since moving to Louisiana, he subs often in the Monroe Symphony Orchestra, the Shreveport
Symphony Orchestra, and the South Arkansas Symphony Orchestra. In the summers, he is a
clarinet and saxophone performer for the New Music on the Bayou new music festival.
Originally from Delaware, Trevor has a BA from Kutztown University, a MM in Jazz Studies
from Indiana University, and a MM in Multiple Woodwinds from UNC Greensboro. He
continued at UNC-G and completed the DMA in Clarinet Performance where he studied with
Anthony Taylor. Former teachers include Kelly Burke, Jeremy Justeson, Tom Walsh, and James
Campbell. Trevor currently lives in Ruston, LA with his wife, Joann.

John T. Dunn is an Assistant Professor of Fine Arts at Northwestern State University of
Louisiana, where he also serves as the course steward for the core curriculum Fine Arts courses.
At NSU, he has taught Fine Arts Survey, Music History, Music for Stage and Screen, A History
of Opera, a seminar on Music and Disability Studies, and several Music Theory courses. He is
currently the President of the Faculty Senate and has been the faculty sponsor of the NSU
Gamers’ Guild. He recently completed his doctorate at Louisiana State University in
Musicology; his dissertation explored the representation of disability in the music of Alfred
Hitchcock films. His emphasis of study is film music, Romantic and 20 th century music history,
music and disability studies, and music in popular culture, presenting papers on WandaVision,
music, trauma, and nostalgia and also Magical Realism and Encanto at recent Popular Culture
Association National Conferences. Dr. Dunn is affiliated with the Film Music Society, the
Society for Disability Studies, the American Musicological Society, and the Popular Culture
Society.

Gregory Lyons teaches Applied Percussion, Percussion Ensemble, Percussion
Methods, Secondary Instrumental Methods, and Introduction to Non-Western Music at Louisiana
Tech University where he is Associate Professor and Assistant Director of Bands. Recently, he
was awarded the James Alvey Smith Endowed Professorship with support funds from the
Louisiana Board of Regents. He earned the BME from the Wheaton College Conservatory, the
MM from Central Michigan University, and the DMA from The Ohio State University.
Formerly, he served as an Assistant Band Director in the Missouri public schools. Lyons is an
active solo/chamber/orchestral performer as well as the co-founder and co-coordinator of New
Music on the Bayou, an annual summer festival that spotlights contemporary classical music. He
is a past president and past treasurer of the Louisiana Chapter of the Percussive Arts Society and
is a proud endorser of the Vic Firth Company, SABIAN cymbals, Grover Pro Percussion, and
Majestic Percussion.

Named the 2019 Performing Artist of the Year by the Northeast Louisiana Arts Council, Mel
Mobley currently resides and teaches in Monroe, Louisiana. As composer, conductor, performer,
and advocate of new music, he has been part of numerous premieres and festivals around the
country. Serving as principal percussionist of the Monroe Symphony Orchestra and frequent
performer with the Shreveport, South Arkansas, and Rapides Symphonies, Mel also performs
with many chamber groups including the Implosion Percussion Group, the NMB Percussion
Group, and M2. He has performed with the 2X2 Percussion Quartet with performances at the
Sugarmill Festival and at the National Percussion Pedagogy Conference. His most recent work
centers on the combination of spoken text and music involving the creation of both text and
music through a combination of chance and intuitive processes. Dr. Mobley teaches at the
University of Louisiana at Monroe and at several camps throughout Haiti in the summers.  He is
a founder and coordinator of the New Music on the Bayou Festival that connects composers
from around the world with the communities of north Louisiana. He is a member of the
Percussive Arts Society (PAS), the National Composers’ Association, USA (NACUSA), and the
American Society of Composers, Authors, and Publishers (ASCAP).  More information can be
found at melmobley.com and soundcloud.com/melmobley.

Dr. Oliver Molina is an Associate Professor of Music and Assistant Director of Bands at
Northwestern State University of Louisiana. As an active percussion performer, educator,
arranger, adjudicator, and clinician, Dr. Molina has presented and performed at various state Day
of Percussion events, PASIC, NCPP, and other music conferences and festivals. He earned his
Doctor of Musical Arts degree in Percussion Performance and Pedagogy at the University of
Iowa under Dr. Dan Moore. Additionally, he has is a founding member of the Omojo Percussion
Duo and the Ninkasi Percussion Group. Dr. Molina currently serves as Chair for PAS Education
Committee and as Vice President of the Louisiana PAS Chapter. He is a Yamaha Performing
Artist and an education endorser of Vic Firth Sticks and Mallets, Remo Drum Heads, Sabian
Cymbals, and Black Swamp Percussion. His professional affiliations include the Percussive Arts
Society, National Association for Music Education, National Society for Steel Band Educators,
and the College Music Society.

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