Maurizio Kagel: Theatre Of War

"Black mark against my name? Yes, and I worked very hard to get it!" Mauricio Kagel proclaims with an impish grin, as we sit in the book-lined snug of Amsterdam's Ambassade Hotel. Kagel was born in Buenos Aires in 1931, to an Argentine-Jewish family with strong left wing views. He was reborn in 1957, when he decided to escape from a Peròn regime that insisted its state composers conform to a rigid, dry neoclassical style. The irresistible pull of the Central European New Music scene prompted his relocation to Cologne, Germany, at a crucial moment in the development of post-war contemporary music. In Darmstadt, Karlheinz Stockhausen and Pierre Boulez were focusing on the acoustic fabric of sound itself, rather than sculpting with notes on paper, out of a desire to instigate a musical Year Zero. Finding it purist and self-important, Kagel roundly rejected the hardline Darmstadt doctrine. Instead he set about plundering musical tradition and polluting modernist idealism, which makes him a kind of soothsayer for postmodernism. The previous year, his contemporary György Ligeti had also wound up in Cologne after fleeing the Soviet tanks sent in to crush Hungary's 1956 uprising. The two refugees found they shared a more tolerant and less dogmatic vision of modernism. "There were some European composers at this time who viewed me as a fugitive bird from Argentina that they wanted to shoot out of the sky," Kagel continues, "but I was immediately friendly with Ligeti, and we have always shared an interest in one another's work. There's a lot of space in this world for different positions and aesthetics. The only thing I ask is that the result has to be interesting. If somebody tells me that they want to produce boring music as a philosophical point of view then I accept it - but the boringness must be exciting."

Kagel is in Amsterdam to premier his new Doppelsextett (Double Sextet), played by The Schoenberg Ensemble under conductor Reinbert de Leeuw. The Dutch music scene has long regarded Kagel as one of their own, and he's built an enduring relationship with de Leeuw and the Ensemble's musicians. Not to mention with the Ambassade Hotel, which has traditionally welcomed maestros and auteurs. Kagel, however, smells a rat. As his eyes scan the surrounding shelves - which carry authors as diverse as Umberto Eco (another Ambassade regular) and blockbuster novelist Leslie Thomas - he delights in pointing out that the books look like they have never been read. In his work too, Kagel has long thrived on unpicking the often perilously thin divide between pretence and truth.

In a musical century dominated by impressionism, serialism, minimalism, totalism and postmodernism, Kagel has sidestepped 'isms' altogether. Instead he has doggedly interrogated modern music and its relationship to tradition. He has drawn on his background in musical theatre, coaching singers at the Teatro Colòn in Buenos Aires, to radicalise and disrupt the concert experience, while offering a critique on its performance conventions and rituals. Targeting the corrupting nature of institutions or vested interests is more important to Kagel the satirist and pasticheur than advancing a personal political agenda. Musically and politically, his vision can be summed up as anti-dogmatic, suggesting that fertile and stimulating ideas in the field of music - and by extension society at large - are trampled on by protocol and spin. Being a composer not a politician, Kagel frames his anti-establishment tendencies as musical discourse.