I don’t have much to say about the passing of Mauricio Kagel. Most of his music is still ahead of me. But I spent weeks on the little I’ve heard, de Leeuw/Schoenberg’s Ensemble’s recording of some of die Stücke de Windrose, and it changed me. I think of it as crayon music — primitive in the best sense — courageously broad strokes, playful, unafraid to rub the notes against each other, and unafraid (as I am) by density and drama.
The opening of Sudwesten is vivid in my mind; a loose, funky bass and drum game, and then the strings, either lyrical or rigid as a ballet chorus, sweep in, displacing our relationship to the underlying meter. It is the kind of music that makes me want to give up my Big Ideas and just sit at the page, whimsy liberated by patience, and dream up worlds.
Kagel
September 25, 2008The opening of Sudwesten is vivid in my mind; a loose, funky bass and drum game, and then the strings, either lyrical or rigid as a ballet chorus, sweep in, displacing our relationship to the underlying meter. It is the kind of music that makes me want to give up my Big Ideas and just sit at the page, whimsy liberated by patience, and dream up worlds.