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The Music of Mauricio Kagel.

Article Excerpt
The Music of Mauricio Kagel. By Bjorn Heile. Burlington, VT: Ashgate, 2006. [viii, 209 p. ISBN 10: 0-7546-3523-6; ISBN-13: 978-0-7546-3523-9. $99.95.] Music examples, photos, notes, chronological list of works, select bibliography, indexes.

This is the first monograph in English devoted to the music of Mauricio Kagel, a major figure of the European musical avant-garde in the second half of the twentieth century. Born in Buenos Aires in 1931 and self-taught as a composer, Kagel immigrated to Cologne, Germany in 1957 where he received international recognition for his music. Although he possessed a varied compositional palette that included aspects of integral serialism, indeterminancy, and classical electronic music, Kagel focused on visual and theatrical elements in his works as a means to critique modern attitudes toward music. For him, improvisation was a means whereby performers could uncover new sounds and theatrical modes of expression, making musical performance, in essence, a dramatic event. Besides being active as a composer, conductor, lecturer, and professor since 1958, Kagel has been writing and directing television films since 1965, and authoring radio dramas (Horspiele) since 1969. He has garnered numerous awards, honors, and prizes, among which include the Koussevitzky Prize (1965), the Mozart Medaille of Frankfurt (1983), the French Order des arts et des lettres (1995), the Erasmus Prize (1998), Prix Maurice Ravel (1999), Ernst von Siemens Musikpreis (2000), and the...

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