Innehåller verkförteckning

Introduction: In search of Kagel ; Buenos Aires ; Beginnings in Cologne ; The instrumental theatre ; Experimentalism and multimedia ; Referentiality and postmodernism ; Apocrypha and simulacra

Growing up in the rich cultural atmosphere of Buenos Aires in the 1940s and '50s, where the writer Jorge Luis Borges was one of his teachers, Kagel became a member of avant-garde circles as well as receiving a rigorous musical education. By 1957 he had acted on the advice of Pierre Boulez to move to Europe to pursue a career as a composer. He quickly established himself at Cologne, the rallying point for young composers at the time, and became one of the leading, if controversial, figures at the famous Darmstadt summer courses. He embraced multiple serialism, aleatory technique and electronics, but he is best known for his pioneering explorations in music theatre, radio play, film and mixed media. Bjorn Heile charts Kagel's compositional development, considering the aesthetic and ideological issues the composer raises in his work. Focusing on Kagel's use of music as a means of intellectual inquiry, Heile shows Kagel to constantly question the nature of music and its role in society. Kagel's broadening of the concept of music to include theatre, film and other media, his disdain for purism as well as his subversive humour and sense of the absurd have challenged reified notions of music and art. What emerges is the breadth of Kagel's imagination and the multiplicity of contexts he draws from, which are both distinctive and, in the age of pluralist multiculturalism and globalization, exemplary.