September 18, 2018 marks the 10th anniversary of Mauricio Kagel’s death. We commemorate it with a concert at the Kölner Philharmonie.

In 2005, we performed the world premiere of Mauricio Kagel’s Chamber Symphony with him in Montreux. Near the beginning of the piece, the harp and piano play an arpeggio passage in 3/8 time, three triplet groups on the first quarter note, two triplet groups on the following eighth. The speed of the individual notes should have remained the same, causing the last eighth to become too long.

I asked Mr. Kagel about this mathematical inconsistency, but he just shook his head and agreed that something was not quite clear. The next morning he proudly presented me the solution, sketched on a piece of paper: the two triplet groups newly divided. And so the problem was solved – for him. Everything was right again.

This sketch is characteristic of Mauricio Kagel in many ways: for him, the music came first. It was the most important thing and he stood up for it with everything he had, reaching deep into his bag of tricks if necessary – then despite the changes he made to the structure, the speed of the small notes hadn’t changed: The six tones within the eighth note were still 33% faster than the nine in the quarter note.

And then the sketch itself: Kagel carefully cut unneeded photocopies into four parts, used the backside as notepaper and then apparently took them with him on concert tours. Even as a commercially established composer, he always remained a frugal and humble servant of his art. He never complained about the lack of legroom in a plane, even though he measured almost two meters tall. He simply put a tissue over his eyes, his glasses over that, and then he would relax.
On the first “Windrose” tour there was a relatively rickety Mercedes bus, very uncomfortable and none of us were happy with it. But no negative word came from Kagel about it. Sometimes there wasn’t enough time to eat properly. Something I’ll never forget is Kagel with a huge doner kebab in his hand and saying: “I loooove this Turrrrrkish fooooood!”

Most of his fellow composers wanted to free contemporary music from traditional baggage. Kagel, however, was quite happy with this baggage, using specific sound combinations to reach the audience emotionally with specific memories of something they had heard before. He knew exactly what he was doing. When he said, ”At this point, the audience will inevitably clap,” then the audience did inevitably clap right there.

His little gimmicks were particularly impressive: For example, at the end of “Blue’s Blue” you see him motionless from the side on the sofa, head tilted backward, his right arm hanging lifelessly down, his fingertips holding a cap. Nothing happens. A kind of uncertainty slowly comes over the audience as to whether the play is over… or not yet?…. Until at just the right moment Kagel drops his cap with a slight flick to the floor – and again the audience inevitably clapped.

And he was hardworking: “My wife wanted a video recorder. Now it’s there, and nobody knows how it works.” – “You can read about it in the manual.” –  M.K. somewhat indignant: “Do you know how many notes I can write in that time!”

Ulrich Löffler
, piano