“Marching In Goose-step”,
“Looking horns”,
“A bird of ill omen”,
“Going to the dogs”

To honor Mauricio Kagel’s 75th birthday (December 24, 2006), Winter & Winter released a Special Edition album of Kagel’s most important works for film and radio from the 1960s and 1970s. That included Bestiarium, a piece composed for bird whistles.

Obviously, language allows us to ask questions like “What is music?” or “What is art?” By asking such questions, we demonstrate our belief in the power of definition, a rational definition that would help us organize our thoughts, especially when something we encounter does not fit neatly into our preconceptions.

What is great about works like Mauricio Kagel’s Bestiarium is that they challenge our established notions of the nature of music, or art, refusing to be invalidated by definitions – especially those definitions that are based on the assumption that everything we call music has some essence or set of properties that are absent from what is not music. If such a definition really existed, it would make many of Mauricio Kagel’s works unapproachable, including Bestiarium.

Zoological Encounters

Bestiarium, Music for Bird Calls is a three-part work “about freely invented zoological encounters: an acoustic ornithology sui generis in No Man’s Land”. Like Messiaen, Kagel is a bird song freak. Over the years, he amassed a considerable collection of bird call whistles from South America (Brazil) and Europe (France). As Kagel’s creative output grew, it was inevitable that he would also compose for his whistles. That happened in 1974-75.

In Bestiarium, three musicians (Kagel is one of them on the album) are given a certain number of identical bird whistles and a varying number of different ones. With these, the players are able to change the notes into a continuum of pitches according to the species of bird at hand.

Kagel lists the bird species: jay (Garrutus glandarius), tawny owl (Strix aluco), robin (Eruthacus rubecula), warbler (Phylloscopus sibilatrix), golden oriole (Oriolus oriolus), sea magpie (Haematopus ostralegus), common siskin (Musciapa hypoleuca), song thrush and many others.

Not all the sounds are bird sounds. Some of the sounds resemble the calls of mammals and the sounds of the rainforest.
Sometimes it feels as if the sounds are used for purely musical reasons. In describing the piece, Kagel talks about “solo passages” and how they comment on “musical events.” However, the piece is as far removed from Messiaen’s bird compositions as the Sex Pistols are from Bach’s cantatas.

Bestiarium progresses as a continuous variation of sounds. Most of the sounds are very high-pitched, often atonal, and not always pleasant to the ear. My daughter’s guinea pig was terrified. The hisses, screams, gurgles, gurgles, hisses, whistles, etc., etc., however, somehow manage to create a strangely appealing soundscape. The piece lasts half an hour.

As one commentator put it: “Sometimes magically nocturnal, aboriginal, certainly bestial in character, the fascinating potential of the various materials used in the whistles and the environments from which they have their origins are sometimes disturbingly realistic. It still might not be easy to take it all in as thoroughly enjoyable music, but close your eyes and let it wash over you, and you might find things appearing inside your mind’s eye that you never knew where there.”

Needless to say, Bestiarium, recorded in the studio with close miking, is a great test sample for the treble response of speakers and equipment and the acoustics of the listening room. Do Brazilian wooden whistles, for example, stand out from French ones made of steel and leather?

The many sides of Kagel

Kagel, who studied music but was self-taught as a composer, can easily be considered as a bad boy of contemporary music, but his influence on contemporary music has been indelible. It has been said that whatever a composer invents today, Kagel has invented it before. Stockhausen, Berio and Cage were all influenced by Kagel.

Kagel is not a star of a horror film, nor a self-serving experimentalist. But it is understandable that music professionals, most of whom have never heard of Joseph Beuys, Stefan Wewerka, Schuldt and the numerous other artists with whom Kagel has made art, consider Kagel to be one.

Kagel is an eclectic and avant-gardist in the best sense of the word. Kagel, who, in addition to music, studied literature and philosophy, only chose music as a tool for his creativity after moving from Argentina to Germany in the late 1950s. This did not stop him from making films, works of sound art and writing books. In the 1980s, Kagel’s Varieté, directed by Werner Herzog, toured European theaters.

Kagel is also an exceptional composer in that he has been genuinely interested in electroacoustics, the technology of recording and producing sound. Not only in the form of documenting live performances, but as a completely new art form in the same way as photography or film once were.

Immediately after moving to Germany, Kagel began to work closely with the WDR radio company (Westdeutschen Rundfunks). The tapes and other sound works that emerged as a result of this collaboration are one of his trademarks. The works heard on Winter & Winter’s The Mauricio Kagel Edition have been re-edited and mixed by Kagel himself.

So is Bestiarium music? It would be tempting to think that Kagel is a firm supporter of the institutional theory, i.e. the institution with all its actors determine what is art and what is not, which sounds are music and which are not, rather than the inner properties of the work. However, it would seem that for Kagel it is rather the sounds (not just the organized ones, but all of them) and the acoustic environment – ​​the context – in which they appear that decide the matter.

The most important thing, however, is that Kagel poses these tough ontological questions about music in general. It may be that the question of the difference between music and sound does not have an answer.

Winter&Winter’s three-disc, thick-book album is an excellent introduction to this side of Kagel’s musicianship. One of the discs includes a DVD of Kagel’s experimental film Ludwig van Beethoven . The film tells the story of Beethoven’s return to his hometown of Bonn to celebrate his “commercially very successful” 200th anniversary.