A Response to Kagel’s notes re: 1898.

It must have been a commandment of common sense that caused our remote ancestors to denote years in terms of numbers. Any other modus operandi would surely be more complicated, and less precise - above all, it would strain our capacity to remember things. But it also means that the events that are recorded day by day in the calendar create their own kind of species counterpoint, a silent polyphony of personal experiences and publicly relevant, recurrent milestones.

Why 1898, ad not 1897 or 1899, or ...?

Shortly beforehand, a miraculous change had occurred that allowed acoustic vibrations to be turned into visible, tangible and endlessly reproducible black discs, and form that year onwards there began the industrial production of sound media that enabled everyone to acquire conserved sounds on records. This was the motivation for me in “1898”, to strive to convey a musical X-ray of the end of the 19th century, andat the same time to try to effect a compositional reconstruction of the sound of the first, acoustically unstable recordings.

To do this it was necessary to redefine the treatment of timbre, namely the product of instruments being played together. To start with, I decided in principle to reject the idea of achieving harmonic complexity by overlapping dense chords or clusters. Instead, I limited myself to the orchestration of two monodies, which are inextricably interwoven throughout both movements of the piece, like Ariadne’s threads. In this way, constant unisons and multiple octave doublings create remarkable sonorities that seem to hover over a weighed-down no-man’s-land which is pervaded by the aura of an epoch that is coming to an end, but already exudes the fragrance of a joyous eruption into the more radical modern music. Perhaps this is a sort of musical report on a time where one inhales tonally, and exhales atonally. The mood of catastrophe that evolved soon after the turn of the century throws historical shadows backwards, as well as forwards.

In the context of this unwritten chronicle, the vocal entries in “1898” underline the prevailing “Yes” and “No” malaise with an explicit text covering every conceivable nuance: both carefree and obsessive, whistling, singing - but with the mouth closed -, and laughter which is both liberating and desparing.

And here the composer is again confronted with quesions which are also relevant to his current work. When one looks at yesterday with today’s eyes, is one not also tracing the future?

Just like “1898”, “Music for Renaissance Instruments” is pervaded by the breath of the past, though without any explicit quotations or imitations of style. When I wrote this work in 1965, and permiered it in 1966, the misunderstandings among experts and colleagues were enormous. Why should I - still a rabid avant-gardist - have changed so soon into a nice arrière-gardist? Why rummage around in the hisory of music when I could be happily enriching the present? My motives back then are just as relevant for me today: what happened to music in the past remains as forcefully present as if, when speaking, we were constantly to be mixing up all the different tenses. Equally, with musical language, it is often impossible to distinguish between perfect and imperfect, or imperative and infinitive, in a metaphorical sense, becaues the history of music is an immaculate continuity, even if it is constructed from an unbroken chain of individual climaxes. We are constantly struck by the inherent modernity of the past, even in all those things which, technically speaking, should not be part of modernity. Modernity is probably a concept that should in any case be under continual scrutiny. Perhaps pre- and post-modernism will turn out to be freely interchangeable. In the meantime, the uninhibited use of many of the sound sources in “Music for Renaissance Instruments” has become common practice. And rightly so. The past is a reservoir of molten lava that can flow in any direction. So long as the ground slopes a little.

Mauricio Kagel

August, 1998

(translation: Richard Toop)

Mauricio Kagel, the protagonist of my story, decided to turn his eyes towards the past and cast a penetrating gaze upon the cultural tissue of reproductive becomings and epistemic confusion. What he sees is the capricious event of sound-becoming-body; sound-made-fleshy. Kagel gleans an idea to simulate the corporality of sound-becoming-body in his work by imagining a revealed crease of skeletal monodies supporting the flesh of timbral variety. He expects the membrane of this insouciant work to leak a certain residue of a past genesis and disintegration that we understand as ‘era’. However, the confusion of being-as-presence impressed upon a material sludge more accurately defines its absence.

But for Kagel, the exhalation of the past-becoming-present, as revealed through intention, doesn’t obfuscate the transparency of memory; it illuminates what we call history by illuminating the spectre of memory. Is the present any more impressive than the past? Is it not also just as absent as the ‘was’ and subject to varied sketches? We suffer the strange condition of conveyance both ‘then’ and ‘now’ as we attempt to denote our experience. The desire for coherence and sense of a never-present reality gestures towards its own limit by authoring incomplete readings of what always escapes totalization. In this work Kagel asks us to consider the placement of ‘1898’ as it narrates a history of historization and as he “strive(s) to convey a musical X-ray of the end of the 19th century.” He translates, or modulates the fragile sound-becoming-body that was early vinyl into a register of coding (analytic musical notation) parallel to (but more depthless) than the tactile resin.

And this what is so curious: where is anything? History is the signifying practice of sentimentality; the year 1898 is a localization of difference within this fabric of differentiating play; interpreted within this localization, from our position of sentiment, is a remembrance of representation; Kagel is representing, through demonstration, and another signification (Title: “1898”), an inscription of the present acting as the past while reading the past.

At the end of my story, Kagel’s retrospection and temporal carryings-on effects “1898” as a memento or trace of a ‘was’, his ‘was’ and ‘our will-be-was’. The nostalgic nudge and souvenir beckoning “1898” disseminates is curious for how it positions neither a conjured past nor a manifest present, but deploys a local contemporality of memory and vanishing in becoming-was.

eldritch Priest

October/November 2003