Permutational Thought: Mauricio Kagel's Antithese (1962) in Comparison to Umberto Eco's Serial Thought Theory

Abstract

PERMUTATIONAL THOUGHT: MAURICIO KAGEL’S ANTITHESE (1962) IN COMPARISON TO UMBERTO ECO’S SERIAL THOUGHT THEORY MAKOTO MIKAWA INTRODUCTION eflecting an early 1960s tendency in which composers and artists became conscious of multimedia composition, Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008) composed Antithese für einen Darsteller mit elektronischen und öffentlichen Klängen [Antithese for one performer with electronic and public sounds] (1962) with an interdisciplinary principle of his own. As the title in part indicates, the piece consists of electroacoustic music, a series of “main actions” executed by a performer, and a quasisurreal staging. With the amalgamation of the “autonomous work”1 (a self-contained piece recorded on magnetic tape) and the mutable, performer -dependent visual components, there are further syntheses or interactions within each of the prerecorded and live performance domains. The musical part, on the one hand, combines two different R 198 Perspectives of New Music compositional styles prevalent in electroacoustic music at that time: elektronische Musik in Cologne and musique concrète in Paris.2 The fundamental difference between these methods is that the former creates a musical piece “on the basis of synthetic sounds,” and the latter “on the basis of real noises.”3 The performing part of Antithese, on the other hand, consists of the performer arbitrarily choosing “main actions” specified by the composer and forming an order for them. In other words, the performer’s task is to create a series of actions, although there are cases in which “the actor cannot give an interpretation of the musical processes” due to “the variable forming of the scenic order.”4 Kagel provides a graphic score with verbal instructions intended only for the actor. Each of twenty-three different main actions indicated by an adjective or verb—for instance, “gastronomic,” “furious,” “destroy,”—contains specific directions for its realization. Subtly underlying the structural concept of the acting part are the concomitant notions of arbitrariness and the serializing procedure. Finally, Kagel provides specific instructions for the stage scenery, consisting of various technical devices and props that are all related to the recording and reproduction of musical pieces. The main purpose of this idiosyncratic stage scenery is, according to Kagel, to “give the impression of a retrospective exhibition of the apparatus which has been used for relaying sound from the beginning of the [twentieth] century up to the present day.”5 Antithese is subsumed under the category of “Instrumental Theater,” the new genre Kagel invented, deriving from his observation that “in general, [musicians] are bad actors,” since “they are not trained to make any kind of movement.”6 Conceptually, Instrumental Theater “emphasizes the procedures of music making and sound production, respectively, and . . . [the] acting out of visual components,” wherein “the actions are not directly connected with the production of music.”7 While Kagel had composed pieces of Instrumental Theater such as Sur Scène (1959/60) and Sonant/. . . . (1960), Antithese was Kagel’s “first piece that is directly conceptualized for a theater stage.”8 Any actions that Kagel wanted his performer to execute in Antithese are not to entertain the audience, but are intended as components of the work. With his strong background in the visual arts and the concept of Instrumental Theater, theatrical enactment was, in a sense, an inevitable reaction to the lack of visual element of electroacoustic music in its presentation. Antithese as a whole thus comprises conceptually heterogeneous and incompatible components, principles, and techniques. Its multicomponent , multilayered, polymorphic structure is, so to speak, a hallmark of Permutational Thought: Mauricio Kagel’s Antithese 199 Kagel’s compositional practice, as it is characteristic of many other works in his oeuvre. On the other hand, Antithese could be regarded as just another experimental multimedia work characteristic of the period. A close examination, however, reveals that its distinct “theatricalization of music”9 resulted not only from Kagel’s painstaking compositional plan, but also arose from an extraordinary original aesthetic vision. The motivation for this vision was based on Kagel’s critical perspective on the development of postwar avant-garde music, as well as his sharp observation of music in social and historical contexts of the midtwentieth century. In consideration of Antithese’s idiosyncratic, novel, multiplexing and amalgamating compositional procedures and the...