Composer Kagel Is a Clown but That’s Not All He Is

Mauricio Kagel, the Argentine composer who joined the new music scene in Cologne in the late 1950s, has the reputation of being the clown of the avant-garde. It’s accurate in the sense that Kagel has created a large body of music and multimedia work that is invariably theatrical and can have a goofy side.

He is the composer of a lieder opera, “Aus Deutschland,” that is staged on a battlefield of pianos. He has written a sacred Passion that has Bach, not Christ, as the protagonist. He has inverted Genesis with the Apocalypse and reversed history--having Amazon tribes discover, pacify and convert the Mediterranean--in various theater works. He celebrated the bicentennial of Beethoven’s birth in 1970 by making a hilarious film of Beethovenian mirth and detritus, “Ludwig van.”

Kagel made a rare American appearance Tuesday night, conducting two half-hour works with the Los Angeles Philharmonic New Music Group for one of its Green Umbrella concerts at Japan America Theatre. And his ability to amuse was certainly on display.

But it’s important not to let the circus-y aspect in this composer’s works overwhelm their ultimate profundity. If Kagel is a clown, it is in the transcendental sense. He is the Samuel Beckett or Buster Keaton of music. As the playwright did through the utterly precise use of language, and the silent-film star did through the utterly precise use of movement, Kagel’s musical precision turns everything upside down. His is the remarkable feat of employing the cold abstraction of music to demonstrate how everything in the world is really subjective, personal.

Indeed, what Kagel ultimately seems up to is integrating our entire relationship with music and history. It is a postmodern concept but it is achieved with a modernist’s reverence for the past, with formal sophistication and with concern for society.

A striking example could be found in the first work Kagel conducted Tuesday, “ . . . , den 24.xii.1931.” The title is the European form of Kagel’s birth date, Dec. 24, 1931. And the subtitle to the piece is “Garbled News for Baritone and Instruments.”

As Kagel was turning 60, he began to muse on what had happened in the world the day he was born and whether that might reveal anything about who he is now. So he set fragments of news reports to wild music. These were scary times. And he brings to life in striking sounds (such as employing the violent turning of pages of a book as percussion or the clicking of heels) a prison uprising in Buenos Aires and General Honjo brutally occupying North Manchuria.

The most troubling fragment is a bit of an advertisement “The Nationalsozialist smokes only ‘Parole,’ ” in which the clever baritone Roland Hermann seems to capture all the terrifyingly pompous self-satisfaction of a Nazi goon. The work ends in glory, with the fabulous sound of electric buzzers and pealing bells celebrating the news that a button pressed in Bethlehem could, through current sent along the wireless, ring the bells of St. Thomas Church in New York.

The other work of the evening, “Orchestrion-Straat,” written two years ago, is another celebration of street music. This time Kagel arranges pairs of like instruments in rows, as if the players were seated on a train. The inspiration, though, was the old-fashioned mechanical instruments, orchestrions, still found sometimes on the streets of Amsterdam, and here machine-like rhythms go continually awry, melodies break apart in always unexpected ways, and instrumental colors rain down upon the audience.

In both these works, the theatrical impact requires virtuosity, and the performances were of a high order. Kagel, it turns out, is a masterful conductor who galvanized the Philharmonic players.

But this is only one side of the composer. A film by Kagel was shown before the concert, another had been screened the night before at Art Center College of Design as part of the Beyond the Pink performance art festival. In one, “Blue’s Blues,” Kagel invents a turn-of-the-century New Orleans blues singer with the rawest voice you’ve ever heard. The other, “MM 51,” gives a different twist to the classic horror silent “Nosferatu.”

Further sides of this remarkable composer can be found in the excellent series of recordings of his music on the French label Avudis Montaigne. But the bigger news from Europe is that Kagel’s major music theater works are turning out to be classics of our time. And his brief but telling visit here indicates that we, on this side of the Atlantic, are clearly missing something.