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Mauricio Kagel

Country: Argentina

Mauricio Kagel (1931 to 2008), born in Buenos Aires and resident in Cologne from 1957, was one of the most distinctive composers of the postwar avant-garde, and from the start his name was tied above all to music theatre, the genre where he had the greatest impact. He treated the concert situation itself as material, staging the effort, absurdity and ritual of performance.

La musica moderna IV (16x10” binder)
Amazing book-bound storage binder collecting 16 10" albums issued in the historical La Musica Moderna collection, without covers/magazines, published by Fratelli Fabbri in the late 1960's as a panorama of avant-garde music in the 20th century.
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Exotica, The Great Learning, Cybernetics III / Contrappunto Dialettico Alla Mente
Earlier this year, Deutsche Grammophon announced and delivered one of the most exciting initiatives in recent memory: a brand-new audiophile vinyl reissue series dedicated to crucial avant-garde and experimental works from its own extensive catalog. Beginning with Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien No.1 / Société II (1970), Mauricio Kagel's Acustica (1972), and Tōru Takemitsu's Quatrain / A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden (1980), these deluxe limited editions completely blew us away, returning…
Exotica
Limited and numbered edition, featuring original artwork and a newly designed, beautifully crafted collector’s sleeve with new liner notes by Bradford Bailey, and pressed on 180g vinyl. Includes hi-res audio download. Among the most playful and pointed entries in Deutsche Grammophon's legendary Avantgarde series, Mauricio Kagel's Exotica returns to vinyl - a work that turns the Western fascination with the music of elsewhere into a piece of high comedy and, beneath the laughter, a quietly devast…
A Second Wind For Organ (LP)
Great 1967 album on Odyssey's "Music Of Our Time" avant-garde music series produced by David Behrman with three experimental works for organ performed by David Tudor, including Mumma's amazing ear-splitting Mesa.
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Avantgarde (4LP Bundle)
Special discounted Bundle. Audiophile edition. Pure analogue mastering & cutting from the original master tapes. Representing three of the most essential and sought-after works within the canon of 20th Century avant-garde composition, this bundle brings together Luc Ferrari's Presque Rien No.1 / Société II, Mauricio Kagel's Acustica, and Tōru Takemitsu's Quatrain / A Flock Descends Into The Pentagonal Garden in a single offering. Originally issued by Deutsche Grammophon between 1970 and 1980, ou…
Acustica
Composed between 1968 and 1970 and originally issued by Deutsche Grammophon in 1972, there are arguably few works within the canon of 20th Century experimental music as beloved and sought after as the Argentine composer Mauricio Kagel’s Acustica. Created for “experimental sound-producers and loudspeakers”, comprising electroacoustic material assembled on 4-track tape in 1969 at  Westdeutscher Rundfunk (WDR) in Cologne, and acoustic material for 2 to 5 musicians, scored over roughly 200 filing-ca…
Atem / Morceau De Concours (LP)
1972 LP on EMI Eelectrola with two great pieces for trumpet and electronics performed by Edward H. Tarr.
Prima Vista (LP)
Rare compositions for solo instruments or small ensembles with or without electronics by some of the greatest XXth Century composers (Mauricio Kagel, Earle Brown, John Cage, Roman Haubenstock-Ramati, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Wolfgang Fortner, Klaus Hinrich Stahmer, György Ligeti, Henri Pousseur) spanning from 1952 to 1979 performed by Pro Musica Da Camera and released on Thorofon in 1981. With insert.
Virtuose Kammermusik / Virtuoso Chamber Music: Posaune / Trombone (LP)
Two contemporary pieces for solo trombone by Mauricio Kagel and Luciano Berio, plus three other historical pieces by Saint-Saëns, von Weber and Stojowski, released on Telefunken in 1980 and never re-issued on either LP or CD.
Zeitgenössische Musik In Der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 4 (1950-1960) (3LP box)
Fourth volume of the massive and exhaustive 3LP box series of "Contemporary Music from West Germany" released in the early 80's by Deutscher Musikrat, presenting pieces composed between 1950 and 1960 by Hans Werner Henze, Karlheinz Stockhausen, Hans G. Helms / Hans Otte, Dieter Schnebel, Mauricio Kagel, Winfried Zillig, Giselher Klebe, Karl Höller, Siegfried Borris, Fritz Büchtger, Harald Genzmer and Hans Ulrich Engelmann. With insert.
Zeitgenössische Musik In Der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 8 (1970-1980) (3LP box)
Eigth volume of the massive and exhaustive 3LP box series of "Contemporary Music from West Germany" released in the early 80's by Deutscher Musikrat, presenting pieces composed between 1970 and 1980 by Hans Werner Henze, Wolfgang Rihm, Hans-Joachim Hespos, Walter Zimmermann, Josef Anton Riedl, Peter Michael Hamel, Mauricio Kagel, Isang Yun, Mathias Spahlinger, Nicolaus A. Huber. With insert.
Zeitgenössische Musik In Der Bundesrepublik Deutschland 10 (1970-1980) (3LP box)
Tenth volume of the massive and exhaustive 3LP box series of "Contemporary Music from West Germany" released in the early 80's by Deutscher Musikrat, presenting pieces composed between 1970 and 1980 by Helmut Lachenmann, Dieter Schnebel, Karlheinz Stockhausen, York Höller, Robert HP Platz, Wilhelm Killmayer, Wolfgang Rihm, Mauricio Kagel. With insert.
The Rest Is Silence – Music Of Our Time
*2025 stock* "Stefan Winter, head of the Winter & Winter boutique label, has a different attitude to popularising classical music. Rather than relying on the familiarity of old favourites, he believes that contemporary classical music is more accessible than its ascetic, atonal reputation suggests, and can find an audience outside its assumed intellectual elite. Hence this compilation of excerpts from the label's catalogue…" - The Independent"Winter & Winter is something of a special case when i…
Chorbuch, Les Inventions d'Adolphe Sax
*2025 stock* This Winter & Winter cd of 'Chorbuch' and 'Les Inventions d' Adolphe Sax', recorded in December 2007, was Mauricio Kagel’s last recording, delayed due to unexpected death in the year 2008. The centrepiece of the album, 'Les Inventions d' Adolphe Sax' was commissioned by the Nederlands Kamerkoor, who invited the acclaimed Raschèr Quartet to participate. As a premiere recording and with Kagel’s artistic participation a masterpiece was created. The Nederlands Kamerkoor and Mauricio Kag…
Kantrimiusik
*2025 stock* “There is freshness, there is (self) irony, there is a desire - and for once let's say it without shame - to have fun with music. [...] Nature triumphs in all its aspects: noises and sounds of birds, pouring rain, thunder, animal cries, alternating on the lines of a fiddle violin.” - Corriere di Bologna
The Mauricio Kagel Edition
"It's fascinating, and a wonderful reminder of how fresh and unique Kagel's place in the history of music in the last half-century is." - The Guardian
Die Stücke der Windrose
2025 stock "Kagel's witty intelligence objectifies the ordinary to create important art." - The Wire
Schwarzes Madrigal
*2025 stock* "In composing a piano trio, I fulfilled a long-fostered desire. This is a genre which, like the string quartet tradition, can slightly intimidate any composer. I too waited patiently but anxiously to make my own contribution. The pre-history of the piece is closely tied to my Music Epic about the devil, La Trahison orale (Oral Betrayal), which I wrote in 1981-83. When conceiving this work, I had already decided to compose character pieces, relatively short numbers with a particular …
Playback Play
*2025 stock* Famous for his examination of unusual and exotic instrumental sounds, here Mauricio Kagel focuses on the most mundane of sound materials. While attending a music trade show, Kagel was taken by the many levels and orbits of sound activity emanating from the various booths and stages. In 'Playback Play' (subtitled 'News from the Music Fair, A Radio Piece') he has arranged a spatially sensitive tableau of crowd noises, sales pitches and fragments of the sort one hears in music store sh…
Radio Cologne Sound Das Studio für Elektronische Musik des WDR
Small repress available! Biggest Tip possible! ** English/German edition. 288 pp + 5CD plenty of incredible music, most of which have never been heard before **  From the Wolke Verlag imprint, who've already brought us incredible books like Karl Berger's "The Music Mind Experience", "FMP Free Music Production - The Living Music", Peter Brötzmann's Along the Way, and George Lewis' "Composing While Black. Afrodiasporic New Music Today", to name only a few and a great many more - comes one of the m…
The Avantgarde Series
The legendary DG Avantgarde vinyl series (1968-1971) is turning 55! In order to celebrate this occasion, the series is now released on 21 CDs for the first time. The Avantgarde series serves as a historical document for a time of radical change in musical thinking and the breaking of artistic boundaries. The question "What is music?" confronted many of the composers and musicians involved in the series, and the anti-authoritarian spirit of the 1960s and 1970s was a palpable influence. Deutsche G…
Save Percussion Theatre
DVD of French-school percussion theatre by Aperghis, Kagel, Globokar, Alvarez and Drouet, performed by Aiyun Huang and colleagues and directed by Hans Fjellestad and Anton Cabaleiro, the first commercial video release of these works.
Behind the facts. Interfunktionen 1968-1975
** 2021 Stock. In process of stocking** Hard-cover. Cloth boards issued without dust jacket offset-printed sewn bound. Critical anthology of the art journal Interfunktionen, an art journal which published 12 issues between 1968 and 1975 in Cologne, was founded in 1968 as a form of protest by artists who had no affinity with the critical lines that were redrawn at Documenta that year. The review was of considerable importance as a vehicle for propagating pro-European ideas and as a union between …
Süden: Gastón Solnicki on Mauricio Kagel
111 cyclists reach famed opera house Teatro Colón to welcome Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008), one of the great composers of the 20th Century, who was born in Argentina, but left the country and settled in Germany in 1957. However, his adventurous music remained an inspiration to a number of forward-thinking Argentinean musicians, and in 2006 he returned to Buenos Aires for a Kagel festival, where he was to direct a major concert by the Buenos Aires Philharmonic, but also worked with a group of young …
Earle Brown Contemporary Sound Series Vol. 1
Few figures of the American avant-garde wore as many hats as Earle Brown. Composer, graphic notation pioneer, member of the New York School alongside John Cage, Morton Feldman, and Christian Wolff - but also, and crucially, a record producer whose ear shaped one of the most important document series in 20th century music. Between 1960 and 1973, working first for Time Records and then Mainstream Records, Brown curated the Contemporary Sound Series - 18 LPs presenting works by 49 composers from 16…
Sankt-Bach-Passion
Mauricio Kagel (December 24, 1931 – September 18, 2008) was a German-Argentine composer who was notable for his interest in developing the theatrical side of musical performance. Many of his pieces give specific theatrical instructions to the performers, such as to adopt certain facial expressions while playing, to make their stage entrances in a particular way, to physically interact with other performers and so on. His work comparable to the Theatre of the Absurd.
Orchestral Works
Mauricio Kagel by himself: the composer, theater maker, filmmaker, virtuoso, writer of radio plays and, on the whole, all-round talent conducts his own works.
Szenario - Duodramen - Liturgien
Mauricio Kagel is a conductor, writer, teacher and self-taught composer, initially influenced by avant-garde figures such as Boulez and Stockhausen. 'Szenario,' scored for string orchestra and tape, was conceived as an independent work, but quickly found a new role as musical backing to the Luis Bunuel/Salvador Dali silent classic 'Le chien andalou'. Duodramen can be heard either as an orchestral song-cycle in the tradition of Mahler or as an operatic 'final scene' in the tradition of Wagner or …
Acustica
Composed between 1968 and 1970, Acustica, for experimental sound-producers and loudspeakers, is one of Mauricio Kagel's radical and extraordinary works, in which his constant search for ways of escaping from the restraints and conventions of traditional musical performance took him into a world of exotic instruments and almost surreal invention. The instrumentation for Acustica is a huge array of sound sources: there are folk instruments collected from around the world and from different periods…
Siemens-Studio Für Elektronische Musik
Easily among the most important documents of electronic music's early history, Siemens-Studio Für Elektronische Musik assembles 19 compositions created between the late 1950s and mid-1960s at the legendary Siemens Studio for Electronic Music in Munich - the first programmable recording studio ever built - under the artistic direction of Josef Anton Riedl. Originally issued on CD in 1998 by the Siemens Kultur Programm and compiled by Riedl himself, this remarkable collection gathers works by Herb…
Mimetics
Sabine Liebner plays Mauricio Kagel's Metapiece (Mimetics) of 1961 interleaved with his Cuatro piezas para piano, An Tasten and MM 51, then Metapiece solo. Recorded in 2017 at the Bayerischer Rundfunk, Munich, with first recordings.
Improvisation Ajoutée
Mauricio Kagel's organ works, from Improvisation ajoutée (1962) to Rrrrrrr... (1980/81), plus Dominik Susteck's own K-A-G-E-L improvisations. Recorded by Susteck at the Kunst-Station Sankt Peter, Cologne, 7-9 April 2014, for Deutschlandfunk.
Sterben
Edition Musikfabrik: Francesco Filidei's Finito ogni gesto, Michael Beil's Black Jack and Mauricio Kagel's unfinished Heine cycle In der Matratzengruft with tenor Markus Brutscher, all first recordings by Ensemble Musikfabrik under Marcus Creed, Otto Tausk and Emilio Pomàrico.
Vom Himmel zur Hölle
Edition Musikfabrik vol. 3: Martin Smolka's Rush (Hour in Celestial Streets), Mauricio Kagel's Orchestrion-Straat and Louis Andriessen's Racconto dall'Inferno with Cristina Zavalloni, conducted by Peter Rundel and Reinbert de Leeuw.
Transición II. Phonophonie
First recordings, supervised by the composer, of two early works by Mauricio Kagel: Transición II (1958-59) for piano, percussion and tapes with live electronics, and Phonophonie (1963-64), four melodramas for two voices and other sound sources.