Mauricio Kagel: Anagrama (1957/1958)
Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008): Anagrama, for four soloists, speaking chorus, and chamber ensemble (1957/1958).
Ensemble vocale e strumentale diretto da Mauricio Kagel.
Cover image: painting by Gerhard Richter.
The composition « Anagrama » for four solo voices, speaking chorus, and instruments, written between February 1957 and November 1958, after preparatory work in Argentina, was given its first performance at the ICMS Festival in Cologne on nth June 1960. Nearly all the speech elements and sounds are derived from the palindrome on gnats and moths (wrongly attributed to Dante):
In girum imus nocte et consumimur igni
(we circle in the night and are consumed by fire), whose completely symmetrical structure is the equivalent of Webern’s late twelve-tone rows. This is not a superficial comparison, for this piece, constructed in five sections and in three levels, represents no less than an attempt to match in vocal music the standard of synthetic sound differentiation based on Webern’s work achieved in electronic music of that period. Of course, « Anagrama » at the same time also has its sources in completely different worlds, above all in Romanic- Manneristic Surrealism, but also in the Romantic-Universalistic spirit, which was obsessed with the idea that everything was connected with everything else. Kagel uses German, French, Italian, and Spanish; Latin is reserved for the palindrome, whose vocabulary of sounds (i, n, g, r, u, m, s, o, c, t, e) is extended by transposing the letters into acoustical terms; the c of consumimur, for example is mutated into a German k or a Spanish q (as in queso), the k in turn – together with s – provides the German x (as in Xylophon). It is not the meaning of the words, then, but their sound values which are the most essential part of all sound, word, and text composition here – most obviously so in what Kagel calls « acoustical translation ». Pure sound imitation produces from the palindrome a sentence like: « In giro immoto notte e quieto ingu » (p. 36, b. 15). In line with Kagel’s conception of lexica as the « summa summarum of all permuration systems », most of the new words are formed out of more or less regular rearrangements of the palindrome syllables. From « rum », for example, the words rumor (Sp.: rumour), rue (Fr.: street), Ruhe (G.: rest), Russe (G.: Russian), and rustre (Fr.: boorish) are derived, and there is an effortless development with about 30 intermediate steps from rime (Fr.: rhyme), ruinoso (Sp.: ruinous) or ripieno (It.: full) to Regung (G.: movement, emotion etc.), Regen (G.: rain) and requiem – partly via regular, partly via associative word production.
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