Six Marches and a Funeral
2007
ensemble
11 min.
Six Marches and a Funeral is a composition based on and around seven pieces from Mauricio Kagel's 10 Märsche um den Sieg zu verfehlen. On the invitation to make an arrangement of the marches for the Close Encounters festival in Georgia I was inspired, in part by an exhbition of large scale drawings by Julie Mehretu, to make a single Ivesian collage out of the various marches rather than maintaining their original separate identities.
Kagel originally wrote the marches as music for a play in which a politician rehearses speeches to a background of recorded applause and loud military music.
Kagel himself explains in the liner notes to a 1979 recording of the marches that he found it rather difficult to compose music in a genre so far from his own taste. He wished for marches that would subvert the victory rather than supporting it.
In my assemblage Kagel's liner notes appear as a text (translated into Georgian on the recording) spoken out over certain sections of the music:
These marches, developed as a counterpart to the text of the radio play The Tribune. This play is about a political speaker, who during the rehearsal for a public appearance plays a tape with loud applause for himself over a background of omnipresent music from a military band.
I have written marches to accompany this monologue, although I cannot say that I was able to enjoy composing them
(Can one enjoy a genre whose effect is so questionable?)
Since the Geneva Convention musicians and medical staff in uniform have not been allowed to carry weapons. The fact that the acoustical tools of musicians can incite violence is deliberately concealed, because their effect seems harmless.
The opposite is true: music can effectively embed itself in the heads of those men who are in control of warheads. The result is universally known.
2007
ensemble
11 min.
Six Marches and a Funeral is a composition based on and around seven pieces from Mauricio Kagel's 10 Märsche um den Sieg zu verfehlen. On the invitation to make an arrangement of the marches for the Close Encounters festival in Georgia I was inspired, in part by an exhbition of large scale drawings by Julie Mehretu, to make a single Ivesian collage out of the various marches rather than maintaining their original separate identities.
Kagel originally wrote the marches as music for a play in which a politician rehearses speeches to a background of recorded applause and loud military music.
Kagel himself explains in the liner notes to a 1979 recording of the marches that he found it rather difficult to compose music in a genre so far from his own taste. He wished for marches that would subvert the victory rather than supporting it.
In my assemblage Kagel's liner notes appear as a text (translated into Georgian on the recording) spoken out over certain sections of the music:
These marches, developed as a counterpart to the text of the radio play The Tribune. This play is about a political speaker, who during the rehearsal for a public appearance plays a tape with loud applause for himself over a background of omnipresent music from a military band.
I have written marches to accompany this monologue, although I cannot say that I was able to enjoy composing them
(Can one enjoy a genre whose effect is so questionable?)
Since the Geneva Convention musicians and medical staff in uniform have not been allowed to carry weapons. The fact that the acoustical tools of musicians can incite violence is deliberately concealed, because their effect seems harmless.
The opposite is true: music can effectively embed itself in the heads of those men who are in control of warheads. The result is universally known.