Der Schall

Kagel One of the desires of Mauricio Kagel, Argentine composer by birth (1931), but German by adoption, has always been to "sabotage the listener." But with Der Schall (1968) (sound, in the physical sense), Kagel manages to sabotage the performers as well.

In this piece, the composer demolishes the traditional performance structure, in which a performer hyper-specialized in their instrument interprets a codified score, conceived and written for that instrument. Der Schall, on the other hand, is for five performers and fifty-four instruments, most of which are completely unknown to the performers.

Furthermore, the rules of the piece are designed precisely to put the performers in an unfamiliar situation: that of holding an instrument they don't know how to play. The performers must frequently change instruments. The score stipulates that:

During the performance, each instrumentalist must experiment with a number of instruments equal to at least half of those available to him or her, and
Each instrument may not be used for more than a third of the total duration of the piece.

This ensures that the composition of the instrumental ensemble is constantly changing. A performance like this lasts about 36 minutes and features 54 instruments, which have been divided among the five performers as follows (I quote the names in English from the liner notes):

Foghorn, spaghetti tube with trumpet mouthpiece, straight cornet, C-trumpet. baroque trumpet (clarino), plastic tubing with ringed joints, tromba d a tirarsi, short tube with plastic funnel, 20 meters of garden hose with plastic funnel, antilope horn, various mutes and mouthpieces.
Conch trumpet, pandean pipe, 2 posthorns, hand-drum as mute, double foghorn, plastic tubing with connection piece, plastic tubing with ringed joints, trombone, various mutes and mouthpieces, nafir.
Low jew’s harp, sitar, banjo, octave guitar, stoessel lute, rubberphone (rubber bands to be plucked), various gloves, bowing and plucking requisites.
6-12 organ pipes (mixtures) to be blown by mouth, 2 pandean pipes, taishokoto, ocarina, Kimuan violin (Kimuanyemuanye), bass balalaika, bass mouth-organ, 2 brass tubes, various bowing and plucking requisites.
Bell-board (eight bells fixed to a board, to be bowed only), genuine Cagniard de la Tour siren (blown siren with frequency measuring device), cuckoo (a short of seesaw with two bellows, each adjustable in pitch), 4 tortoiseshelIs, nose-flute, bassdrum, telephone, 2 brass tubes, 1 musical box

Since each performer has about ten instruments at their disposal and must use at least five, they are required to change instruments every 7.2 minutes on average.

In 1969, the piece was recorded for Deutsche Gramophone by an exceptional quintet composed of Edward H. Tarr, Vinko Globokar, Karlheinz Botner, Wilhelm Bruck, and Christoph Caskel, with the composer conducting (the vinyl is now out of print). It is available in FLAC here.

Mauricio Kagel – Der Schall (1968)

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