Artists/Historians: Mauricio Kagel, Musiktheater and the Mobility of (Music) History

This dissertation explores the circum-Atlantic movement of Musiktheater composition during the mid-twentieth century, focusing on composers working between Argentine, West German, and U.S.-American institutions. The dissertation traces how such artists came together from disparate geographic locales and political circumstances, using the genre of Musiktheater to interrogate cultural patrimony and negotiate questions of identity and cultural violence. By piecing together unexplored cross-disciplinary and transnational relations, my research challenges Eurocentric historiography of avant-garde, postwar musical and operatic composition. The dissertation takes a case study format, focusing on specific constellations of individuals, relationships, and institutions significant to music and theater history of the postwar era. My methodology combines close readings; extensive archival research into historical, material, economic, and institutional contexts; and oral histories I gathered from composers, performers, and cultural administrators throughout the U.S., Canada, Argentina, Germany, and Switzerland. The first three case studies of the dissertation focus on the 1960s and 1970s and the work of composer Mauricio Kagel (1931-2008) and visual artist Ursula Burghardt (1928-2008), opening with two chapters focused on works by Kagel that address political implications of bourgeois concert culture and the legacies of colonialism. The first chapter analyzes the 1969 film Ludwig van: A Report, a commission commemorating the 1970 Beethoven bicentennial that Kagel made in collaboration with Burghardt and other Fluxus artists, including Joseph Beuys and Robert Filliou. Exploring notions of collaboration and (music) theater in a filmic medium, I demonstrate how Ludwig van asks its audience to reflect on the negotiations of the diasporic experiences of avant-garde artists in the wake of the Holocaust. The second chapter analyzes Kagel’s music-theatrical Mare Nostrum: Discovery, Pacification and Conversion of the Mediterranean Region by a Tribe from Amazonia (1975). Borrowing its title from the Roman Empire’s name for the Mediterranean, Mare Nostrum is a farce of colonialism that narrates an inverted history of the colonization of the Americas. I argue that Mare Nostrum is in truth a story of the Black Atlantic that deconstructs the near-sacred status of European narratives of the so-called “discovery” of the Americas. Kagel weaves references to canonical European music history into a narrative that ultimately, I demonstrate, identifies the birth of colonialism as the beginnings of a long history of racial, cultural, linguistic, and environmental genocides. The third chapter of the dissertation functions as its conceptual center and turning point, addressing themes of collaboration, authorship, and historiographic erasure. Providing the first English-language biographical account of Burghardt, the chapter demonstrates the imbalances of power in the intimate spaces of marriage and artistic partnership that have led to the historiographic erasure of Burghardt in analysis of Kagel’s oeuvre, and more broadly in histories of mid-century avant-gardes. I focus on the collaborative work of the nonprofit association Laboratory for Research on Acoustic and Visual Events (1968-1973) and demonstrate how Burghardt created and manipulated theatrical, acoustic environments in ways that question traditional definitions of the musical instrument, instrumentality, and who is allowed to claim the title of “composer.” The dissertation’s fourth chapter focuses on three composers whose careers have unfolded between the U.S. and Europe in the twenty-first century. I evaluate how the legacy of mid-century music-theatrical composition is navigated by contemporary composers, specifically, “The New Discipline,” founded by Irish composer-performer Jennifer Walshe (b. 1974) in 2016. Through analysis of Steven Kazuo Takasugi’s (b. 1960) instrumental theater, Sideshow (2015), and Ash Fure’s (b. 1982) meditation on the Anthropocene, The Force of Things: An Opera for Objects (2016/2017), I demonstrate how, in the hands of these contemporary composers, Musiktheater is used as a generic space to interrogate environmental crisis, histories of violence, and circum-Atlantic performance. The dissertation demonstrates that writing a history of later twentieth century experimentalisms with instrumental music theater at its center rather than its periphery requires a kaleidoscopic turn of music historiography. Such a turn, I argue, produces a history finely attuned to the experiences of the displaced, of outsiders, culturally, linguistically, methodologically, religiously, or otherwise. The dissertation illustrates how these individuals formed communities and worked to negotiate the richly complex, if traumatically violent, social and political world constantly moving around them.

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