Kölner Ensemble für Neue Musik & Mauricio Kagel
Biography Kölner Ensemble für Neue Musik & Mauricio Kagel
The Cologne Ensemble for New Music
was a pioneering German ensemble for contemporary music, founded in Cologne in 1960. Under the direction of Mauricio Kagel, it specialized in electroacoustic music, new music, and indeterminacy. It is best known for recordings such as "Acustica" and "Der Schall" (1970) for Deutsche Grammophon.
Mauricio Kagel (1931–2008)
was a composer, film and radio play director, conductor, and university professor. He studied autodidactically and through private lessons in his birthplace, Buenos Aires. There, he worked in the film industry as well as a choir director and vocal coach. He published his first compositions in the early 1950s. Kagel came to Cologne in 1957 with his wife, the artist and sculptor Ursula Burghardt (1928–2008). From then on, he focused on instrumental theater. With the Cologne Ensemble for New Music, he developed experimental, instrumental-theatrical works in the 1960s. The "Two-Man Orchestra" marks the end of this phase. Kagel's subsequent output encompasses all vocal and instrumental genres, from solo pieces to oratorios.
