"It is always interesting when composers go beyond the usual boundaries of an art form."

Violinist Clemens Merkel is a member of Montréal string quartet Quatuor Bozzini, whose concert at Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival on Friday 19 November includes two early quartets by Mauricio Kagel. These rarely heard pieces present a challenge even to the most adept musician, for their pages contain a host of directions for extra movements and gestures to be performed whilst playing. Here Merkel explains the attraction of tackling Kagel’s theatrically demanding score.

hcmf//: When did you first encounter Kagel’s string quartets I and II?

Clemens Merkel: We'd known the first and second quartets of Kagel for a long time. They were, however, always some kind of phantom, because even a CD recording can give you only the sounding part of the piece and it really needs the visual part, too. Reading the scores as well listening, I always found the quartets daring, weird, fresh – and funny.

How do they fit into his body of work and his development as a composer?

In the early sixties Kagel started to write pieces which include extramusical elements, developing his own language which today we commonly know as ‘musical theatre’. This would be the neutral description. Another description would be that he radically questioned the format and ritual of concerts, a subject we are still – or again – working on these days and redefined (or undefined) the role of the performer (and the audience). Through this he was putting his music on a political level and in a social context where it hadn't been before.

It is certainly no coincidence that these were years of radical political changes and, for many people, the time of a new consciousness as social and political individuals. Other artists had been working on similar topics at the same time: John Cage, Christian Wolff and Cornelius Cardew come instantly to my mind. But no one else did it with the same sense of humour.

What do you find most interesting about these pieces?

It is always interesting when composers go beyond the usual boundaries of an art form. In this case the concert ritual of the usually so-serious string quartet is part of the performance. The musicians and their role in the quartet are questioned and somewhat turned upside down. What’s surprising is the freshness and the radicality of these pieces even after more than 30 years.

What challenges do they present to the instrumentalists, both in the written music and in the performing directions?

The instrumentalist has to be an actor and, while we often might think of ourselves as some kind of actor, these quartets are on a very different level. The instrumental playing is only one tool amongst others.

Differently than (spoken) theatre, Kagel notates everything on a fixed timeline, but sometimes you might need a moment more or less to get, let's say, from point A to B. The ensemble has to be able to follow the timeline closely and be flexible at the same time.

What differences are there between the two pieces?

Written two years apart, the quartets do form a pair. Kagel specifies: "The two movements of this piece form a single unit – even when they are presented in reverse order. However one should avoid playing them one after another." So Kagel sees them as two movements of the same piece, which can be played in any order but not back to back. This means that they will always define the frame of a concert programme.

Why do you think the quartets are not heard very often today?

They require a very special engagement of any quartet who wants to play them. The scores are very complex, as Kagel had to develop a way of expressing all the visual and physical actions while the music is going on. At the time, there was certainly no other score, other than by himself, that attempted to notate music and action so precisely. An ensemble playing these Kagel quartets has to go far out of its usual way of playing, rehearsing and appearing on stage.

Click here to buy tickets for Quatuor Bozzini on Friday 19 November

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