Word: kagel
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Dates: during 1970-1979
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From Zacher's organ at the Folkwang Academy in Essen come some of the most adventurous and innovative sounds heard in a time beset by strange noises. Playing music by such avant-garde composers as Mauricio Kagel, Georgy Ligeti, Olivier Messiaen, Ernst Krenek and, naturally, John Cage, Zacher treats the organ as though it were a giant musical synthesizer, capable of taking sound back to its primeval sources and building music anew. That is exactly how Zacher feels about...
Zacher's new technique is not confined to the keyboard. His most dramatic trick is to turn the organ blower off while playing. How this sounds can be heard in Kagel's Improvisation Ajoutée, a chilling evocation of chaos included in a Zacher LP just released in the U.S. on the new Heliodor/Wergo label. At the climax of the work, as the supply of air begins to deplete, a cascade of falling pitches and fading sounds engulfs the listener in a musical-mystical doomsday. "It sounds," says Kagel, "as if the organ were exhaling her soul...