How strange. I was engrossed throughout the London Sinfonietta’s performance of Mauricio Kagel’s The Pieces of the Compass Rose last night, and I have no idea how to describe it. Each of the eight pieces in this remarkable cycle for “salon band” is titled after a point on the compass – and each is, essentially, an evocation of that point. Or perhaps I mean “direction”, or “place”. Maybe just “word”. Kagel has the habit, at once fascinating and infuriating, of continually switching his vantage points: “North-West” looks up and across from Kagel’s native Argentina to the Andes, while “South-East” looks towards the Caribbean, from Cuba. These are only two of the more focused offerings: “South-West” is a journey south-west from Mexico to New Zealand, for instance, and Kagel toys in his programme notes with calling “West” “Weast or Ewast”. There is only one “North-East”, though, he tells us: “the legendary ‘Nordeste’ of Brazil”.
Do these pieces sound like their titles? For me, some do, and some don’t. But how does music ever communicate a sense of place? It struck me, while searching desperately among the sounds of “South” for something southern, that mostly we rely on cliché. Pentatonicism, flutes and gongs evoke the East; tremolando strings and wind machines the North. Any evocation of such concepts set on avoiding predictability, then, is bound to produce a range of sounds too personal to work for everyone. “East” for Kagel, apparently, is a train journey through Russia, accompanied by local musicians. It sounds a bit like a tango to me. “South” may have something to do with the South Mediterranean, but it also contains panpipes. This is in contrast to “North-West”, which evokes the sound of panpipes using a plastic descant recorder played by the clarinettist.
The “salon band” consists of string quartet, double bass, clarinet, piano, harmonium and percussion – and what a ludicrous display of percussion it is, from the softly hit cushions of “South-West” to the log thwacked with an axe at the end of “West” (a comment on the West’s depletion of the rainforests? Maybe. Sure). You might think that a diverse array of indigenous percussion instruments would be the most logical way to convey a particular location. Kagel, though, uses a diverse array of invented or obscure percussion instruments to convey... something. I don’t know what it means to pour a jug of water onto a metal sheet, or indeed to turn on a fan and have it blow against a few little strips of plastic. Crazy percussion is the logical way to make this piece make sense, and yet Kagel uses his crazy percussion in perhaps the most illogical way imaginable.