Imaginäre und imaginierte Musik im Schaffen von Mauricio Kagel

Many of Kagel's works can be described as realisations of literary descriptions of music. For instance, _Norden_ for salon orcehstra is derived from Mircea Eliade's descriptions of shamanic ceremonies in the Arctic, while one of Kagel's earliest compositions sought to reconstruct the violin sonata in Marcel Proust's _Recherche_. Such translations of imagined music into actual sound are related to the concept of imaginary music which plays an important role throughout Kagel's oeuvre. In the latter instance, the sounding music seems to refer to a sphere of ideal music that is evoked but that can only be imagined. In either case, the reference beyond the piece in question suggests an idea of transcendence which acts as a dialectic counterpart to the ostentatious worldliness of Kagel's music.