Mauricio Kagel Quotes

I’ve certainly stayed a marginal figure, though I became a member of the "surveillance committee” fairly early on. I can actually live pretty well with this, because I’m allowed to work in peace – except when I have to give strings of interviews… And also, I’ve never sought a position of power in the music business. I became a teacher not so as to found a Kagel School, but to transmit knowledge. My work as a composer should be the only yardstick by which my contribution can be measured.
Mauricio Kagel 

I have to admit to being astonished at how undialectically many intellectuals since the sixties have defended the advantages of dialectics. They read Adorno, admired his verbal virtuosity and the sharpness of his mind. But they found composers who really achieve aesthetic resistance with the aid of this dialectic harder to accept. But this has scarcely anything to do with the actual music. In the world of music, there are also verbal icons, and they simply lead to self-deception. Some political concepts were gobbled up completely uncritically. Some of the subjects of my pieces are certainly two- or even three-sided. I am interested in ambiguity. Though not because I am a fan of ambiguity, but because it is an essential feature of the external world.
Mauricio Kagel