Drawing on a truly inexhaustible wealth of ideas, Kagel, like no other European artist, tested and shaped the necessary transdisciplinary, genre-breaking and rule-breaking power of the avant-garde project in ever new forms (musical, cinematic, scenic, media).

As a systematic anti-systematicist, he has critically and reflexively integrated a wide range of resources from art and historical tradition, technology, ethnography and everyday life into his work projects, thus opening up new spaces of experience and thought for his audience.

In the distant past, when people still assumed I was innocent, I decided to become a composer. Back then, in typically adolescent naïveté, I believed that a pencil and sheet music were the only tools needed for this noble craft. How wrong I was! Typewriters, telephones, fax machines, meetings, and interviews gradually became just as essential as waiting at the train station or the airport is inevitable. I won’t mention the computer and the internet as the pinnacle of this list of obligatory tools, because I have not yet voluntarily allowed myself to be ensnared by the tentacles of these technological phenomena.