Mauricio Kagel completed Music for Renaissance Instruments in 1966. It is dedicated to Claudio Monteverdi and readdresses some Renaissance musical practices without referring to it directly. There is no music from that period in Kagel's piece, no quotes or formal references. The composer once attempted to make a similar piece that involved Renaissance instruments when he was still a musicology student in Argentina, but there were not enough instruments from that period available to make his piece actually work. In the 1960s, there was a new interest in early music and period performance, which meant that information about Renaissance music and period instrument makers were suddenly abundant. The work was now a genuine possibility. Kagel wanted his work to feature instruments depicted by Michael Praetorius in his 1619 Syntagma Musicum, a famous lexicon of musical information The work is written for an ideal twenty-three performers, but true to Renaissance musical practice, between two and twenty-two performers could also realize this piece properly. Ensembles in Monteverdi's time usually consisted of whoever showed up to play. However, Kagel's way of adapting to this practice has little to do with how it was done back then. In fact, his way of conforming to the ancient way of doing things makes the work all the more avant-garde. The form is highly inventive and while there is usually a lot going on, the sound itself is never cluttered. The primary idea of the piece is to show the diversity and strength of timbres among instruments from the Renaissance period.

The sounds and associations that Kagel creates with this ensemble work are extraordinary. Many of the masses of sound that come out of the performance are bizarrely suggestive of Ligeti's micropolyphony from the 1960s and many the electronic sounds made by the Cologne's electronic composers in the 1950s. Because Kagel has been widely regarded as the prankster of the avant-garde, it is impossible to know if this was a deliberate similarity. He studied in Cologne and certainly knew Ligeti's music, if not the man personally. This work is not a stunt; it is a fine piece of well-ordered music. Many of Kagel's pieces are little more than dadaist gags, but works such as this reveal a first-rate command of his craft and the talent to make new and worthwhile music. It is original in spite of its similarities to comparable music if the period. A lot goes on in Music for Renaissance Instruments, with new combinations providing always new and varying material. It is frequently an eerie sound, primarily focusing on the timbres in combination, revealing a fresh palette of color consistently. Music for Renaissance Instruments requires enormous technical skill to perform. When Kagel first attempted to write this sort of piece, it was not only the absence of instruments that made the work's performance implausible. The lack of musicians who could play the music he wanted to hear on period instruments was equally a problem. Not only were the specific lines beyond the reach of most performers, but many of the extended techniques in the work eluded the musicians as well. Another similarity to Ligeti's writing in this work is the use of flaws in the instrument's engineering. Kagel demands that some winds be blown so that air is audibly released in ways that standard performance practice teaches players to avoid. Music for Renaissance Instruments turned out to be a wonderful piece, one of the good Kagel works. It is always a pleasure to discover another one.

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