About the Works

Mazen Kerbaj: With a Little Help From My Friends I: Lungless

In the mid-1990s, I was studying illustration and graphic design at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts while also publishing comics in local magazines. It was during this time that my friend, guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui, gave me a trumpet he had no use for. Although I had no prior experience playing any instrument, I went on to develop a very personal approach to the trumpet, creating my own techniques by using everyday objects to prepare and transform the instrument, completely altering both its form and sound.

Three decades later, following a sabbatical year in 2024, I am setting the trumpet aside and exploring two new instruments, both invented by close friends: the late musician and instrument inventor Michel Waisvisz and sound artist Tarek Atoui. These explorations led to the creation of two new solo works: “From One War to Another” and “Lungless”. Though radically different in form, both compositions evoke the trauma of the many wars I lived through, from my childhood in Beirut to my present days in Berlin, two cities once scarred by division and conflict.

For his “Reverse Collection” project, Lebanese sound artist Tarek Atoui invited several improvising musicians from Berlin and Beirut in 2015 to explore the Dahlem Museum’s collection of ancient, folkloric and ethnic instruments. I was among the guest musicians and spent two days applying my self-invented techniques and preparations for the trumpet to a range of old wind instruments from various cultures around the world. Based on the recordings from this initial phase of the project, Atoui later created new instruments, which were showcased in 2018 at the Tate Modern, where they were played by another group of improvising musicians from London.

In 2020, Atoui invited musicians from Berlin to play these new instruments at a private event in the small town of Güldenhof, Brandenburg. I was part of the ensemble, and finally discovered the outcome of a process I had been involved in five years earlier. I was particularly drawn to “Les Trompes de Poutine” (“Putin’s Horns”), an instrument built for Atoui by Thierry Madiot, consisting of five trunks controlled by air valves that produce sounds strikingly similar to his own. In 2022, I spent a week in Güldenhof exploring the instrument’s possibilities, which led me to conceive a modified version capable of transforming into six simultaneously playable prepared trumpets.

The modified instrument was built between 2024 and 2025 and was named “Putin’s Organ”, in reference to the Soviet multiple rocket launcher used in World War II, which German troops nicknamed “Stalin’s Organ” (“Stalinorgel”). This infamous rocket launcher was heavily in use during the Lebanese Civil War (1975–1990). During those fifteen years, rockets were the only objects that could easily cross the Green Line, which divided Beirut into two parts, isolated by barricades and checkpoints. I was born in the same year as the civil war began, and grew up in the predominantly Christian East Beirut, while Atoui was raised in West Beirut. The two of us, who could never have met in their childhood, were first introduced to each other in 2007 by Michel Waisvisz in Amsterdam.

“Lungless” is a composition born from the painful nostalgia of childhood during the civil war. From my voluntary exile in the once-divided city of Berlin where the spectre of war is following me, I evoke memories of East Beirut, another fractured city where I grew up, often fantasising about its other half. After the war, the previously unbridgeable communication gap between the inhabitants of the two sides was gradually overcome by the realisation of how similarly they had experienced the conflict, particularly in terms of the shared soundscapes that defined their lives. The title “Lungless” should be understood both literally (the sound is generated by an air compressor) and figuratively (the inability to speak in the face of war’s violence). Additionally, it adds a deeper layer of meaning to the “organ” in the instrument’s name.

– Mazen Kerbaj

Georges Aperghis: Quatorze Jactations

Jactation (n.):
1. A tossing or swinging of the body to and fro; spec. in Pathology (1699–)
2. Boasting, bragging, ostentatious display (1576–)
From the Latin “jactātiōn-em”, noun of action from “jactāre”, to throw, toss about, discuss, boast of

– From Oxford English Dictionary

Evan Johnson: A general interrupter to ongoing activity

“A general interrupter to ongoing activity” is a study of the voice as an instrument that is uniquely capable of occluding itself. This occlusion takes place on a number of levels: the noisily tongue-blocked airflow of fricative and sibilant consonants, which comprise the fundamental sonic material of the piece; the diffusion of the text’s vowels into whistles and hisses, as more or less destructive background colorations; and the fragile compromises necessitated by an overloaded structure wherein almost every physical effort partially overwrites every other. The result is a navigation of the boundary between audible and inaudible, communicable and private, vocal and muscular.
The text, an anonymous Middle English versification of a passage from Augustine’s “Confessions”, is meant as both an evocative epigraph and a source of occlusive possibilities and repetitive structures:

Thole [ie., “wait”] yet, thole a litel
But yet and yet was endeles 
And thole a litel a long wey is

– Evan Johnson

Timothy McCormack: Seated at the Throat

song i
Beyond the mouth,
Swelled & heavy,
Ghosts nest in my passage,
Sprawled upon my nodes

This grave is loud.
Dead sex echoes
In the carrier

song ii
my Stowaway, 
our hosts…
I eat and am eaten.

song iii
Unfurl the tongue.
Flare the throat.
My fleshy altar
A seat to offer

You’ll find me,
Sunken,
Hungrier than the ghost
 
– Timothy McCormack

Ayanna Witter-Johnson: Songs of the Abeng

“Songs of the Abeng” takes us on a journey to uncover stories of triumph and wisdom that have liberated a rich and powerful people. The Abeng, a cow horn, was used to carry coded messages among the Maroon people in Jamaica’s hills, guarding against British Colonial Forces during the Transatlantic Slave Trade. This coded language was a warning, a signal and a primary tool of guerrilla warfare that lasted hundreds of years. With its rousing rhythms and mighty melodies, “Songs of the Abeng” delves into this language, uncovering the stories the Abeng holds and its ongoing messages for us today.

– Ayanna Witter-Johnson

Elena Rykova: Vicissitudes

“Vicissitudes” explores the interplay between the trumpet’s acoustic properties and the performer’s physicality. The title reflects the ever-changing nature of the instrument’s sonic landscapes, shaped by the labyrinthine pathways of its valves and tubing. Through this internal maze, the soloist navigates a vast palette of colours, polyphonic textures and delicate sonorities. With precise muscle control and focused intent, the performer transforms the physical complexity of the instrument into an intricate sonic architecture. This piece celebrates not only the craftsmanship of the double bell trumpet, but also Marco Blaauw’s infectious passion for its boundless exploration – a passion that remains one of my greatest sources of musical inspiration.

– Elena Rykova

George Lewis: Buzzing

This piece came out of a very jovial conversation I had with Marco Blaauw about extended techniques for the trumpet. He mentioned that many of the scores he is sent require techniques such as clicking the valves, knocking on the instrument or almost inaudible breath noises. “What about good old ‘buzzing’?” he joked. As a brass player myself‚ I understood immediately. In our very first trombone lesson in school, back in 1960, Ray Anderson and I used a technique that would now be called an extended technique, blowing air through the instrument. Nothing came out – at least nothing anyone would associate with the stentorian character of the trombone, what Hildegard von Bingen called “God’s trombone.” Our teacher, Frank Tirro, came in and saw us and he wasn’t impressed. Then he said: “To play the trombone, you’ve got to start with buzzing.” He demonstrated the technique, first with his lips and then with his lips on the mouthpiece of the trombone. The sound was almost deafening. That was the beginning of a lifetime of buzzing. “Buzzing” is the latest work in my series of “recombinant” works that I began in 2010 with “Les Exercices Spirituels” for octet and live electronics. In these works, acoustic sounds are transformed by interactive digital delays, spatialisation and timbre transformation. At times the trumpet sounds like the old trumpet and ratchet instrument that I saw in the Museo Nacional de Antropología in Mexico City. I imagined the sound of hundreds of these instruments played by musicians moving across a sports ground in Teotihuacan. The word “buzzing” cuts across linguistic boundaries. Marco told me: “The word is onomatopoeic, and it can be understood in Dutch, German and English – and maybe other languages too.” Although I promised Marco that I would mainly use the amazing things that happen when his lips are buzzing, I’ve allowed myself a couple of knocking and Aeolian sounds that are then amplified and transformed using software written by Damon Holzborn of Rustleworks LLC.

– George Lewis

Peter Jakober: little beauty

“little beauty” is a composition for brass and woodwind instruments by Peter Jakober, written for 88 individual voices. The project will be realised together with amateur musicians who play brass or woodwind instruments with varying levels of experience. During the performance, which will take place on the long concrete ramp at silent green, visitors will be accompanied by the sounds of “little beauty” as they make their way into the Betonhalle, where it will be followed by the concert of the Monochrome Project.

Claudia Molitor: Fever

Ancient trumpets may have been a way to call to nature, to connect to other creatures, to tell stories about nature and human experience, to signal to other humans, to come together and communicate. Maybe, as Marco Blaauw hypothesises, early trumpet-like instruments might have been a sonic answer to the natural noises people heard around them, or even a loud expression to process trauma. We continue to do all these things through making music, tell stories, reach out to others, create social encounters and rituals, tell of our despair and hope. “Fever” for me is an answer to the noises we are surrounded by in the early 21st century, the noises that are a sonic marker of our destructive human ways. A call for hope of reconnecting to each other and our fellow creatures, to find a way to live with our environment, not against it.

– Claudia Molitor

Sivan Cohen Elias: Who-He-Huh

“Who-He-Huh” embraces the confusion of our time at its core, where our identities are shredded into fragments of realities. In the plot, the singer is a social-media presenter who gives a tutorial on “how to teach your avatar emotions”. In parallel, she also creates a DIY figure that starts to move on the table. The piece is designed as a sequence of connected miniatures combining theatrical elements, visually and sonically, while using fixed media, live electronics and video.

– Sivan Cohen Elias

Nwando Ebizie: Dahlia (and you will be there forever and ever)

A ritual experience for one performer. A practice: committing to the experience of joy. Encompassing vivid memories of a wedding, a proposal, a dance and a dress. A reclaiming of what is beautiful. A heralding of new spring and a determination to grow.

– Nwando Ebizie

Diana Soh: La Ville-Zizi

“La Ville-Zizi” will be a virtuosic, non-stop, rapid-fire vocal work where the body of the performer is also solicited and her movements choreographed directly into the score. The text of the piece is translated and adapted from a feminist play by French actress and playwright Marion Aubert titled “Les Orpheline” (2009). The play begins with a foreword stating that there are countries in the world where baby girls are killed once they are born – an already striking statement that resonated with me, and one that further lured me into Marion Aubert’s universe. In her “absurd” and imaginary world, the character Monsieur is investigating the disappearances of little girls throughout the story. With his bags packed, he sets off on his journey but is almost immediately captured and imprisoned by a band of little girls, whose leader Violaine is one of those very missing girls. Violaine lives in an imaginary world and she gathers together all the little girls that do not have the right to live. During 30 days and 30 nights, Monsieur will encounter the hard lives of Violaine and her imaginary friends, including a she-devil (La Diablonne) and a he-devil (Le Diablon). There are numerous retellings of short stories in this play, one of which is the story about La ville de Zizi (the town of Zizi; it is noteworthy that “zizi” is a french children’s slang for penis and “zézette” is the slang for vagina). The story is told by La Diablonne, the persona and role that Laura Bowler (soprano) will undertake in this work “La Ville-Zizi”.

– Diana Soh

Milica Djordjević: Monochrome, light blue darkness

This is a comprehensive study of crystallised tones as an area that appears to remain static from the outside, its reflections changing from metallic to matt, while on the inside it is kinetic and constantly shimmering in a bright blue shadow of the darkness.

– Milica Djordjević

Dai Fujikura: Shimmer

Music is about communication. And the most important part of composing for me is collaboration. In this case with the trumpeter Marco Blaauw. […] We have known each other since 2005, and I have heard him play many pieces, but it was only in the pandemic that we started working together. Marco wanted to play a series of my solo works that weren’t written for the trumpet – they included a solo piece for bass flute and a solo work for the horn. I also wrote a piece for shō and electronics: the shō is a traditional Japanese mouth organ. Marco played this piece on the trumpet with electronics. I love writing music that gives the soloist the feeling that this music is capable of getting the best out of him. When I began writing the trumpet concerto, I was already familiar with Marco playing my own music. I sent Marco fragments of my music, and he would record them and send them back to me. I could then listen to the recordings, and this would inspire me to write the next part, and so on. A key question was how to make the trumpet sound sensual without giving the impression of a fanfare or some sort of powerful brass sound. I’m a big brass fan, but I don’t like the typical brass sound used in classical music. […]

– Dai Fujikura

Liza Lim: Shallow Grave

There’s an image that sticks in my mind: March 2022, 12 days into the war in Ukraine, a military brass band stands around a bomb crater playing into the hole. The image echoes on in our times of extreme and often incomprehensible violence and I’ve been thinking a lot about music’s power to address and reach into a hole in the ground and pull back up some life energy from what has been destroyed. The power of music to speak to the dead, to reach back in time and unwind something; to make passages for the living; music as a living knot in time between the ancestral and the unborn – these are some basic themes of recent work. “Shallow Grave” is in two parts. In the first part, Marco Blaauw plays a “Neolithic” horn, a replica of a 3,000-year-old terracotta horn excavated from a rock shelter in Vallabrix, Southern France, made by ceramic artist André Schlauch as part of the European Music Archaeology project. It’s shaped like an animal horn but I think of it as a lump of earth with a mouth. The second part of the piece, for the low-voiced alto trumpet in F, is music of bitter and sardonic humour for an imaginary “Punch and Judy” show. There the living haunt the dead.

– Liza Lim

Mazen Kerbaj: With a Little Help From My Friends II: From One War to Another

In the mid-1990s, I was studying illustration and graphic design at the Lebanese Academy of Fine Arts while also publishing comics in local magazines. It was during this time that my friend, guitarist Sharif Sehnaoui, gave me a trumpet he had no use for. Although I had no prior experience playing any instrument, I went on to develop a very personal approach to the trumpet, creating my own techniques by using everyday objects to prepare and transform the instrument, completely altering both its form and sound.

Three decades later, following a sabbatical year in 2024, I am setting the trumpet aside and exploring two new instruments, both invented by close friends: the late musician and instrument inventor Michel Waisvisz and sound artist Tarek Atoui. These explorations led to the creation of two new solo works: “From One War to Another” and “Lungless”. Though radically different in form, both compositions evoke the trauma of the many wars I lived through, from my childhood in Beirut to my present days in Berlin, two cities once scarred by division and conflict.

During the 2006 Lebanon War, I recorded myself playing the trumpet on my balcony in Beirut while Israeli airplanes relentlessly bombed the city. From nearly twelve hours of recordings, I posted a six-minute excerpt titled “Starry Night” on my blog, describing it as a duo for trumpet and bombs. In the pre-social media era, the piece was reposted across various blogs, websites and email chains among friends and acquaintances, bringing me widespread support, especially from the international experimental music community. 

In one such email, Dutch musician Michel Waisvisz – who ran the STEIM Institute for electronic music research in Amsterdam – invited me to flee Lebanon with my family and stay at STEIM until the war ended. While I chose to remain in Beirut, this email sparked a close and intense friendship between us that lasted for two years, until Waisvisz’s passing in 2008.

Over the course of two years, Michel Waisvisz introduced me to the Crackle Synth, an instrument he invented in the 1970s that holds a unique place in music history. It is one of the earliest self-sufficient, battery-powered electronic instruments with integrated speakers, and one of the few that uses the physicality of the player’s body to generate sound through its pioneering “touch” board, which is controlled and triggered by the fingers. Gradually, I adopted the synth as a second instrument and felt the urge to transform it in the same way I had with the trumpet. Modifying the original, which existed in only twelve copies worldwide, was out of the question, so I decided to build my own modified version based on Waisvisz’s schematics.

Work on the new instrument began in 2018, in collaboration with Sukandar Kartadinata, and was not completed until 2024, amid the Israeli war on Gaza – an event that brought back painful memories of the 2006 Lebanon War. In 2006, I witnessed the war from the perspective of the victim; now, in 2024, I find myself in the difficult position of the remote witness, watching helplessly as a never-ending bloodbath unfolds daily on my screen. The memory of violence experienced firsthand has been replaced by the voyeurism of violence inflicted on others. This shift in one’s role in the face of horror inspired the composition “From One War to Another”, in which I blend acoustic, electro-acoustic and electronic sounds in an attempt to exorcise my past fears, present anger and the visceral anxiety I have been feeling recently about the future. 

– Mazen Kerbaj

Milica Djordjević: New work for bass clarinet, trumpet and percussion

In 2022/23, I was working on “Nalet”, a large ensemble work to be premiered by Ensemble Musikfabrik, conducted by Ilan Volkov, in January 2023. At the same time, I was working on solo pieces for Carl Rosman, Marco Blaauw and Dirk Rothbrust, which would be premiered a few months later in the Acht Brücken festival. Some of their personal favourite techniques turned out to be particularly effective in combination (Carl’s and Marco’s split tones with Dixi’s scraped tiles; Marco’s pedal notes with Carl’s low flutter-tongued contrabass clarinet, etc.), and it was inevitable that “Nalet”  would feature these three players in extended trio passages. It was equally inevitable that aspects of some of these passages would eventually find a home outside the larger work, combined with other materials in a new trio.

– Milica Djordjević

Liza Lim: Incandescent Tongue

Eating Fire
Eating fire
is your ambition:
to swallow the flame down
take it into your mouth
and shoot it forth, a shout or an incandescent
tongue, a word
exploding from you in gold, crimson,
unrolling in a brilliant scroll
To be lit up from within
vein by vein
To be the sun

– Margaret Atwood

Liza Lim: Microbiome

The parasite doesn’t stop. It doesn’t stop eating or drinking or yelling or burping or making thousands of noises or filling space with its swarming and din.

– Michel Serres, “The Parasite”

Oscar Bianchi: Confessioni

With a playful nod to the unruly spirit of early duplum – that liberated second voice of medieval polyphony that later blossomed into bold contrapuntal adventures – the two protagonists carve out a peculiar expressive space, one that questions and probes: Am I your shadow? Your alter ego? They confess in turns, weaving between existential musings and lyrical litanies – reflections that might just be projections of their own uncertain natures. In this exchange, they become vehicles for vibrant emotional propositions, hinting at new frontiers of expressivity.

Stripped of accompaniment – “naked,” in the sense of pure, unadorned presence – the soprano and trumpet inhabit a shared sonic space where their identities blur and intermingle. Here, ideas don’t march forward in straight lines; they ripple, echo and occasionally trip over themselves. They might well embody “the fluid nature of creativity” – a state where a thought morphs into a gesture, a mood becomes a motive, and nothing stays pinned down for long. Like two dreamers in parallel monologues, their paths crossing in real time, not quite knowing where they’re headed but listening intently as they go – celebrating, in that very uncertainty, a sense of togetherness and possibility.

Raven Chacon: Whistle Quartet

“Whistle Quartet” replicates the way one or ones might learn a song from an elder or leader, how one or ones become part of a group, and how one or ones become leaders when their leader is no longer there.

– Raven Chacon

Raven Chacon: Call for the Company, in the Morning

The work references the tradition of fox-hunting horn calls and signals as material for creating an open landscape of drones, with interludes marking the passing of the outdoor day. The composition considers the strive for ecological balance, utilising musical instruments to aid in hunting, though devolving into sport, and corrupting the instrument’s tone into a timbre of fear.