Why the trumpet? “I’ve always had in mind the image of a troubadour, spreading the news through music. I wanted to do that too—with my trumpet. The task I see for me is to further develop the instrument, its playing technique, and to initiate new repertoire.”

Marco Blaauw has an international career as a soloist and is a member of the Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne. He works in close collaboration with both established and younger composers of our time. Many works have been written especially for Blaauw, including compositions by Peter Eötvös, Georg Friedrich Haas, Wolfgang Rihm, and Rebecca Saunders. He has worked intensely with Karlheinz Stockhausen. Flying over the orchestra in a gimbaled cage, he played the leading role in Stockhausen’s MICHAELs REISE. He presented the premiere of HARMONIES for trumpet at the BBC Proms at Royal Albert Hall and has premiered many solo roles from the opera cycle LICHT. In 2014 he started working with La Monte Young and The Theatre of Eternal Music Brass Ensemble on the melodic version of The Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer. This ensemble has started performing this summer in New York and is touring in Europe this autumn.

Marco Blaauw’s work is widely documented through radio, television, and CD recordings. He started a series of solo CDs in 2005, the sixth of which, Angels, was awarded the 2014 German Record Critics' Award.