Blaauw, Marco
has an international career as a soloist and is a member of Ensemble Musikfabrik in Cologne. An important focus of his work is to further develop the instrument and its playing technique and to initiate new repertoire.
Blaauw works in close collaboration with both the established and younger composers of our time. Many composers have written especially for Blaauw, such as Peter Eötvös, Georg Friedrich Haas, Wolfgang Rihm, Marcin Stańczyk, John Zorn, and Agata Zubel. Blaauw also worked intensely with Karlheinz Stockhausen for seventeen years, and premiered many pieces from the cycles LICHT and KLANG.
His collaborations with Rebecca Saunders started in 1998. He has premiered fourteen works, including Alba in 2015 with the Bavarian Radio. Saunders and Blaauw are working on concrete plans for future works.
In 2015 he established the trumpet ensemble Monochrome Project. In direct communication with La Monte Young, he produced the eight-trumpet version of The Second Dream of the High Tension Line Stepdown Transformer, bringing La Monte Young’s groundbreaking work to audiences throughout Europe. Monochrome Project premiered an evening-long work by Anthony Braxton during the 2018 Ruhrtriennale.
Marco Blaauw initiated Global Breath in 2016, a worldwide research project on the trumpet, beginning with a series of interviews with international trumpet pioneers. The first stage of this research will culminate in a Global Breath conference in 2020. Blaauw’s work is widely documented through radio, television and CD recordings. His sixth solo CD, Angels, was awarded the Preis der Deutschen Schallplattenkritik in 2014. As a composer, Blaauw was awarded the 2016 Karl Sczuka Prize (support grant) for his first radio play, deathangel.
Blaauw is also intensely active as a teacher, including at masterclasses, leading the Brass Academy at the Summer Courses for New Music in Darmstadt, as a guest teacher at the Lucerne Festival Academy, and most recently teaching a master’s programme at the Royal Conservatoire in The Hague.