MaerzMusik: silent green 1

Mazen Kerbaj // Ty Bouque // Global Breath 1

This year, we are once again hosting the MaerzMusik festival of the Berliner Festspiele. The 2025 edition focuses on unique percussion and brass constellations, participatory formats, post-digital music theater, and diverse perspectives on voice and breath.

The first evening opens with the world premiere of Mazen Kerbaj’s new work Lungless, which reworks the composer’s painful childhood memories of the Lebanese civil war in sonic form: “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).” This is followed by a solo concert from baritone Ty Bouque, which navigates the boundaries between the audible and the inaudible, the communicable and the private, the vocal and the muscular through works that include a study of the voice by Evan Johnson. Bouque’s relationship to sound is explicitly queer, luminous and introspective, barren and vulnerable. 

The programme is completed by a concert by the research project Global Breath, initiated by Marco Blaauw, for which the musician has explored the meaning of a trumpet sound in different cultural contexts around the world since 2016. Numerous new works have emerged from this research; the compositions by Ayanna Witter-Johnson, Elena Rykova, George Lewis and Aaron Holloway-Nahum offer some initial glimpses.

Programme

Mazen Kerbaj
Lungless. With a Little Help From My Friends I
for Putin’s Organ (2025)
Commissioned by MaerzMusik
World premiere

Ty Bouque: Seated at the Throat
Georges Aperghis
Quatorze Jactations
for solo voice (2001)

Evan Johnson
A general interrupter to ongoing activity
for solo voice (2011)

Timothy McCormack
Seated at the Throat
for solo voice (2024)
dedicated to Ty Bouque
German premiere

Global Breath 1
Ayanna Witter-Johnson
Songs of the Abeng
for trumpet and electronics (2025)
World premiere

Elena Rykova
Vicissitudes
for double bell trumpet and electronics (2023)

George Lewis
Buzzing
for trumpet and live electronics (2024)

Aaron Holloway-Nahum
I Contemplate Snippets of Silence and Find them Few
for double bell trumpet, baritone and electronics (2023)

Cast
Mazen Kerbaj
Putin's organ

Ty Bouque
Voice

Marco Blaauw
Double bell trumpet

Aaron Holloway-Nahum
Electronic

Ty Bouque
Baritone

Global Breath is supported by Ernst von Siemens Musikstiftung and Kunststiftung NRW.

Friday, March 28
Kuppelhalle
5 pm until 8:15 pm
Tickets