At the end of January 2024, our trombonist, Bruce Collings, will retire from the ensemble.

After appearing regularly with us as a guest, Bruce became a member in the 1995/1996 concert season. In some of his first projects, he wasn’t hired to play the trombone but to step in on the euphonium. Two remarkable pieces are worth noting: a complex work by James Dillon and a brass quintet by Hans Werner Henze. Both parts were extreme in register, virtuosity, microtonality, determination, and perseverance. A perfect match for the ensemble!

Throughout his career, Bruce combined his position in the ensemble with his job in the Bergische Symphoniker Orchestra. The orchestra demanded his mastery of classical skills,encompassing the orchestral sound, articulation, and interpretation of the well-known repertoire. Ensemble Musikfabrik asked the opposite: something new and different for every piece. Juggling both positions required Bruce to travel between Solingen and Cologne, often to do a morning rehearsal with the orchestra and an afternoon rehearsal with the ensemble, only to turn around and return for the orchestra concert in the evening.

Finding this wide range of skills, combined with flexibility and good stamina in one person, is unique and made him one of the most outstanding trombone players around, culminating in invitations from other leading New Music ensembles in Europe.

It is impossible to mention all the projects in which Bruce played a significant role. Still, it is important to highlight a few:

DRY–TSAYN

The tour and CD production of Karlheinz Stockhausen’s MOMENTE in 1998 was conducted by Rupert Huber, with the famous composer himself as sound engineer. Bruce’s contact with Stockhausen sparked an interest in his repertoire that remained and grew, coming to fruition in the staged productions of MICHAELS REISE (2008) and SONNTAG AUS LICHT (2011).

Throughout his opera cycle LICHT, Stockhausen gives the trombone a significant solo role as the protagonist Lucifer, which requires the memorization of choreography and complex musical parts.

Bruce invested a lot in developing this role. His sound, energy, and interpretation gave Lucifer a new voice. These performances have been documented on CD and video and are now a valuable example for future generations of trombonists.

An essential feature of the Lucifer character is his obsession with counting the numbers up to thirteen. Bruce’s American accent gave the German number a unique and unforgettable sound.

FORTY–THREE

The project DELUSION OF THE FURY, a music theater piece by composer Harry Partch, offered a whole new package of challenges for the ensemble, not in the least for Bruce.

Director Heiner Goebbels placed Bruce in key roles in both mysterious stories: As the ghost of an old warrior in the Noh drama and as the blind judge in the African folktale. Both roles reveal uncomfortable truths.

In Delusion of the Fury, the composer required the musicians to sing and act, which is an exciting but tricky challenge. The director managed to cast the musicians of the Musikfabrik in roles based not on acting skills but on the character traits available within the ensemble. The way we know Bruce as a colleague, his roles seemed a perfect match!

PROMETHEUS

We remember another role: the moving scene in the production KUNST MUSS (ZU WEIT GEHEN) or DER ENGEL SCHWIEG. The composer Helmut Oehring placed Bruce on a high platform. In his famous trademark full lotus yoga posture, he faced a young boy and told how the trombone became an essential part of his life.

The boy reflects on his words, referring to Prometheus, “Prometheus – the one who thinks ahead – didn’t bring fire from heaven just so that the sausage roasters could do business; He brought it so the earth would burn. He was one cunning son of a Titan. When the breaking of taboos has become chic and grand in the hands of the sausage roasters, a thing in which the bourgeoisie finds more and more pleasure and earns more and more money, then art must recede; oh no, not to return fire to heaven, but cunning as all forward-thinkers are, to seek and find a way to save what is free, orderly, inconsolable. In other words, all that is poetic about love, possibly by taking a detour via chastity to protect it from the tattered freedoms.”

With a shrewd philosophical comment of a young boy, the composer puts Bruce on the spot and reveals the real intent behind his playing: to seek, find, and save freedom! During the monologue, Bruce illustrates the words with Mahler’s iconic trombone solo from the Third Symphony.
The trombone becomes a sacred instrument.
It can put the world on fire!

The Old Testament refers to the sound of trombone-like shofars that break down the walls of Jericho.
Or shall we think a little more down to earth?

The trombone becomes a vehicle to move through the world, settle in Germany, and feed a family. A megaphone for self-expression to create crazy sounds that cause friction, full of the heat that we associate with fire.
Our ears burn.

HERMES

Remember his start in the ensemble? As a virtuoso euphonium player?

Since then, he has continuously worked on widening his horizons and maintaining and developing skills. Bruce’s fire kept him practicing – always trying to make his playing more precise, more accurate, never giving up when his part seemed impossible to play – practicing before, during and after rehearsals!

The trombone is often perceived as a slow-moving instrument with its endless slide of seven positions. Yet it becomes an agile and fast-moving voice in Bruces’s hands.

It was as if he wore Hermes’ winged shoes when he was given a chance to solo over the music of Frank Zappa – now on our CD “Frank Zappa, Bad Doberan & Elsewhere.”

This intensity can also be heard in how he speaks about the trombone.

His words, loaded with information, flow nonstop and at high speed.

The problem is…

Sometimes, overwhelmed by the copious possibilities proffered by Bruce on his trom- bone, young composers’ ears would turn red and their eyes big, often leaving the room stupefied and in awe. Many established composers have gratefully used all these rich sources to create a repertoire with new sounds on the trombone. Liza Lim, Georg Friedrich Haas, George Lewis, Enno Poppe and Rebecca Saunders, to name a few big names, wrote significant parts for Bruce.

And if you, dear reader, are a trombone player dealing with issues that seem impossible to solve, ask Bruce! It will be a unique chance to meet someone with so much fire to solve problems or find ways to get it done.

Bruce will start discussing and practicing until that passage is smooth and working, until the impossible becomes possible, with you receiving a friendly laugh and many tips and ideas.

HEPHAESTUS

I cannot end this brief homage to my colleague without mentioning mutes. Indeed, most readers of this brochure might be unaware of these objects that brass players insert into the bell to change the color of the sound. Usually, the mutes are made of aluminum and have weird but exciting shapes. It takes a lot of skill, or even acro- batics, to insert or take them out while playing in the flow of the music (where com- posers often forget to allow enough time…).

Bruce has developed great skills to manage this, and on the rare occasions when he didn’t make it, the mutes sounded great when they hit the floor.

The shape of a mute can remind us of a flowervase, as one colleague from the ensemble noted when he got bored during the previously mentioned Momente production. In the middle of a recording session, he filled Bruce’s mute with almost two liters of water, a prank that Bruce professionally managed to hide from the entire crew.

We are not 100% sure, but we estimate that Bruce’s curiosity for sound colors has led him to gather Germany’s largest trombone mute collection. We are never surprised to see at least five mutes next to his chair, although the composer only asks for one, each to serve just a handful or even only one note. No effort is spared to make the best out of what the trombone part has to offer.

ZEUS

Bruce’s career at Ensemble Musikfabrik comes to an end, and we all cry.

We have traveled a lot, spent countless hours at tables of numerous restaurants, shared stories, shared lifetimes, and shared our passion for sounds and music (not always the same). Good times and bad times, lazy times and hard times, challenging music and easy music, masterpieces and works we have long forgotten.

We have shared countless magic moments of breaking a silence – completely synchronized in time, tuning, and dynamic – without any noticeable signal when to start, just synchronicity by breathing together. You can only do this with someone you have worked with for many years.

We will miss that!

Bruce was a member for 28 years.
What happened to time?
It takes a new orientation and bravery to move forward.

For inspiration, we can look to our philosophers and thinkers. Philosophy can help us process all these events, so I gathered some famous quotes from our Elders to help us accept the current situation.

“I think it’s really tragic when people get serious about stuff. It’s such an absurdity to take anything really seriously… I make an honest attempt not to take anything seriously: I worked that attitude out about the time I was eighteen, I mean, what does it all mean when you get right down to it, what’s the story here? Being alive is so weird.”
— Frank Zappa

“Nothing endures but change.”
— Heraclitus

“Time does not change us. It just unfolds us.”
— Max Frisch

“Time flies like an arrow; fruit flies like a banana.”
— Anthony G. Oettinger

“How did it get so late so soon?”
— Dr. Seuss

“The more sand has escaped from the hourglass of our life, the clearer we should see through it.”
— Niccolò Machiavelli

„Ich habe Zeit, um ihn reinzustecken, aber nicht um ihn rauszunehmen.“
— Bruce Collings

Dear Bruce:
Thank you for your sound, music, motivation, fascination and passion! They will always be part of Ensemble Musikfabrik’s epic story.

Marco Blaauw

On 6. November, the Monday Concert will feature the world premiere of Airs Between, a new work by Petros Ovsepyan. Curator Helen Bledsoe tells how she met the Armenian-American composer during her studies:

“Petros and I studied at Indiana University, Bloomington at the same time. We met there in 1988, he was studying composition with Claude Baker and I was playing in the Contemporary Music Ensemble. Petros grew up in the former Soviet Union, so he spoke Russian. Since I was minoring in Slavic Studies, I felt honored when I could hang out with him and the other Russian-speaking students, they were very patient with my attempts to speak in Russian!

Years later I arrived in Amsterdam on my first day of classes and the first person I saw in the Cantine was Petros! It was completely unexpected to see a familiar face. We did a lot of catching up, and I finally got to know his music as a performer – first his IV for flute, clarinet and trumpet, and The C of Love for flute and guitar. In 2014 I premiered his Precipitate/Reciperated für Flöte here in the Studio at Musikfabrik.”

Helen Bledsoe

On 29 January, we will perform the world premiere of Milica Djordjević’s work Nalet as part of our series “Musikfabrik im WDR” and at the ACHT BRÜCKEN festival we will be able to premiere solo compositions by the Serbian composer. Raoul Mörchen spoke with the her in anticipation and reveals how she creates a new piece.

Lucid sonic objects

Due to the current situation, our Monday Concert which was set for the 30th March, could not take place. For this program, curator Marco Blaauw and the ensemble’s brass section worked closely with composer Marcin Stanczyk. They prepared two of his new pieces collaboratively – as work in progress. Here on the blog, Marcin Stanczyk  gives insight into his work and answers some questions about the program, as it was originally planned.

At the next Monday Concert entitled “Progress”, the ensemble’s brass players planned to perform pieces that are still in development. How did this decision to present work in progress come about?

Me and the members of Musikfabrik brass quartet have talked several times in the past about a possibility to write a new piece for them. Their double-bell instruments have a very distinctive specific. You can’t learn about them from books because the development of these instruments is relatively new, so for now they are completely unique, made differently for each individual musician. The only way to understand them is to get to know their specifics from live experience, listening and working with the players. I have worked with the before, but rather as a part of a bigger ensemble. I thought if I wanted to write a  quartet for double-bell brass instruments, I needed more experience. I told this to the musicians and a few months later Marco Blaauw, the curator of this Montagskonzert, suggested to build the material for a new piece by working with prepared sketches, different ideas, trying their potential of further development and preset a work in progress. This way, we could show how a composer and musicians work together, develop new ideas and possibilities of the double-bell brass instruments.

What is the method of working to make Progress?

Progress is both the title of the concert and the temporary title of one of my pieces – a duo for Moog synthesizer and „electric” trumpet (equipped with a guitar amplifier). I connected this term with grès porcelain stoneware which has a high abrasion resistance. This made me think of solid sound blocks consisting of rough noise, which can be easily achieved with a Moog synthesizer, but in case of the trumpet unique skills (and amplificaton) are needed to control them.

But metaphorically speaking, I would say: I believe that to make progress in music, in composing and experiencing it, we need to go back to the real listening experience, which can still rise our imagination. I feel like now we are too obsessed with perceiving music “like computers”, as a succession of subsequent events built from more and more mixed and diverse elements, especially visuals which more often kill the music and only sometimes extend it. I am wondering why so many visual art directions from the XX century were directly and widely translated to music with one exception – surrealism. Does it mean that musicians had less imagination than painters?

Following this lead, for the double bell quartet I planned to prepare a multichannel recording of all four instruments in a resonant space and mix them with the music played live by those same musicians on those same instruments, while walking through the blindfolded audience. This would be a sort of metavirtual brass quartet built from two quartets and two different room resonances mixed up in hope of creating a kind of surrealistic experience. I believe that if we find in ourselves a kind of childish naivety, we can enjoy the music as a pure experience of space and sounds, and our imagination will create amazing surreal images, almost like a film, where the “story” will be projected not on the screen, but on our closed eyelids, and more than this – each “film” will be unique and different for every recipient.

One piece of the program is called “Aftersounds”, a concept which you were inspired by the optical phenomenon of “afterimage”. Can you explain what aftersounds are and how one can find them in your music?

I have been inspired by the idea of aftersounds or afterhearings for several years now. Over time, depending on the piece, the concept of “aftersounds” became to slightly differ, however, it is still based on a reflection on the sound itself, its possible meaning, and perception of the phenomenon of perspective. It can be considered on the level of pure musical material (resonances, reflections, contrasts), as well as metaphorically (when the composition becomes an afterimage of an external phenomenon). I am still trying to figure out what else an aftersound can be, how else can it be understood? In case of the new piece for Musikfabrik, I planned to refer to the original definition of an afterimage. In optics, “afterimage” is an image stored on the retina remaining longer than the duration of the viewing process. After transferring one’s gaze to another object, the eye superimposes and mixes the stored and the current images, utilizing a principle of complementary colors. I thought that in case of music, an aftersound could also be understood simply as the sound „stored in eyes” (or rather ears) remaining longer then the actually played sound – so the reverberation of the sound. The reverb can be produced in a natural way with the concert hall’s acoustic, or can also be reproduced with electronic sources, and finally can be mapped artificially with specific compositional processes. All of these methods interested me especially in case of double bell brass instruments, which have this unique possibility to create different sounds from each bell. I don’t want to talk too much about the specific technical solutions, which partially come out during the performance.

Thinking about the new piece, I also wanted to apply another way of understanding aftersounds by giving the audience an impression of a multiplied and spatialized sound, similar to the acousmatic music, however produced entirely by the instruments, not computers. I have used this idea before in some of my previous pieces and called it „musique acousmatique instrumentale”.

I am a little tired of the progressing visuality of musical art; I don’t see great musical progress in this trend and in most cases I found it rather worrisome. My musique acousamtique instrumentale seems to deny the traditional François Bayle’s concept of acousmatic music as music produced in the studio, which is then propagated through the loudspeakers and the listener doesn’t perceive the original source of the sounds. In fact, in the very beginning, acousmatic experience was an acoustic experience, practiced by Pythagoras’ students called akousmatikoi, who listened to him from behind the curtain to better focus on the content of his lectures. Much later, the term was used by poets, ex. Guillaume Appolinaire, followed by musicians Pierre Schaeffer and François Bayle, who created a new meaning of acousmatic music, excluding the live performance. And that, in my opinion, was a mistake. After the initial curiosity, the concerts of acousmatic music at the end of the 70s did not gain a great popularity, the audience did not accept concerts without the participation of the live musicians. I decided to go back to the origins of “acousmatique” and try to keep some of their advantages. The most fascinating element of acousmatic music is for me the possibility to track the trajectory of the sound, where I am constantly surprised by the movement of sounds in space. These impression were impossible to achieve with a acoustic performance, where we see the musicians and we can easily predict the sound movement in space. This is why I decided to invite the public to wear blindfolds (or just close their eyes) and unleash their fantasies and imagination. This will also be the case of the new piece for the Musikfabrik brass quartet.

You have already worked with the ensemble several times, can you tell us a bit about the collaboration?

We have worked several times before, first time for the piece “Blind Walk” commissioned by the Venice Biennale in 2015. I was amazed by the excellent musicianship and open-mindness of the Musikfabrik members and tried to invite them to collaborate on other works. This way “Some Drops” for trumpet and ensemble was created and played during polish “Sacrum Profanum” Festival, as well as Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival. More recently, the brass quartet accepted my invitation to take part in the multimedia one hour long show “Afterthoughts” composed on the occasion of 100 anniversary of Polish independence and performed in Szczecin Philharmonic. Now we are working on the next two pieces and I hope that this collaboration will continue and bear fruit again.

Besides the works for the brass quartet, what else are you working on at the moment? What are the sources of inspiration for these pieces?

I am working on a concerto for 6 solo saxophones and orchestra planned for March 2021 to be played by the National Polish Radio Orchestra in Katowice, and a flute solo piece which will have its premiere during Das Internationale Flöten Festival organized in September 2020 by the Deutschen Gesellschaft für Flöte in Freiburg. The sources of inspiration still revolve around the concept of aftersounds, afterhearings, afterthoughts and „musique acousmatique instrumentale”. I have already written many pieces entitled or connected with the idea of aftersounds and I still see a great potential in finding it or rediscovering it all over again.

The violinist Sara Cubarsi is the newest member of the Ensemble Musikfabrik. Born in Barcelona in 1991, she studied in London and California and has gained international recognition as a soloist, composer and chamber musician. Although her focus is on contemporary music, she loves to explore a wide variety of styles, and also performs on the baroque and the electric violin. Sara Cubarsi curates her first monday concert on March 2nd, 2020.