With Georg Friedrich Haas' »I can't breathe« we remember Eric Garner and George Floyd and all the other victims of racist violence and systemic oppression!

»I can’t breathe«, for solo trumpet, in memoriam Eric Garner, begins fairly traditionally with a lament: a free cantilena in a twelve-tone space. Then the intervals narrow, the voice sounds increasingly choked, finally reaching a sixteenth-tone scale. In an extreme tonal range and changing tone colours, this constricting lament stands as a perhaps cautious symbol for the world from which the victim was violently wrenched.

GEORG FRIEDRICH HAAS »I can’t breathe« for solo trumpet (2014)

Marco Blaauw solo trumpet

Edivaldo Ernesto dance

The performance was recorded on 27 June 2020 in the cour d'honneur of the Ludwigsburg Palace as part of the concert week »Al fine da capo«.