condition (record/cover): VG+ (small mark producing clics for a few seconds at the end of side B otherwise EX) / VG (tape repair of spine and seams plus minimal wear) | Two works by Mauricio Kagel for a single performer, tape, and the entire history of what it means to blow into a metal tube. Atem für einen Bläser (1969-70) - "Breath for a Wind Player" - takes the most fundamental act of playing a wind instrument and makes it the subject rather than the medium of the music. Breath as vital force, as physical labor, as theatrical gesture, as sound in itself. The piece gives the performer the means to play with their breath, their instrument, and the full arsenal of professional technique - but reframed, estranged, made audible in ways that concert decorum normally suppresses. It has become a key work of the contemporary wind repertoire, one of those pieces that must be studied and analyzed even by players who will never perform it, because it changes what you hear when you listen to any wind instrument afterward.

Morceau de Concours für einen Trompeter (1968-70) takes aim at one of the most venerable institutions of French musical life: the morceau de concours, the competition piece commissioned annually by the Paris Conservatoire for its instrumental examinations. A genre designed to test technique within the confines of good taste - Kagel subjects it to the same loving, corrosive scrutiny he applied to Beethoven in Ludwig van and to the concert ritual in Staatstheater. The trumpet is both instrument and institution, the soloist both performer and defendant. Kagel himself prepared the tape parts and artwork for both works - the composer as total designer of the sonic and visual environment.

The performer is Edward H. Tarr (1936-2020), credited here on cornett and baroque trumpet - a detail that tells the whole story. Tarr was the pre-eminent historical brass player of the twentieth century: student of Roger Voisin and Adolph Herseth, faculty at the Schola Cantorum Basiliensis, author of Die Trompete (1977), the foundational text on the instrument's history. His Nonesuch recordings of baroque trumpet repertoire defined the field. That this same musician was equally committed to the avant-garde - performing Kagel's Acustica alongside Vinko Globokar, recording these two solo works that demolish every convention of trumpet playing - says everything about the depth of his musicianship. He approaches Kagel's deconstructions with the same scholarly precision and expressive commitment he brought to Fantini and Biber: the history of the trumpet, from cornett to avant-garde, embodied in a single player.