A native of Pittsburgh, Andy Kozar is a New York City and Boston based trumpeter, improviser, composer and educator. He is a founding member of loadbang and the Byrne:KozarDuo, and has performed with Sigur Ros, Queens of the Stone Age, Bang on a Can, Ensemble Signal, Boston Modern Orchestra Project, and the St. Petersburg Ballet. Andy is a Yamaha Performing Artist.
Andy Kozar’s Ein Horn features works for multiple trumpets that reference the instrument’s historical roles while pointing the way to ambitious new directions. Featuring music by Mauricio Kagel, Harrison Birtwistle, Eve Beglarian, Elizabeth Hoffman, Lei Liang, and Eric Richards, Kozar’s thoughtful curation and powerful performances make this far more than a survey of new trumpet music and continues to demonstrate why he is one of its most ardent and prolific advocates.
FONT: How did the concept for Ein Horn come about, and what story were you hoping to tell through the combination of the trumpet ensembles’ historical references and forward looking trumpet repertoire?
ANDY KOZAR: To be completely frank, the way I program concerts and albums is guided less by a pre-determined singular story than by a few foundational pieces that, to me, seem to say something to each other. For this album, the first piece I took to the studio was the title track, Eve Beglarian’s Ein horn, not because I knew then that I wanted to make an album called Ein horn, but because I love the piece and the composer. Like most of Eve’s music, the piece is a nesting doll of meaning: originally written for one French horn (Ein horn), it’s based on a Rilke poem about a unicorn (Einhorn). Starting from there, the project evolved into what you see now, an album for one trumpet. Or maybe more accurately, one trumpeter. What can I build with just one horn?
What was your process for selecting the works, and were there any pieces you discovered during the project that changed the direction of the album?
The initial idea for the record, and the subsequent curation, started during the pandemic. A few of the pieces on the album (Beglarian, Hoffman, and Liang) were written or adapted for me, and I had been planning to eventually record them since the PDFs arrived in my inbox. The Eric Richards pieces are really special to me. I was quite fortunate to have befriended Eric a few years before his passing, and though his pieces on this project were written before I was even born, they had never been recorded. Since his death in 2020, I’ve been trying to record and promote as much of his music as possible.
Since I started working professional in NYC around 2007, and then in Boston as well starting in 2019, I, like so many musicians, had been going gig to gig, essentially non-stop, and that was the dream! For obvious reasons, in 2020 there was a mandated break from this way of working, and with that ‘time off’ came a new sense of space and agency. I wasn’t practicing the music I needed to for ‘work,’ there was no work. So I started digging deeper into our instrument’s pre-existing and under-performed repertoire. Some music is under-performed because, well, it’s just not that good, and that’s how it goes. But there’s so much fascinating work out there that’s underperformed for reasons entirely separate from quality. Perhaps it’s un-pragmatic: too many players, too difficult. It’s this repertoire I love to sit with, to pick at, to see what’s really there. That was how I stumbled on Harrison Birtwistle’s “Placid Mobile” for 36 trumpets, and though there was a live recording of the premiere, there wasn’t yet a studio recorded commercial release. I saw this as a huge opportunity, and a way that I could contribute something to our shared body of musical work. Here, sitting untouched, was a real gem from one of the most important composers of the 20th century. It was a privilege and treat to be the one to document this piece. And while I’ve performed and programmed Mauricio Kagel’s Fanfanfaren for 4 trumpets a handful of times, I realized this too didn’t yet have a commercially available recording, and so I decided that both of the works just had to be on the project.
Can you talk about any particular technical or expressive challenges you encountered while performing these pieces, and how they shaped your approach to playing on this record?
First things first, performers on albums always get the credit for the quality of the record, but I’m not sure this whole thing would have been possible, let alone turn out as well as I think it did, without an incredible friend, collaborator, and colleague. Ryan Streber, who owns and runs Oktaven Audio, a dream of a studio up in Mt. Vernon, NY, did all the recording, editing, and mastering on this project. Overdubbing yourself is a painstaking project, physically exhausting (36 trumpet parts?!) and emotionally trying, but Ryan, thanks to his skill and instincts, made this as easy as it could be.
For the Birtwistle, Kagel, and Richards, I created click tracks that I both practiced to and recorded with. Taking the consideration of global time off my plate allowed me to dedicate my complete bandwidth to locking in the intonation, clarity of line, and overall ensemble color. For just about all of these, I also started by recording the lowest voices which helped to balance and stabilize the subsequent layering of parts. Calling this process fun might sound odd to some, but I love being in the studio, dreaming up a large projects and chipping away them, note by note, part by part, piece by piece.
What do you hope listeners, especially other trumpeters, take away from Ein Horn in terms of the trumpet’s evolving voice?
Instruments–not to mention the people that play them–often get typecast or stereotyped. My hope is that with albums like this, we can continue the work of shedding these preexisting notions of what any particular instrument should sound like, or the types of music they should play, and be open instead to what, in the right hands, they are capable of. As trumpeters, we’re lucky to play an instrument this versatile and expressive. We can’t forget that and it’s essential that we push ourselves, our students, our colleagues, and the composers we work with, to continue mining those depths of potential. Why shouldn’t 36 trumpets sound extraordinarily beautiful and gentle? The possibilities are endless, and that keeps me doing my hours of fundamentals every day!
After living with this music throughout the recording process, do you feel it changed your relationship with the instrument at all?
I’m not sure that it changed my relationship to the instrument, but I will say that it further established what was already a very established commitment to recording. Albums were everything to me as a student. Already in high school, I was constantly begging my parents for money to buy more CDs. It was these albums that taught me about repertoire, the diverse ways people play their instruments, and levels of playing I didn’t know was possible. I want to be a small part of that tradition and body of work for generations of trumpeters and artists to come.
