THE H DIARIES

RELEASE EXPECTED: 2027
 

The H Diaries grew out of a collaboration with visual artist Marianne Hollenstein and actress Katharina Weithaler, based on Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch. The performance brought together painting, spoken text and music, with Marianne developing a visual language around Arendt’s thoughts and Katharina speaking selected texts.
 

The work can be understood as a continuation of my previous composition The Precipice (2019). Together, the two works form a kind of artistic diptych, sharing an engagement with Hannah Arendt’s thought and its themes, while approaching them through different musical and performative settings.
 

My musical contribution was conceived as a series of musical images responding to the different themes of the performance. The work was divided into nine sections:
Democracy
The Human Being
Languages
Thinking
Loneliness
The Evil
I Want to Understand...
Travel
Death

These sections correspond to different themes and passages from Hannah Arendt’s Denktagebuch. I approached them as different musical spaces, allowing the words, sounds and ideas to interact with each other.

The violin is present throughout the work as a kind of additional, abstract voice. Rather than illustrating the spoken texts, it responds to them on another level, sometimes following their movement, sometimes opening up a space beyond their literal meaning. Alongside the spoken voice, it becomes another way of articulating what cannot simply be said.

A central element of my work was the spoken text itself. I used quotations from Arendt both for their meaning and as raw musical material. The words spoken by Katharina were electronically processed, fragmented, layered and transformed, so that language gradually moves between its role as text and its role as sound. At certain moments, it becomes difficult to separate the spoken voice from the musical material surrounding it. This blurring of language, sound and music was at the centre of my approach.

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The original work was created for the interdisciplinary performance and has since remained in my archive as a musical composition. I am currently reworking the piece as an independent work, with an official release planned for 2027.