The sound of the caesura

In March, I wrote the analysis of the first of Zender's four Hölderlin works.

The way I see it, in Hölderlin lesen I Zender is less interested in illustrating isolated words and images in Hölderlin’s hymn than in constructing music which echoes the way Hölderlin’s text is articulated. The self-reflexive language criticism implied in the text impels Zender into reflecting on the musical medium and its conventional gestures. Like in Hölderlin’s language, there is no unmediated expression in Zender’s music. Zender does not read a certain meaning or mood into Hölderlin’s text, but he constructs a very specific room for a new experience of it through his montage of citations. In Zender’s work, Hölderlin’s fragmented hymn may not be subject to a “musical reading” in the traditional mimetic sense, but nevertheless, Zender is reading Hölderlin more closely than most other composers. By putting Hölderlin’s disrupted and displaced lyrical gestures in complex and continually transforming constellations with Beethovenian and modernistic musical gestures, and by composing the sound of Hölderlin’s caesuras rather than his words, Zender reads the hymn without reducing it to a message. By allowing it to stay an enigma, he opens it for the reading of the listener.

Now I am working with the analysis of the second work, called "The sound of writing", where Zender's strategies are connected to aesthetic ideas of writing and repetition in thinkers like Kierkegaard, Derrida and Deleuze. I hope to finish the third and the fourth analysis before September. So, you are right, people, I am not very social right now...