Hiraeth

In summer 2022, violinist and composer Wouter Vandenabeele travelled to the Balkans, Greece, southern Italy, Catalonia, Andalusia and Galicia in search of the melancholic soul in music. For three months, he forged links with local musicians and minority groups. 

Melancholy connects people across centuries and cultures. It is contradictory: sadness accompanied by comfort or hope, pain accompanied by beauty or joy. Hiraeth oscillates between the timbres of melancholy heard especially in southern European musical cultures (saudade, flamenco blues, balkan music, ... ). A bittersweet hopeful longing for what is absent and can never be fully present. 

Pizzica, Sevdah, Flamenco… they share a common soul — music born from longing, from a yearning for something lost, or perhaps something that never truly was. But it’s precisely that melancholy that sparks something deep within. It builds into energy, into hope, into a rhythm that refuses to sit still. What begins in sorrow unfolds into joy, into dance, into a disarming sense of freedom. As if our sense of loss is what sets us in motion — what makes us feel alive.