MEINE MUSIK IST GEBET
My music is prayer
 

GUITAR | VOICE | SOUNDS

 

“A path to the core of music.”
Jazzpodium

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Hub Hildenbrand is a Berlin-based guitarist, composer and vocalist. For more than three decades, he has been developing a musical language of his own.

That path has taken him through jazz and improvisation, Turkish and North Indian classical music, microtonality, composition and the human voice. Yet his music is not a collage of these influences. Over the years, Hildenbrand has absorbed their principles into his work – a world shaped by melancholy, stillness, intensity and a fascination with what cannot fully be expressed in words.

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At its centre is one instrument: a 1952 Gibson archtop guitar that has accompanied him for more than twenty-five years.

There is a certain paradox in Hildenbrand’s relationship with the guitar. Many of the sounds he has felt most deeply drawn to belong to other instruments – the Turkish oud, Indian sarod, Afghan rabab or Persian tar. But rather than changing instruments in search of those colours, he chose to make the guitar itself his challenge: to remain with one instrument and continually expand its expressive limits.

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At the heart of Hildenbrand’s playing is an acute sensitivity to the finest gradations of dynamics and timbre – and an awareness of the silence behind the notes.

He often allows a sound to decay fully, following the resonances that emerge from the other strings into the silence towards which every tone eventually points. His guitar language is shaped by ornamentation rooted in makam, flowing two-voice patterns and quiet, open improvisations.

Alongside conventional playing techniques, he occasionally extends the instrument through bowing, felt mallets and preparations. For Hildenbrand, these are not effects, but part of the instrument’s vocabulary.

At times the instrument evokes distant instrumental traditions; at others, it seems to leave its familiar identity behind altogether.

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FROM WEST BERLIN OUTWARD

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In 1983, still in primary school, Hildenbrand formed his first band with schoolmates. He wrote the songs and lyrics, played guitar and sang. They performed in the school auditorium and at local street festivals.

Music was already part of the family. His grandfather was a classical conductor; as a child, Hildenbrand sometimes sat in an otherwise empty concert hall during orchestral rehearsals. His father played guitar and gave him his first instrument.
 

But another formative presence was the city itself.

Hildenbrand grew up in West Berlin in the 1980s – a place physically enclosed by the Wall and yet culturally remarkably open. Different worlds existed side by side: established institutions and radical subcultures, artists and outsiders, German and migrant communities. Turkish life had already become a visible part of the city, while West Berlin’s peculiar isolation created unusual spaces for artistic and individual freedom.

Long before Hildenbrand consciously turned towards Turkish makam music, Turkish culture and music were already part of the West Berlin around him – part of a cultural environment he absorbed before he began to understand its musical significance.

Music was not simply an interest or a profession he imagined pursuing. Increasingly, it became a calling – an attempt to understand music from the inside. 

Jazz and improvisation offered the first framework for that search. Hildenbrand studied with guitarist Mick Goodrick at Berklee College of Music in Boston and later graduated from the University of Music in Rotterdam.

What remained most important was not jazz as a style, but the freedom it offered: to improvise, respond in the moment and, above all, develop a voice of one’s own.

Back in Berlin, Hildenbrand immersed himself in Turkish classical music, studying with oud master Nuri Karademirli at the Conservatory of Turkish Music. There he developed a deeper understanding of makam, ornamentation and microtonal expression and began transferring these possibilities to the fretted guitar through string bending.

Later, in Kolkata, he studied North Indian classical music with sarod master Ranajit Sengupta.

These studies were never about adding new styles to his music. What mattered was to absorb their principles deeply enough that they could become part of his own musical language.

From early on, Hildenbrand had a strong inner sense of when a musical language felt like a mother tongue – when there was no distance between what he felt and what he played – and when, however fluently he might speak it, it remained foreign.

That inner compass became essential as he moved between traditions, guiding what could become part of his own voice.

The deeper Hildenbrand immersed himself in different traditions, the more clearly he sensed a common musical ground beneath their differences in tuning, rhythm, form and expression.

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ONE MUSIC

Turkish classical music, North Indian classical music, jazz and European traditions are not separate ingredients to be combined. For Hildenbrand, they are different manifestations of music itself.

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From this grew a conviction that has become fundamental to his work:

 

​ALL MUSIC IS ONE

 

This does not mean erasing the identity of individual traditions. On the contrary, their depth and particularity demand respect. But Hildenbrand believes that by entering them deeply enough, connections begin to reveal themselves – and their principles can become part of a musical language that no longer belongs to any single genre.

He imagines music as an endless, labyrinthine palace. Every tradition opens another door; behind it lies another room, another perspective, another possibility. There is no final room. Yet his work has increasingly become a search for that final room – the one that can never quite be reached.

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A LANGUAGE BEYOND WORDS

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In 2019, another instrument entered Hildenbrand’s music: his voice.

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At first, he used it to extend melodic lines and add another colour to the guitar. As the voice became increasingly important, Hildenbrand became acutely aware of a fundamental limitation of conventional lyrics: because words carry semantic meaning, they tend to become the centre of perception. The voice becomes the narrator, while the music around it risks being reduced to accompaniment, atmosphere or illustration.

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He wanted that space to remain open.

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In 2021, Hildenbrand immersed himself in the International Phonetic Alphabet (IPA), studying the range of sounds used in human speech across the world’s languages. From this research he began constructing his own vocal language – an evolving vocabulary that currently contains around 200 syllables.

The syllables have no fixed semantic meaning. 

Hildenbrand composes them into fixed vocal texts through an abstract and meticulous process guided by their sound and by the associations and images they evoke for him personally. Once composed, the texts remain fixed; their associative meaning does not. The same syllabic text may evoke different images or meanings for him from one concert to the next.

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In performance, the voice becomes a breathing, associative texture. It can carry grief, longing, fragility, warmth or joy without naming any of them. What Hildenbrand associates with a vocal text is not a message to be decoded: the listener may experience something entirely different. Its openness invites the listener’s own associations, emotions, memories and inner images to emerge.

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“A language that nobody speaks, but almost everyone understands.”

Westzeit

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INVOCATION

For Hildenbrand, music remains a place of longing – a restless search whose vanishing point is the mystical. Truth and beauty remain on the horizon: approached through sound, but never completely grasped.

Today, that search takes form in INVOCATION, his solo concert for guitar, voice and sounds.

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The visual language is deliberately reduced: darkness, minimal light and an uncluttered stage remove distraction rather than add spectacle.

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The concert is not simply a sequence of pieces. It is a space.

What happens within it is shared, but not prescribed.

At its most intense, Hildenbrand seeks the moment when the music itself begins to take the lead and carry the performance.

This is where mysticism enters his work.

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​MEINE MUSIK IST GEBET

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Hildenbrand follows no particular religion. For him, mysticism points to a deeper human ground beneath religious systems and narratives – the realm of love and loss, grief and fear, longing and consolation, vulnerability and impermanence. These experiences belong to no single faith or culture; they precede such distinctions.

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“A prayer, a ceremony. A search for a deeper dimension of being human.”

Concerto, Austria

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For Hildenbrand, prayer describes a way of entering music with complete attention – listening, responding and letting go of control.

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Prayer, in this sense, is not an escape from human experience, but a way of entering it more deeply.

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HUB HILDENBRAND

Over more than three decades, Hub Hildenbrand has worked as a solo artist, composer and bandleader. He has led numerous ensembles, composed music for film and theatre and released 17 albums through projects he has led or co-led.

He has performed more than 500 concerts, primarily across Europe. Selected performances include the Delhi International Arts Festival, Haus der Kulturen der Welt Berlin, Rudolstadt Festival, Festspielhaus Hellerau, folkBALTICA, Bardentreffen, Pafos European Capital of Culture and the Cultural Festival of the University of Cyprus.

Collaborations include Palle Mikkelborg, Hein van de Geyn, Ranajit Sengupta, Nuri Karademirli, Rhys Chatham, Zacharias Spyridakis and Farhad Safari.

Hildenbrand has received grants and support from institutions including the Berlin Senate, Musikfonds, German Music Council, Goethe-Institut and Initiative Musik.

Alongside his artistic work, Hildenbrand teaches masterclasses at university level and mentors musicians internationally.

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Discography →

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