HENRIK HELLSTENIUS

The Oslo International Church Music Festival commissioned the work Together by Henrik Hellstenius in 2020. The work thematizes the ways in which people are together, and the ways in which we meet the other. «An exhibition about the relationships between people in a time when many are isolated and the culture cultivates fictions and fantasies about the sovereign, single individual.»

Together is written for six vocal soloists, percussionists who also use the voice and piano/electronics. The text is written by Henrik Hellstenius and the theme of the work is based on ideas from meetings with texts by the American sociologist and writer Richard Sennet, the French philosopher Emmanuel Levinas and the French writer and mystic Jeanne de Salzmann.

The work is intended as a meditation on the relationship between «me and the others». How I relate to people I meet, work with and live with is the question. I have to deal with people I don’t understand, whom I don’t like or with whom I strongly disagree. But how do I do that? How do I relate to «the other», when «the other» is so different from myself that I cannot use my usual strategies?

In an age of strong divisions and hard rhetoric between political opponents and economic classes, it is more necessary than ever to look at how we can interact. Liberal capitalism daily tells western man fairy tales about the individual choices and how they define us. Technology goes hand in hand with the economy and creates solutions for experiences and actions that isolate individuals more than they bring them together, so we have to  see the new ways to  interact. Ways that do not depend on the old structures, in which many Western countries have lost some of the unifying power they once had. We must realize that we need new strong narratives about  being together, which balances the overall narrative of our alleged sovereign individuality, and the deep gaps between people we see around us. A lot revolves around economics and class, but perhaps also about new narratives that are based on the fundamentals of what holds us together; how we can manage  to things when we work together, things that we can never manage alone.