“My accompaniments pay homage to both expressionist music and painting, attempting to evoke the textures of Egon Schiele’s mottled bodies and Chaim Soutine’s impasto beef carcasses, and also reference klezmer fiddle, exploring my own Germanic–Jewish ancestry. Directors such as F. W. Murnau, Paul Wegener and Robert Wiene established the genre conventions of horror cinema as we now recognise them, crafting disturbed narratives that dissected contemporaneous fears and which remain relevant today: Nosferatu, with its themes of plague and otherness, captures the zeitgeist of a post-pandemic, identity-driven world; Der Golem retells the Frankenstein narrative as spurred on by Jewish mysticism and antisemitism; Caligari mourns the soldiers sent to kill and be killed on the First World War’s battlefields. While my viola soundtracks draw on a variety of musical references, I do not seek to enforce a specific reading of the films, rather ask questions about their context.”

Hugo Max, Improvising Scores for Silent Cinema on the Viola, The Strad