In 2013, a piano is left in a mountain refuge in the Alps. Inside it, a hidden score. Years later, a young girl finds it. Dira’s Diary tells the true story of music given to the snow, of a girl growing into a woman, and of a mountain that breathes with her.
Who is Dira
Dira is fourteen and lives between two worlds: a high-altitude mountain refuge in Val di Sole and the city, where she attends high school. In these pages she writes to hold on to what she loves: the snow, the skis, the piano, the home built by her family, the music that rises within her unbidden.
Her diary alternates between intimate, direct texts and musical scores. The words recount her days—fear, anger, joy, and longing. The music says what words cannot: it becomes landscape, memory, physical gesture, breath. The scores do not illustrate the text, and the text does not explain the music. They coexist, like two voices reaching for each other.
Alongside Dira’s diary, other presences emerge: a piano that arrives in the mountains like an unexpected gift, a composer who entrusts his scores to the snow, a boy who watches and waits. Different stories intertwine around a simple, powerful idea: music belongs to those who need it.
The Mountain
Dira’s stories are immersed in the natural world of Val di Sole (Trentino). The pages reflect her inner states and sensations, but also real events and lived experiences. What emerges are the contradictions that shape the land and its environment: the difficult coexistence with bears, the Vaia storm, flowering pastures alongside artificial lakes. In Dira’s words lives the clash between the sterile, conformist environmentalism of the city and the reality of those who live the mountains on their own skin.
The City
For Dira, Trento is an unfamiliar world, made of foreign rhythms, relationships yet to be built, ideas and behaviors that feel incomprehensible to her. The city marks her entry into adolescence. The diary of her first year of high school is a lifeboat she clings to in order to remember and keep her childhood alive. The diary of her second year will mark her full immersion in this new city and dimension.
The Work
In Dira’s Diary, narrative, music, and reality coexist and intertwine, shaping a combined literary and sonic experience. For each episode she recounts, Dira records in her diary a musical score she has composed, alongside drawings, maps, and sketches. Most of the events, places, and characters described are real.
The first volume is devoted to the mountain; the second to the city.
Dira’s Diary is the first release of Sebastiano Cognolato’s Secret Songs, written over the course of about thirty years, never previously published, and entrusted—like time capsules—to the sea, to cities, to bees and butterflies, to children, or, in the case of Dira’s Diary, to the snow.
The complete first volume is available on Amazon in both Kindle and paperback editions.
The EP and individual tracks are available on all major platforms.
The score in traditional notation is available on Bandcamp.
Purchasing the book, in any format, includes free access to the music.
Preview
On this page, ahead of publication, the first volume of the diary can be read in full as a flipbook, and all the pieces can be listened to via the links and QR codes within it, or through the playlist below.
Dira’s Diary – Listen
All tracks recorded and mixed by Stefano Barzan.
Scores in Traditional Notation
