Matthias Pintscher’s new projects include a choral work for SWR Vokal Ensemble and his new string quartet Study IV for Treatise on the Veil.

“A pure, concentrated compendium of emotional states almost without boundaries” is what the “shir ha shirim”, the “Lied der Lieder” or “Song of Songs” represents for Matthias Pintscher. “All the songs give the impression that they have no beginning or end, no middle, rather that there are simply states of expression which revolve within themselves.” From the fifth song comes the text which Pintscher has used for his a cappella work for the SWR Stuttgart Vocal Ensemble. This “she-cholat ahavah ani” translates as “I am so sick with love” and sums up the key phrase of the theme of the love-song for the composer. The famous Hebrew text also opens up special perspectives in structural terms. “In Hebrew, words are like islands, sources of energy, for everything is derived from short word stems. For a musician or composer, this is an opportunity to delve deeply into the connotations of the words, because you can fashion the flow yourself, the route between the individual words, which are like objects.”

This circling, repetition and picking up the threads of images “from deep abyss to ecstasy and rapture”, which the text displays is pre-destined for a choral setting for Pintscher, because the point of view constantly changes and evokes a play with changing colours. “Firstly one can say it is a great love song from Hashem, that is God, to his chosen people Israel, and on the other hand it is also a quite secular love song. They are, as it were, songs in praise of the bride and bridegroom, in which the perspective of the person singing constantly changes – firstly a man, then a woman, then the daughters of Jerusalem, so there is a constant puzzle picture, from which position the person sings or speaks.”

As regards the treatment of the voices, Pintscher has written a vocal texture which is entirely sung, without breaking up the text phonetically. “I have tried to find the abstraction in the sound in the structure itself, that is primarily in the harmonies, in what is omitted, in the perspective of different layers which I very consciously use, but also in a very chamber music-like structure for the choir: like a script in an abstract space. So I imagine that this text is a script in the abstract field of composition.”

The stereotyped character of the word islands of the Hebrew coincides with his interest in Cy Twombly’s technique of over-painting. Twombly’s series of paintings treatise on the veil has inspired Pintscher to compose a cycle with the same name, including his new string quartet which will be premiered in January in Salzburg. Like membranes, the works in this cycle overlap each other, “as if a painter repeatedly paints the same scene using different techniques, as if a work takes over where another leaves off, but carries the same message using completely new techniques, with other materials, backgrounds, colours, media.”

Marie Luise Maintz
from: takte 2/2008