dernier espace avec introspecteur (Matthias Pintscher)
In dernier espace avec introspecteur for bayan (Russian button accordion) and cello, composed in 1993, Matthias Pintscher for the first time intentionally refers to visual arts. He describes his work as “an approach, a paraphrase, an optical enlargement of a chosen work from the area of visual arts”.
He continues: “in the case of dernier espace avec introspecteur the subject of my study is Joseph Beuys’s spatial form environment from 1982 (exhibited at the State Gallery in Stuttgart). Obviously, it is impossible to «compose» visual impressions, to turn them into sound; there are no means of interdisciplinary translation between the shape that is heard and the shape that is seen. However, there is much greater possibility of confronting various linguistic formulations, of bringing them closer through mutual analogies and similarities. I attempted to transfer the concept of Beuys’s experience of space, present in his environments, onto the plane of acoustic procedures. The result is a paraphrase of specific visual signs and contours contained in the installation; an intended acoustic simulation of a specific space, achieved through purely associative phenomena; an attempt at a comprehensive encompassing; a form of distribution within the rotating staticity of my music which, like a prism, allows the most subtle changes of colour, intensity and plasticity through extreme reduction of the material.
Perhaps the term one should use here is «multidimensionality» of the sound shape. The «introspecteur», who intently looks inside, will here «listen intently to the interior of sound», and savour each moment.
To make this acoustic investigation audible, the music of dernier espace avec introspecteur develops in slow tempos. Beuys, when talking about his installation, referred to a new dimension, a new quality, the quality of warmth. I also tried, quite consciously, to direct the energy currents between the sound repertoire of the two instruments.“
Matthias Pintscher
