composers note:
I take gestures that aren’t mine, and yet! ...

I pick them up to live in them myself.
Rukke di gu - blood is in the shoe...

In the shelter of used up time.
I.t.S.

Beethoven's String Quartet No. 1 was my 'inner reference piece' during the composition process. However, in the course of the work the proximity to it changed again and again and questions about the piece, but also about the process of referring to a work of the past came to the fore.
In the end the distance to this 'reference piece' was greater than initially planned, "and yet ..." there are various references, even if they are not so clear.
What remained decisive for my work: how does this 1st string quartet resonate, how does the music of Beethoven resonate in general (which I used to love to play on the piano, my examination piece was opus 111)? And what exactly? Musical gestures or quasi 'rhetorical figures', themes or moods?

At some point I thought I could recognize certain 'pathos formulas'.
I tried to trace these 'pathos formulas' in Beethoven's music and to formulate them in a new and different way.
The term 'pathos formula' was coined by the art historian Aby Warburg (1866 - 1929).
He believed that over the ages he could identify certain recurring motifs, or 'gestures of expression' in art, which in his view referred to a 'pathological reason', to a 'supra-historical treasure of human suffering', a 'stamp of affects'. According to Aby Warburg, 'pathos formulas' are part of a universal cultural history, "engrams of passionate experience as a memory-preserved heritage".
In this respect, "Und doch…(And yet ...)" is an attempt to draw a very personal trace of memory with my possibilities and 'my language'.


Iris ter Schiphorst