Michael Pisaro / Barry Chabala - Unter Eichen (Roeba 001)

Michael Pisaro's 'Unter Eichen', composed for electric guitar in 2003, was performed and recorded by Barry Chabala on CD in 2009. With Austrian poet Georg Trakl's poem 'Untergang (Sinking)' in the score, the structure of the piece is divided into six sections in keeping with the sentences of the poem, with long silences between. The pitches and chords of the guitar are all instructed in the score, but the timing of playing them, the length of each silence, the volume of each tone and the strength of each stroke are mostly left to the performer's decision. The performer is supposed to "use a very low level of amplification" and the guitar sounds are supposed to contain "no distortion or very little." The two other instructions in the score, "there is more silence than sound in this piece" and "notes are mostly allowed to ring until they die away', seem to be particularly crucial for this piece.

Unter Eichen

• for electric guitar

Sinking

The wild birds have flown away
over the white ponds.
In the evening an icy wind blows from our stars.

The broken forehead of the night bends
over our graves.
Under oaks we drift on a silver raft.

The white walls of the city are always ringing.
Under thorn bows

O my brother we climb blind hands toward midnight.

(Georg Trakl) - translation by Michael Pisaro

In the first section, after a long one-minute silence from the start, a downstroke of a chord of a few high pitches is played on the guitar at a slow tempo. The solid texture of the sounds, which contains slight senses of tension and alertness, evokes the images of the first line of the Trakl poem - the cold still water of ‘the white pond’ after ‘the wild birds have flown away’. Every time the guitar chords are heard after a long interval of silence, the air seems to get chilly and the density of the silence increases in the stillness. Again after another long silence, a downstroke of a chord of a few high pitches is played, soon followed by a bass note from the guitar with a long resonance. The thick bass sound of the guitar evokes shadowy water below the oak tree, as well as the increasing darkness of the silent evening. As the silence increases its presence, the sense of reality seems to be gradually fading away. About 9 minutes and 40 seconds in, a long three minute silence ensues. It is a very dense silence that makes the listeners feel like everything is in a complete stillness without the flow of time.

In the second section, after a very long silence, a soft, pure high pitch of the guitar is heard. This soft tone also contains a slight sense of tension and sharpness, which evokes an extremely heightened sensibility. In this section, a high-pitched tone, a middle-pitched tone and a low-pitched tone on the guitar are heard individually at the intervals of silences, sometimes at a loud volume, sometimes at a very low volume. The pure high-pitched tone evokes the image of the lights of distant 'stars', the solid middle-pitched tone evokes the image of 'icy wind', and the deep low-pitched tone evokes the image of the increasingly darkening 'evening', all in the Trakl poem. With such a simple structure of a few different pitches and strengths of the strokes, a vivid realistic perspective and the sense of elapsing time in the scenery of the Trakl poem are exquisitely expressed via the sparse sounds/atmosphere.

In the third section, again after a very long silence, a strong bass note is played on the guitar with a slow tremolo effect, quivering widely and bending, leaving a long thick resonance in its wake. The gloomy bass sounds, which spread a dark, disquieting atmosphere, are resonant with a line of the Trakl poem - 'the broken forehead of the night bends over our grave', conveying the images of the deeply eroded spirit, the stricken heart, and the distorted, distressed mind of the poet. Every time the quivering bass sound is added vertically, the silence seems to be momentarily blasted, only to become even denser afterward. (This contrast between the bass sounds and the dense silence seems to have some sort of hypnotic, sleep-inducing effect.) When the heavy guitar bass disappears after each long thick afterglow resonance, the silence seems to overlap with the darkness of the poet's mind.

In the fourth section, again after a very long silence, a softly plucked high-pitched tone of the guitar is heard, containing both coldness and softness simultaneously. Four different pitches of high-pitched tones are individually played after short silences, some of them extremely quiet and some of them rather strong. This section evokes the sense of floating alone in stillness, which is resonant with 'a silver raft drifting under oak trees' in Trakl's poem. In the long silence after this section, there is a silent image of something gradually sinking into a thick darkness.

In the fifth section, again after a very long silence, four chords consisting of two notes individually are heard one by one, each after short silences. Each major chord and minor chord seem to create a different mood in a subtle way - hope, harmony, anxiety, lament, resignation, fatigue, urgency, weakness, question and grievance. It is amazing how all these different moods are evoked with such simple changes. The nuances of these chords calls to mind images of numerous voices of souls who are calling the poet from the other side of 'the white walls' - the land of the dead, which is resonant with a line from Trakl's poem: 'The white walls of the city are always ringing'. These sounds contain rather sweet, inviting tones without any sense of fear or frightfulness, which seems to reflect Trakl's yearning for the end of life.

In the last section, again after a very long silence, soft high-pitched tones of the guitar appear one by one, sometimes as a chord of a few notes, while wavering their translucent tones like water, then disappearing into silence with a faint afterglow. These transient tones, which contain a fragile beauty and a slight sense of tension, evoke the images of little souls that are trying to climb upward through the cruel world of reality, which is resonant with the last line of the Trakl poem: 'climb blind hands towards midnight under thorn bows'. Despite that the motif of this section is rather dark, there is no heavy negative tone like bitterness, grief, fear or anger in the sounds and silences here. Instead, the tones are all tranquil and transparent, which seem to reflect the poet's strong fascination with another world, where he thought he could finally gain the ultimate comfort and peacefulness in his soul.

The darkness of evening, white pond, icy wind, distant stars, graves, silver raft, white walls, midnight - these words that often appear in Trakl's poems seem to be associated with the image of death. The contrast between these cold dark stillnesses and the flickering living souls that are moving up towards midnight brings a memorable beauty to the poem. The long, deep afterglow of the images, which is unique to Trakl's poetry, is closely overlapped with the resonances of the guitar sounds. Michael Pisaro's composition and Barry Chabala's guitar performance have brilliantly and sensitively expressed the dense silence and the clear, unclouded darkness that are unique to Trakl's imagined scenery (which could have been somewhere between the world of reality and another world) with sparse insertions of simple tones and long silences. Even though Trakl's poetry is filled with the images of death, his poems never convey any feeling of depression or deep sufferings. Instead, there is a tranquil and ethereal atmosphere, created by his poems that have similar flow and rhythm as soothing music. This ethereal, eternal beauty and the surreal images of Trakl's poetry were perfectly translated into this 60-minute piece by Pisaro and Chabala, with their deep understanding of the poem and delicate and precise uses of simple sounds and silences.

Another of Michael Pisaro's compositions, 'black, white, red, green, blue' (performed by Barry Chabala as well), also consists of sparse sounds and very long silences. While the silence in 'black, white, red, green, blue' gives the impression of spreading horizontally while sustaining an intimacy between the sounds and the silences, the silence in the 'Unter Eichen' gives the impression that there is always a tension between the sounds and the silences, and that silence is shaken for a moment by the appearance of each sound, which seems to vertically strike and momentarily explode the silence. While the silence in the former piece contains peacefulness and warmth, the silence in the latter piece contains tension and iciness. Even though both pieces have similar structures of sparse guitar sounds and long silences, the texture and the impression of the silences are extremely different. In these compositions, Michael Pisaro has clearly demonstrated that the sounds that exist before or after silences can dominate the quality and the characteristics of those silences.