Samuel Beckett: Stirrings Still (ECM New Series 2801)

| Tyran Grillo

Samuel Beckett
Trevor Bača
Stirrings Still

Paul Griffiths narrator
JACK Quartet
Christopher Otto violin
Austin Wulliman violin
John Pickford Richards viola
Jay Campbell violoncello
Recorded 2023 and 2024, Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano
Engineers: Michael Rast, Lara Persia, and Michael Hinreiner (mix)
Cover photo: Rosemarie Clausen
Produced by Manfred Eicher
Release date: September 4, 2026

Completed in 1987 and first published the following year, Stirrings Still was Samuel Beckett’s last message in prose, a dispatch from that uncertain border where the voice survives even as the self begins to lose its outline. More monologue than story, it finds an unnamed man whose passage may lead through a vast wheatfield drained into black and white, or deeper into the stumbling grain of memory itself. The distinction gradually ceases to matter. Life and what lies beyond become double exposures on the same strip of film, each haunting the other with the possibility that consciousness is merely the afterimage cast by its own disappearance.

Beckett cherished music, especially the songs and string quartets of Franz Schubert, whose melodies often travel farthest just they seem to be coming back home. Something of that impossible homecoming inhabits Beckett’s prose. His sentences circle their subjects until repetition becomes a form of erosion, each recurrence touching the old wound from another angle. Phrases withdraw before reappearing with their centers of gravity subtly displaced. Meaning flickers among them, less an object to be grasped than a disturbance of breath registered in passing. Stirrings Still is therefore already a kind of chamber work, its developments tightening toward the point where language encounters the silence it has carried within itself all along.

Paul Griffiths’s relationship with this world reaches back more than half a century. His first encounter with Beckett arrived at a decisive age, when the boundary between art and life can still vanish without warning. “A student production of Waiting for Godot was put on at the Oxford Playhouse in November 1965,” he recounts to me via email. “I was in my first term as an undergraduate and had just turned eighteen. It changed my life. Little by little (I was living on a student grant) I bought pretty much everything of Beckett’s that was in print.” That formative shock and stretching of personal resources can be felt in his narration of Stirrings Still. Griffiths does not approach the text as a monument to be admired from a respectful distance. He speaks from within a lifelong proximity, as though the words have accompanied him for so long that they now belong to his private scaffolding. Such familiarity allows him to resist theatrical enlargement. Every hesitation carries its own weight, and each repetition sounds newly discovered in the mouth.

The recording also belongs to producer Manfred Eicher’s longstanding conversation with literature, a dimension of his work sometimes eclipsed by the attention given to his cinematic imagination. Griffiths places the project within a history extending to the origins of ECM New Series: “Spoken-voice recordings were part of the New Series from the beginning, and they trace some part of Manfred Eicher’s literary world, which he also partly shares with some of the musicians he’s worked with—Heiner Goebbels, for example, and Kurtág.” Literature, in this context, forms part of the label’s underlying sensibility, shaping its understanding of voice and the charged intervals surrounding utterance. Eicher’s ear has always extended toward those places where one art begins to think through the materials of another.

The path to this particular convergence was itself Beckettian in its patience. In 2006, Eicher asked Griffiths to seek out a composer capable of writing music that could exist in the closest possible sympathy with a recording of the text, preserving its austere sovereignty while answering its inner music. A decade passed. Then, hearing the JACK Quartet rehearse Trevor Bača’s Akasha at Harvard in 2016, Griffiths recognized that the search had been listening for its own answer. Asked what in Bača’s work provoked that recognition, Griffiths answers with characteristic directness: “Not much more to say about the genesis. To answer in one word: intimacy. His music speaks intimately and is made intimately, down to the finest nuance. Also, of course, the string quartet was the obvious ensemble, and I felt this was music that could withstand and deal with the huge presence of Beckett.”

That final phrase identifies the central danger of the undertaking. Beckett’s presence is indeed huge, despite the spareness of the material. And so, any musical candle lit in its shadow could easily become decorative or subservient, reducing itself to atmospheric confirmation of meanings the prose has already supplied. Bača declines the obedient servitude of accompaniment. His score runs beside the words as a parallel stream with its own depth and darkness, neither illustrating the text nor competing for possession of it. Heard in alternation with Griffiths’s narration, the JACK Quartet enters as another order of consciousness, contemplating Beckett from beyond the reach of speech. The strings draw the listener beneath the semantic surface, into the undertow where words continue to exert their pull after their immediate impact has loosened its grip. Griffiths gives the narrator a voice worn almost to the grain, while Bača opens chambers around it in which solitude can resonate beyond the dimensions of the solitary.

What emerges is a work suspended between articulation and subversion thereof, each dynamic carrying what the other must relinquish. Bača’s finest gestures seem microscopically fashioned, alive to the pressure of bow hair and the tremor released when one surface encounters another. Within these sounds lies a physical knowledge that language can approach but never quite retain. Something continues on the far side of saying, faintly stirring in the dust from which every word is born and to which every word returns.

“One night as he sat at his table head on hands he saw himself rise and go.” Thus begins the world into which we are introduced, accompanied by nearly mournful scrapings from the strings. They touch resonantly upon a premonition of death, though the narrator is granted no consoling return to whatever enchanted him as a child. The circumstance of living forces him instead toward the limits of what can be known. A window remains locked because opening it would expose more than the mind can bear. He is left to imagine a form of intercorporeal travel in which light acquires qualities beyond day and night, while the vagaries of experience fall as rain upon drought-stricken earth.

From this threshold come the most delicate tremblings, poised at the edge of audibility, where mortal questions cease to be asked because the answers must also die if they are to be genuinely felt. Those haunting fringes of strings and fretless fingerboards provide a passage for the ghosts of implication. An insectile agitation enters the instruments, suggestive of animal life. The sound seems to remember some primordial condition before flesh and thought became convinced of their separation. Bača allows timbre to retain that ancient uncertainty. A scrape may be the distress of wood under pressure, yet it also carries the sensation of a body trying to hear beyond itself.

As the narrator, poised between tenderness and robust resignation, continues to riff on the fragility of his own existence, the music reveals a premonitional character rather than a commentative one. Siren-toned descents foreshadow the broken heart of solitude, and whisper-quiet stirrings release the title from abstraction. Appearances and disappearances implicate us in their zoetrope, each open slit a death, with the moment beyond it offering another life begun. Creakings suggest the internal groaning of bone on bone, the expression of a body in retrograde. Flinching angels exchange glances with lock-staring demons in a currency of dangerously intimate proportions, always returning to center before resuming their games of perception.

Once the framework of self-awareness begins to lose its structural integrity, the strings grow more animate. They tremble in real time at the realization that something deeper than vibrational frequency is at play, an almost instantaneous relativity that flies straight into the heart of grief. Every bow stroke appears to alter the temporal pressure around Griffiths’s voice. The quartet does not surround the speaker so much as expose the detachments already contained within him. His pauses widen into territories, and the score crosses them without pretending to know what waits on the opposite side.

Beckett’s alter ego is always seeking a way, only to discover that every doorway leads further back in. A quivering harmonic becomes another slipstream into the flowering mind, where wilting and blooming remain equally present. Through a harshly beautiful economy of language, what appears bare on the page acquires in discourse a richness of observation about the human condition. Impulses scrabble in the walls of the subconscious, evading the reach of neurological fingers before falling into the hands of the very soul they describe with unabashed honesty. Griffiths follows these movements without imposing an emotional map upon them. The tenderness of his reading comes from acknowledging how little tenderness the universe itself appears obliged to provide.

Bača’s attention to detail occasionally touches the borderlands explored by George Crumb, another composer drawn toward language at its margins. Yet Bača occupies this territory with a privacy distinctly his own. He listens into the spaces between words, where the tail of one utterance curves toward the head of another in a continuous rotation of exhalation and inhalation. Within the interval separating those breaths, the self becomes perceptible as a rhythm rather than a stable possession. The bow reverses direction while sustaining the illusion of a single note, and consciousness performs an equivalent maneuver, repeatedly changing course while calling the result continuity.

The deepest achievement of this recording may lie in how thoroughly it dissolves any secure division between the witness and the witnessed. The man sees himself rise from the table, Griffiths gives breath to the man, and the quartet listens to that breath from a region his monologue cannot enter. We receive each layer as we add another through the act of attention. Perception becomes a relay conducted across bodies that can never meet, yet briefly inhabit the same uncertainty.

Perhaps the unnamed man is therefore doing more than approaching extinction. In watching himself depart, he invents the witness who might survive him. Beckett entrusted that witness to language, Griffiths lends it mortal breath, and Bača places it within the vulnerable substance of sound. We inherit the man’s vigil without acquiring his identity. For a little while, his consciousness passes through ours, asking for neither rescue nor remembrance. It reveals something more unsettling: that the self may be only the temporary custody of an awareness forever arriving from elsewhere. Our lives are shaped by the voices we shelter, most of whom will never know our names. In this sense, consciousness has always been on loan, and listening is the obscure means by which we return it like a library book we checked out and forgot about long ago.

La Buissonne Studios (RJAL 397003)

| Tyran Grillo

Released in 2005 as a promotion-only compilation, La Buissonne Studios occupies the elusive third chamber in the catalogue attached to the celebrated recording complex at Pernes-les-Fontaines. Its history was built through improbable labor. Gérard de Haro and two childhood friends first recorded musicians in a modest space at L’Isle-sur-la-Sorgue; an encounter with bassist Barre Phillips sharpened their desire for a professional studio. They found a hangar and house in Pernes, worked with acoustician Marc Beaufils, and opened La Buissonne on September 1, 1987.

Since then, its rooms have helped define modern European jazz as a silent collaborator, familiar to ECM devotees yet present across numerous labels. Only one ECM recording appears here. That scarcity clarifies the compilation’s purpose: less a house sampler than a map of circulation, showing how one acoustic language can pass through radically different bodies without imposing a uniform complexion. Many selections arrive as excerpts, fragments of fresco carrying enough pigment to imply the civilization around them.

The Jean-Philippe Viret Trio opens one inward passage with “Par Tous Les Temps,” as heard on Étant donnés (Sketch SKE 333025). Édouard Ferlet sets an arpeggio in motion as Viret’s double bass moves beneath him and Antoine Banville’s cymbals scatter radiance across the pulse. A processional shimmer brushes Steve Reich’s language without surrendering jazz’s appetite for contingency.

The Sketch label reappears through Michel Graillier and Riccardo Del Fra’s “Blue Wind,” via Soft Talk (SKE 333014), where piano and bass achieve rare conversational transparency. The inward gravity deepens in Stéphan Oliva’s “It Should Have Happened a Long Time Ago,” from Fantasm (RCA Victor 74321739252). Bruno Chevillon bows his bass until sorrow acquires grain, bowing to minute percussion marks from Paul Motian at the edge of Oliva’s piano.

That private concentration eventually seeks a public body. Under Bernard Struber’s direction, the Orchestre Régional de Jazz d’Alsace turns “Le Phare,” the title piece of its Enja album (ENJ 93592), into a festival whose gaiety contains structural rigor. Guest Louis Sclavis adds another hinge; brass and reeds exult while the rhythmic center remains lucid.

Claude Barthélemy finds harsher collectivity in “Mama Barth Blues,” recorded with the Orchestre National de Jazz for La fête de l’eau (Le Chant du monde 2741228). His guitar strikes the ONJ’s polished mass and releases gorgeous unrest. Andy Emler’s MegaOctet pushes the principle beyond decorum. The previously unreleased “Bal Tribal,” featuring Marc Ducret’s acoustic guitar, wanders through a hospitable delirium where direction keeps changing its name. On “4/4 Cm3/Horizons,” included on Dreams in Tune (Nocturne NTCD 361), Médéric Collignon’s voice becomes percussion and alarm signal before breaking into ecstatic fracture, as Emler’s ensemble treats meter as tensile sculpture.

Another family of pieces gathers around the exposed voice and its difficult bargain with intimacy. “Down by Love,” from Youn Sun Nah’s So I Am… (In Circum Girum ICG 0204-1), holds self-possession and vulnerability within the same trembling filament. David Neerman’s vibraphone opens suspended space, while Benjamin Moussay, Yoni Zelnik, and David Georgelet alter its depth and footing. Nah sings from the point where command begins to quiver, and that quiver becomes sovereign territory.

John Greaves approaches the art of song from a more autumnal interior on “The Price We Pay,” preserved on The Trouble with Happiness (Le Chant du monde 274 11 99). Sophia Domancich’s piano and Vincent Courtois’s cello enlarge the chamber in which mortality has taken a seat. Lucilla Galeazzi brings fiercer blood to “La Luz de Oro,” heard on Trio Rouge (Intuition INT 33532). Her diction tears a bright incision through the darkness, Courtois answers with pizzicato cello, and Michel Godard’s serpent coils through the lower register.

The geographic imagination then widens. Daniel Mille’s “Entre chiens et loups,” the title track of his Emarcy release (013535-2), lets the accordion carry an entire horizon inside its bellows. Jules Bikoko’s double bass provides the patient floor; Jean-Christophe Maillard moves between piano and guitar, with Minino Garay’s percussion tracing paths through the dust.

Carlos Maza’s “Guanabacoa,” appearing on Fidelidad (Emarcy 016109-2), opens the frame across a broad percussive field. Maza’s piano, voice, and cries of acclamation make awareness sudden and bodily before the excerpt withdraws. Jean-Marie Machado’s “Tua-Badalada,” taken from Leve leve muito leve (Hortus/Didier Maes H 100), gathers singers and wind players into modal pageantry. A trace of Carl Orff passes through the writing, though Machado’s fairytale has stranger laws, its tower built downward into recollection.

Scale contracts as smaller ensembles excavate dream matter. François Raulin’s “Légère Houle,” on Trois plans sur la comète (HatOLOGY 582), places his piano beside Bruno Chevillon’s bass and lets François Corneloup’s baritone saxophone roam through the clearing they create. Voice doubling introduces a child’s candor, turning wonder into a form of exact knowledge.

Claude Tchamitchian’s “Rêve. Hommage à Sayat Nova,” drawn from Le monde est une fenêtre (Émouvance EMV 1018), brings his double bass into dialogue with Gaguik Mouradian’s kamancheh across a narrow abyss. Earth and ether exchange substances; wood dreams in mineral. Louis Sclavis and Vincent Courtois achieve related concentration in “Grand Comme le Monde,” a clarinet-and-cello theme drawn from Denis Gheerbrant’s film Grands comme le monde rather than a conventionally catalogued album. Its brevity gives it the density of an inscription.

Rhythm itself becomes philosophy in Daniel Humair’s unreleased “Drum Solo,” drawn from the Work sessions for Sketch. Humair sends thought through skins and metal, asking how consciousness might proceed if it had no nouns, only impact and decay. Sparkle carries shadow, even as momentum becomes a life force whose destination recedes.

Eric Watson’s “Tryst,” documented on Full Metal Quartet (Owl Records 159 572-2), answers with the perilous discipline of the ballad. Mark Dresser’s bass and Ed Thigpen’s drums create a foundation supple enough to disappear. Watson’s piano offers tenderness without sentimentality, leaving Bennie Wallace’s tenor free to roughen the lyric surface. His sound bears the abrasion of a truth dragged across distance, and the quartet’s restraint makes every fracture audible.

Two larger visions convert audibility into conscience. Jon Balke’s North Magnetic Orchestra supplies the compilation’s lone ECM emissary with “Falling,” included on Diverted Travels (ECM 1886). Strings gather around Per Jørgensen’s wordless voice, creating a lullaby whose destination has been erased from the map. The piece suspends arrival, asking listening to survive without possession.

Charlie Haden’s Liberation Music Orchestra carries that suspension into historical responsibility on Bill Frisell’s “Throughout,” heard on Not in Our Name (Verve B0004949-02). Although the album was recorded in Rome, Gérard de Haro mixed it and La Buissonne later hosted its mastering, proof that the studio’s authorship sometimes begins after the musicians leave the recording floor. Carla Bley shapes the opening with Haden, Chris Cheek and the horns unfold in varying densities of duration, and Steve Cardenas threads guitar through the restrained ache. The performance never confuses beauty with innocence. Its tenderness has political weight because every lucid tone carries the pressure of what lucidity obliges us to see.

François Couturier, Jean-Marc Larché, and Jean-Louis Matinier gather those obligations into “Epilogue Requiem,” part of Music for a While (Émouvance EMV 1017). After Couturier’s piano opens in dark concentration, Matinier’s accordion and Larché’s soprano saxophone gradually lift the music into another register, though hope arrives with scars still legible in its grammar. The title promises an ending, while the performance quietly disputes the jurisdiction of such a concept.

Across this rare disc, La Buissonne’s crystal clarity makes room for separateness, preserving the pressure around a cymbal stroke, the darkness under a bowed note, and the breath before a singer risks becoming audible. The microphone receives vibration, but also ancestry and unborn meanings gathering around a phrase. What the studio preserves is that instant when something personal becomes an aperture. Through it, one can almost glimpse a future archaeology in which our civilization is known neither by its monuments nor by the catastrophes it mistook for destiny, but by the care with which a room once held a vanishing note and refused to let its fragility count as disappearance.

The Outflung Net

| Tyran Grillo

Issued in Germany in 1992, The Outflung Net is a rare six-LP box whose very lack of a conventional catalog number suits its elusive character. The title comes from Norman Maclean’s A River Runs Through It, where a fly cast spreads so widely that it seems to have “a center wherever you look.” That image is an ideal emblem for this gathering of ECM New Series recordings. Arvo Pärt may supply its spiritual center, but every disc becomes a center in turn, each extending a line toward Bach, modernism, improvisation, ritual, and the fertile silence for which producer Manfred Eicher’s label had become known. More than a sampler, the set is a compact aesthetic manifesto.

Pärt’s Miserere (ECM 1430) is its natural threshold. The Hilliard Ensemble under Paul Hillier, soprano Sarah Leonard, organist Christopher Bowers-Broadbent, percussionist Pierre Favre, the Western Wind Chamber Choir, and the Orchester der Beethovenhalle Bonn under Dennis Russell Davies inhabit music whose power lies in the tension between utterance and suspension. In the title work, Psalm 51 advances almost word by word, clarinet responses turning language into dialogue. The “Dies irae” erupts like a storm at the end of the world, yet the performance never mistakes volume for grandeur. Leonard’s ascents, David James’s countertenor radiance, Gordon Jones’s grave baritone, and the Hilliards’ collective purity lead from devastation toward an order glimpsed rather than possessed. Festina Lente spirals with stately paradox, while Sarah Was Ninety Years Old sets voices, organ, and Favre’s drums inside an austere arithmetic of awe. Few recordings make interrupted thought feel so complete.

Two albums by Swiss cellist Thomas Demenga place Bach beside living modernism, not as opposing camps but as mutually illuminating practices. On Bach/Holliger (ECM 1340), he is joined by violinist Catrin Demenga and oboist-composer Heinz Holliger. The latter’s Duo trembles and darts with sibling precision, his Studie über Mehrklänge turns circular breathing and multiphonics into a strangely lyrical anatomy of the oboe, and Trema makes the cello shiver as if pursued by its own shadow. After such exposed nerves, Bach’s Fourth Cello Suite arrives cleansed of familiarity. Demenga plays without decorative vanity, drawing a dark inward song from the Sarabande and allowing every fingerfall and resonance to enter the recording’s crystalline air.

Bach/Carter (ECM 1391) reverses the route, opening with the Third Cello Suite in a performance of warmth, mobility, and improvisatory lift before stepping into Elliott Carter’s quicksilver world. Demenga is joined by flutist Philippe Racine, clarinetist Ernesto Molinari, violinist Hansheinz Schneeberger, pianist Paul Cleemann, percussionist Gerhard Huber, and conductor Jürg Wyttenbach. Esprit rude, Esprit doux, Enchanted Preludes, and Riconoscenza per Goffredo Petrassi sketch compressed dramas of interruption and pursuit, but the Triple Duo is the summit: three instrumental pairs exchange ideas with the precarious grace of an intoxicated gymnast. Carter’s simultaneities can seem like scattered strata until time reveals their underlying geology. Heard after Bach, their density is not disorder but another species of counterpoint.

Gavin Bryars’s After the Requiem (ECM 1424) supplies the box’s most openly elegiac landscapes. Its title piece, written as an instrumental afterimage of the Cadman Requiem, brings Bill Frisell’s electric guitar together with the violas of Alexander Balanescu and Kate Musker and Tony Hinnigan’s cello. Frisell burns slowly through the strings like northern light, his sustained tones less a solo voice than a spirit learning the texture of mourning. Elsewhere, Balanescu, clarinetist Roger Heaton, pianist Dave Smith, Bryars on bass, and percussionists Martin Allen and Simon Limbrick navigate The Old Tower of Löbenicht and Allegrasco, while Evan Parker, Stan Sulzmann, Ray Warleigh, and Julian Argüelles form the saxophone choir of Alaric I or II. Bells, low reeds, spare ostinatos, and corroded melodies make the album feel antique without imitation.

The set then widens beyond the concert-hall frame. Trommelgeflüster (ECM 1249) is Harald Weiss alone on percussion and voice, though “alone” hardly describes its populous theater. Steel-toned steps, melismatic chants, whistles, outbursts, and distant twangs gather into a ritual that continually questions its own regularity. Weiss’s theatrical and intercultural imagination risks pastiche, yet the music’s physical conviction pulls its materials into one breathing organism. Part I moves as if across sun-struck earth before Part II enters darker, more dreamlike territory. The title means “Drum Whisper,” but the album whispers with an entire body.

Walter Fähndrich’s Viola (ECM 1412) closes the collection by reducing the field to a single instrument and opening it onto uncertainty. A composer, improviser, and sound-installation artist, Fähndrich gives his pieces only Roman numerals. Overtones sway, rapid arpeggios climb into spirals, sul tasto passages ring like buried bells, and scratches become avian calls and insect song. His precisely governed bow does not tame these sounds so much as release their inner ecology. The final, expanded return to “IV” refuses neat circularity, leaving the ear at the threshold of another possible performance.

Across these six records, ECM’s celebrated spaciousness is never merely atmospheric. Pärt’s prayer, Bach’s architecture, Holliger’s fractured breath, Carter’s restless syntax, Bryars’s weathered remembrance, Weiss’s embodied ritual, and Fähndrich’s improvisational earth all belong to the same outflung net. Its center is everywhere because attentive listening keeps moving it. Rare as an object and even rarer in the coherence of its vision, this box preserves a moment when New Series seemed less like a label imprint than a new way of organizing musical time.

Special thanks to Bernhard Liebenberg for bringing this collection to my attention.

ECM New Series Collection 1995

| Tyran Grillo

Released in Germany as a promotional anthology, ECM New Series Collection 1995 gathers 26 passages from a fertile landscape. Eleni Karaindrou’s Ulysses’ Gaze (ECM New Series 1570) lays out a path of travel before us with two themes whose cinematic origin loosens into a larger psychic terrain. Kim Kashkashian’s viola draws the personal through the political until both seem filaments of one buried nerve. Mourning gathers speed and reveals dance inside its dark clothing, while instrumental conversation becomes conversion, turning grief toward an exuberance too scarred to call innocent.

That traffic between fragment and world deepens in György Kurtág’s Hommage à R.Sch (ECM New Series 1508), where the dedicatory composer’s miniature forms become living particles. Piano and clarinet gather around the viola in the eponymous Hommage à R.Sch., op. 15d, giving the music sudden visibility. Schumann enters through Märchenbilder Fairy Tale Pictures), op. 113, although arrival proves too stable a word. Its vignettes emerge from Kurtág’s afterimage, each microscopically tuned to affection.

Keith Jarrett’s traversal of Händel’s keyboard suites (ECM New Series 1530) offers a lucid counterweight. The recitative-shaped opening of Suite No. 2 in F Major, HWV 427 carries the vocal Händel in embryonic form before the Fuga opens its intricate gates. The pianist’s telescoped dynamics give ornament ethical weight, as every flourish answers to proportion. Federico Mompou’s Música Callada (ECM New Series 1523), represented here by three selections in Herbert Henck’s grave illumination, carries inwardness past the edge of utterance. Mompou’s “silent music” inhabits the soul’s inner ear, where sound waits inside solitude for the touch that will give it contour. Henck allows the notes to hover at the fringe of incarnation.

Sacred language assumes more labyrinthine form in Christopher Bowers-Broadbent’s reading of Messiaen’s Méditations Sur Le Mystère De La Sainte Trinité (ECM New Series 1494). The French composer’s communicable language encodes Aquinas into the organ, converting theology into an audible grammar whose meaning remains partly sealed. Part VII places density in the upper register, where sin becomes molecular and descends through imagined soil. The Hilliard Ensemble’s Codex Speciálník (ECM New Series 1504) approaches inscription from another century. In natali domini advances in luminous block chords touched by chromatic ornament, while Pulcherrima Rosa unfurls a melodic current whose anonymity feels sovereign. The Prague manuscript becomes a living archive under these voices, crossing five centuries without surrendering its obscurity.

Giya Kancheli occupies the anthology’s most desolate interior. In Exil (ECM New Series 1535), the Paul Celan setting Einmal rises from an alto flute invocation that arrests the heart before Maacha Deubner’s unaffected soprano enters. Tapped bows and glassy harmonics place enormous force inside a nearly vacant field. The related Abii ne viderem (ECM New Series 1510) expands this monastic material into orchestral mass. Staccato eruptions are joined by abysses of silence until a full statement arrives, weighted by the piano’s pulse.

The cello works on Patrick Demenga and Thomas Demenga’s 12 Hommages A Paul Sacher (ECM New Series 1520-21) transform a patron’s name into generative code. The Sacher hexachord is an alphabet evolving into timbre. Henri Dutilleux’s 3 Strophes sur le nom de Sacher gives the dedication a tensile intimacy, with conflict touching agreement within one speaking body. Luciano Berio’s Les Mots Sont Allés opens modest notes into fractal agency, language departing only to discover further chambers inside the instrument. A different dialogue animates Robyn Schulkowsky and Nils Petter Molvær’s Hastening Westward (ECM New Series 1564). In “Pier And Ocean II,” foregrounded cymbals create an aerial plane for Molvær’s trumpet, while deeper impacts lend the scene sanctity freed from doctrine. Percussion supplies a shifting anatomy; trumpet becomes the consciousness passing through it, visible to itself for one impossible instant.

A program dedicated entirely to Sándor Veress (ECM New Series 1555), performed by Camerata Bern with Heinz Holliger, is another homage. Veress taught Kurtág and wrote the Passacaglia Concertante for Holliger, so inheritance here passes in genuine form. A plucked string drops an idea into depth, and viola-rich currents carry its consequences outward as Holliger’s oboe burns through the structure with intimate authority. His own Beiseit/Alb-Chehr (ECM New Series 1540) divides that authority between folklore and verbal fracture. Alb-Chehr recounts a cowherd’s ghostly encounter through playful color shadowed by fatal knowledge, while Beiseit lets Robert Walser’s words dictate their own arrhythmias. Countertenor, clarinet, accordion, and double bass inhabit an intimacy sharpened by the recording site, a psychiatric institute whose walls seem to have retained every unsounded syllable. Und ging briefly turns lyrical, yet lyricism here bears the delicate unease of a door found open in a room no one remembers entering.

Across this rare compilation, the New Series ideal emerges as an art of attunement to what has not fully entered the world. ECM’s celebrated spaciousness consequently feels less acoustic than ontological. These recordings suggest that consciousness may itself be a form of chamber music, each self sounding only because another presence has drawn a bow across its silence.

Special thanks to Bernhard Liebenberg for bringing this disc to my attention.

ECM New Releases Autumn 2012

| Tyran Grillo

This double-disc promotional sampler appears to be the only one explicitly devoted to both ECM proper and its classical New Series imprint, making it one of the label’s most consummate yearly portraits. Its two halves suggest adjoining chambers within the same heart. Since the ECM disc was also issued individually as ECM Music & Words: Autumn 2012 for the Italian magazine Musica Jazz (see my review here), our attention turns to the New Series side.

Johann Sebastian Bach provides the foundation through András Schiff’s recording of The Well-Tempered Clavier (ECM New Series 2270-73). The work is an origin story written in the grammar of recurrence, and Schiff’s total avoidance of pedal makes its restraint a potent expressive tool. In Book I’s C major Prelude, the timeless arpeggios acquire linguistic pressure. Schiff transforms the piano into a syllabic organ, every tone carrying the faint memory of a mouth. By the fugue, Bach’s nerves have made their way into a river’s flow.

From that immense design, the sampler contracts into the charged particles of György Kurtág’s Signs, Games and Messages, as heard on Kurtág/Ligeti: Music for Viola (ECM New Series 2240), as performed by Kim Kashkashian. In “Panaszos Nóta” (“Plaintive Tune”), the violist’s exaggerated vibrato lends a metallic vulnerability, as notes negotiate their own survival before withdrawing into the instrument’s wooden dark.

John Cage’s The Wonderful Widow of Eighteen Springs, from As It Is (ECM New Series 2268), offers another form of divination through Alexei Lubimov and Natalia Pschenitschnikova. Language hovers near semantic collapse while Lubimov turns the piano into a cabinet of knocks and intimations. Pschenitschnikova allows James Joyce’s words to shed meaning without surrendering their magnetic charge. Although this track also appeared on the above-mentioned standalone sampler with Paul Hindemith’s Ragtime, the present collection represents Anna Gourari’s Canto Oscuro (ECM New Series 2255) through Busoni’s transcription of Bach’s “Ich ruf’ zu Dir, Herr Jesu Christ.” Beneath her hands, melody ascends as a thought trying to remember the mind that first contained it.

Valery Afanassiev enters a different temporal fissure through Franz Schubert’s Moments musicaux (ECM New Series 2215). These late works sustain an unstable exchange between ebullience and melancholy, of which the Allegro moderato inhabits that brink with childlike wonder, jumping into the muddy puddles of the heart and discovering that their reflections lead downward.

Valentin Silvestrov’s Sacred Songs (ECM New Series 2279) further loosens chronology with the Songs for Vespers of 2006, of which “Come, Let Us Worship” draws a single thread through two millennia, its shifting harmonies washing radiance in shadow before releasing it into the ear. The Alleluja-Tropus from Arvo Pärt’s Adam’s Lament (ECM New Series 2225) sets liturgical words devoted to St. Nicholas of Myra. In this music, the body is time’s most temporary form of handwriting.

Elsewhere, an orchard is being cultivated for instruments that have not yet been invented. Tiny tuning forks ripen on its branches while snow falls upward into a sleepless moon. The silence tastes faintly of iron and pears, and the only image we have left is that which shows us as we are.

Special thanks to David Wakeham for bringing this rarity to my attention.

New Releases 2018/1 ECM

| Tyran Grillo

Across selections gathered in this rare promotional release, ECM’s 2018 landscape holds together by an invisible underground current in which every melody becomes a thread whose destination remains mercifully uncertain. John Surman opens that map on Invisible Threads (ECM 2588). In “At First Sight,” his soprano enters the upper air, stitching daylight to the needle-eye of time. Thomas Strønen’s Lucus (ECM 2576) carries this paradox inward. “Time Is A Blind Guide” separates filaments of interpretation from emotional moonbeams, suggesting that guidance may begin precisely where sight relinquishes authority. On Contra la Indecisión (ECM 2582), the Bobo Stenson Trio gives Silvio Rodríguez’s “Canción contra la indecisión” a unified tenderness. Deprived of words, the song discovers another grammar in touch: melody becomes a hand passed between players, each musician safeguarding its meaning with tenderness.

The human voice enters this space bearing the knowledge that affection often recognizes itself through distance. Norma Winstone transforms “What Is A Youth?” on Descansado (ECM 2567) into a dark lens for parries of desire, her phrasing suspended between confession and the private afterimage of confession. Elina Duni’s Partir (ECM 2587) makes departure even more elemental. Domenico Modugno’s “Amara Terra Mia” opens as many doors as it has words, then leaves each one trembling on its hinges. With the scene stripped to voice and guitar, ancestral ground becomes an umbilical memory severed for the sake of itinerancy. Uncertainty shadows every vocal step, while the guitar offers a small republic of earth beneath it. Elsewhere, Ketil Bjørnstad’s A Suite of Poems (ECM 2440) finds a more mischievous form of displacement. In “Astor Crowne, New Orleans,” Anneli Drecker steers a blues-inflected drinking song through whimsy, turning the tavern into a temporary country whose citizenship lasts only as long as breath can carry a phrase.

Other performances navigate by enlarging the sky within the instrument. Shinya Fukumori’s For 2 Akis (ECM 2574) begins with “Hoshi Meguri No Uta,” Kenji Miyazawa’s “The Star-Circling Song,” whose original words enlist Polaris as a guide through the visible universe. Its historical aura reaches toward Japan’s interwar preservation of folk culture, but Fukumori approaches the past as a living correspondence rather than a museum seal. Walter Lang’s lyric curiosity illuminates the route, and Matthieu Bordenave’s vulnerable tone gives stardust a pulse. Nicolas Masson pursues a related bond on Travelers (ECM 2578), where “Gagarine” moves through continually altered currents. The saxophone exceeds the boundary of the body producing it; song sustains the instrument until player and horn dissolve into a shared horizon. In Jakob Bro’s Returnings (ECM 2546), “Strands” constructs a tesseract inside the floating mind. Its geometry seeks purchase without demanding surrender, tethering consciousness to an elsewhere whose dimensions can be heard but never entered whole.

Ground and altitude keep exchanging masks. On Kit Downes’s Obsidian (ECM 2559), the floating arpeggios of “Kings” score their images with a palette knife. A horizontal path tilts upward against gravity, weighted by Downes’s contrary motions and his spontaneous deference to suggestion. Somewhere inside the music, a boy crosses hills in search of a destiny no one has selected for him, leaving an audible trail for those whose blindness has sharpened other forms of vision. Mathias Eick’s Ravensburg (ECM 2584) assembles “Children” within the puzzle logic associated with the album’s Southern German namesake. Eick’s singing voice extends his trumpet’s long residence in the throat. Håkon Aase threads his violin through the deeper channels Eick carves, while Andreas Ulvo and the rhythm section give the terrain a responsive consciousness.

That self-awareness darkens and intensifies across the instrumental ensembles. “Thirteen,” from the Andy Sheppard Quartet’s Romaria (ECM 2577), lets guitar swells recover the spacious grace once brought by Terje Rypdal to Ketil Bjørnstad’s The Sea. Kristjan Randalu’s Absence (ECM 2586) works through briefer inscriptions; “Lumi II” reveals process by granting Ben Monder’s painterly imagination room to wander beyond the frame. Circularity becomes an ethical discipline in “Modul 60” from Nik Bärtsch’s Ronin’s Awase (ECM 2603). Tender and shadowed, this interlude uncovers depth through return. Marc Sinan and Oğuz Büyükberber fracture that depth on White (ECM 2558). “there I,” the opening section of Büyükberber’s five-part suite, releases a free-jazz kaleidoscope of windows nested within windows.

Arild Andersen’s In-House Science (ECM 2594) brings the experiment to combustion. “Mira” rises from the bassist’s luminous tone before Paolo Vinaccia and Tommy Smith drive it toward a brightness nearly hostile to vision. A fleeting uplift vanishes before it can harden into reassurance. These powerful characters merge through radical attentiveness, exchanging leadership with the fluidity of thought moving between minds.

Steve Tibbetts closes this constellation by bringing cosmic scale into the foreground. On Life Of (ECM 2599), “Life Of Emily” trades earth for flesh, with fatherhood refracting sunlight through rain held just beyond arrival. The album’s invisible routes finally converge in the fact of another person, whose existence redraws the map simply by entering it. Perhaps this is what all these musicians have been circling: every note entrusted to the unknown is an act of parenthood, responsible for a future it will never see to full fruition.

Special thanks to David Wakeham for bringing this album to my attention.

Ralph Alessi: A Sun That Never Sets (ECM 2864)

| Tyran Grillo

Ralph Alessi
A Sun That Never Sets

Ralph Alessi trumpet
Joseph Alessi trombone
Matt Mitchell piano
John Hébert double bass
Ches Smith drums, vibraphone
Recorded February 2025
Oktaven Audio Studio, Mount Vernon, NY
Engineer: Ryan Streber
Mixed by Manfred Eicher, Ralph Alessi, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer)
Bavaria Musikstudios, München
Cover design: Sascha Kleis
Produced by Ralph Alessi and Manfred Eicher
Release date: July 3, 2026

On A Sun That Never Sets, Ralph Alessi expands the architecture of his quartet by adding a second horn: his brother Joseph, a trombonist best known for his work with the New York Philharmonic. Their shared history gives the music an immediate intimacy, but the album draws its energy from the differences between their voices. Joseph is more than a featured guest. His burnished tone changes the ensemble’s center of gravity and reveals new colors in Ralph’s compositions. The result is an album concerned with kinship, not only between brothers but also between freedom and form.

Pianist Matt Mitchell and bassist John Hébert return alongside Ches Smith, who moves between drums and vibraphone. The musicians navigate Alessi’s writing with confidence, allowing angular ideas to open into clearings where lyricism can emerge without becoming sentimental. The influences of Ornette Coleman and Igor Stravinsky remain present without sounding imitative. Coleman’s example encourages melodic liberty, while Stravinsky’s is evident in the music’s rhythmic disruptions and structural precision. These forces help the album sound cerebral but never clinical. Each musician receives ample space, yet every contribution remains connected to the group’s larger movement.

The title track establishes this language through a precise theme that gradually loosens into exploratory improvisation. Smith’s vibraphone and Hébert’s bass approach the music from different angles, creating productive uncertainty over where its rhythmic and harmonic direction originates. Mitchell supports Alessi’s trumpet without restricting it, enabling the bandleader to move beyond the tune’s apparent boundaries while retaining a thread back to its central idea. The performance captures the strength of a quintet that can surrender a fixed destination without losing its sense of direction. Unity comes through the negotiation of contrasting approaches rather than strict agreement.

Several pieces turn that tension inward. “Nothing Is Dead” suspends piano and vibraphone within an elusive harmonic atmosphere, allowing its meaning to emerge gradually. Alessi’s trumpet is assured but guarded, conveying emotional weight without forcing a single interpretation. In “Ether,” Smith’s brushed drumming opens space beneath Mitchell’s wide range of touch, attracting fragments of memory into the present.

The closing “Behind Clouds” extends this fascination with concealed presence. Over Hébert’s steady, intoning bass, the ensemble proceeds with melodic care. Placed beside “Nothing Is Dead,” it creates correspondence across the record, as both compositions examine how absence can remain active.

The brothers’ most prominent duets, “Relaxed Misery” and “Of Trees (Variations on a Theme by TB),” bring the album’s interest in inherited language into sharper focus. Trumpet and trombone circle one another through muted exchanges, sometimes converging and sometimes letting the space between them carry the conversation. “Relaxed Misery” earns the sardonic tension of its title, turning discomfort into buoyancy and giving Ralph room for some of his most animated soloing. “Of Trees” is more oblique, developing its theme through disparities that keep the source partly hidden. The pieces share a jaunty, alert quality, but their emotional charge comes from the brothers’ ability to recognize and challenge one another in real time.

A familial current also runs through “Twichild,” “Slow Dancing Bear” and “Duck Face,” whose titles suggest private humor and childhood memory. Each uses wonder as a disciplined way of reconsidering familiar materials. “Twichild” follows delicate, winding lines toward a more inward mood, with Ralph’s precision made unusually vulnerable. “Slow Dancing Bear” finds tenderness in an awkward rhythmic gait, allowing weight and grace to coexist. On “Duck Face,” Hébert provides a perceptive countervoice before Smith’s solo releases the tune from its established footing. Together, the tracks treat play as a vital form of communication.

“Sweet Spot” occupies a warmer region. Its spacious, glowing color recalls Enrico Rava, while Mitchell’s piano creates a suspended foundation beneath the horns. Joseph’s trombone contributes a dusky depth that approaches a lullaby without becoming overly sweet. Small harmonic disturbances keep the tune’s balance alive. “Transitional Imagery,” by contrast, converts instability into propulsion. Mitchell and the rhythm section move with fierce clarity, shapeshifting as they proceed. The title could describe Alessi’s broader method: his music is most alive when one shape gives way to another.

Across these 11 originals, Alessi’s fluency as a player and composer gains a more varied context. The expanded ensemble shows how strongly his music depends on the willingness to offer an unfinished thought and let another musician transform it. His writing gives each player a distinct orbit while maintaining a field of mutual consequence. Freedom, therefore, carries responsibility, since every spontaneous gesture changes what is available to the others.

Steve Swallow: Winter Songs (ECM 2879)

| Tyran Grillo

Steve Swallow
Winter Songs

Mike Rodriguez trumpet
Chris Cheek tenor saxophone
Steve Cardenas guitar
Gil Goldstein piano
Steve Swallow bass
Adam Nussbaum drums
Recorded September 2024 at Sear Sound, New York
Engineer: Tyler McDiarmid
Cover photo: Luciano Rossetti
An ECM Production
Release date: June 26, 2026

“I was there when this music was written. In fact, my hand held the pencil. I began with the need to do something to fill each long day, and music rushed forward to sustain me. Before Winter Songs I had given music whatever I could, but as I made this album the tables turned: it gave me what I needed. Music is elemental, like the air we breathe.”
–Steve Swallow

Winter Songs is one of those albums that arrives quietly, carrying the circumstances that shaped it. Steve Swallow’s first true leader date since 2013’s Into The Woodwork, and his first appearance on the label since contributing to John Scofield’s Swallow Tales and Carla Bley’s Life Goes On in 2020, does not present itself as a comeback. Instead, it sounds like music assembled among close friends, with each idea given time to settle into its clearest form. Its restraint, therefore, evokes the confidence of an artist with nothing left to prove.

Swallow is joined by saxophonist Chris Cheek, trumpeter Mike Rodriguez, drummer Adam Nussbaum, guitarist Steve Cardenas, and pianist Gil Goldstein. These longtime collaborators approach the material with patience and mutual trust. The horns add color without crowding the arrangements, Cardenas and Goldstein outline the harmony, and Nussbaum keeps the time flexible. Swallow’s distinctive electric bass moves through the ensemble with unforced grace. He rarely demands the foreground, but the group continually turns around the quiet authority of his phrasing. No one treats space as something that must be filled, and that shared worldview gives the performances much of their character.

Recorded at Sear Sound in New York in September 2024, Winter Songs suggests a warm room in a cold climate. Fluid swing, reflective balladry, and chamber-like precision coexist throughout. The improvisations never mistake intensity for discovery. Instead, the music finds momentum in subtle shifts of weight, tone, and emphasis, with ideas passing naturally between the players. Its calm is active rather than static, sustained by close attention to every change in direction.

The titles, taking simple form as spelled-out numbers, leave the music open to association. “One” and “Nine,” positioned at opposite ends of the sequence, share a luminous tenderness. “One” moves with understated assurance. Rodriguez delivers a sensitive solo, and Cheek follows with what feels like a thoughtful reply. Their exchange shows how two melodic voices can meet without competing. “Nine” carries that generosity into a more spacious setting. Piano and guitar establish a delicate atmosphere before Rodriguez’s trumpet gives the piece direction and weight. Its grace comes from the ensemble’s trust: each musician holds a part of the tangram, but the complete shape emerges from their cumulative outcome.

The more rhythmically driven pieces are equally controlled. “Two” is a midtempo performance whose strengths become clearer with repeated listening. Swallow navigates its shifting harmonies so easily that their complexity feels instinctive. Goldstein finds fresh routes through the composition, while Nussbaum’s cymbals add brightness and motion. Cheek’s concise solo is especially compelling; his pauses give the phrases room to register. “Four” builds on a rounded backbeat and restrained, slow-moving funk. The horns braid their lines naturally before Goldstein explores the harmonic implications of their exchange. The groove is steady but never forceful. “Six” releases more of the energy held in reserve elsewhere, allowing Cheek to stretch across a broader emotional range. Rodriguez takes up that momentum in his own ascending solo. Even at its most animated, however, the ensemble remains disciplined.

Cardenas takes the foreground on “Five,” using light, pastel-toned voicings that add color without unnecessary density. Cheek enters with a solo that builds gradually while preserving the performance’s even keel. On “Eight,” Goldstein creates small openings in the piano texture, and Cheek responds with measured emotion. In both tracks, timbre shapes how the compositions develop.

“Three” and “Seven” lead into the album’s deepest interior. “Three” unfolds at an unhurried pace under Goldstein’s guidance, with Cardenas adding brief, pointillistic guitar figures near the end. The melody feels patient, lucid, and seasoned without calling attention to its maturity. Its force comes from clarity rather than drama, and the arrangement trusts the listener to meet it at that level. “Seven” brings Swallow most clearly into focus. He states the melody against Goldstein’s soft-pedaled chords and Cardenas’s fluid picking, creating the album’s quiet fulcrum. Swallow makes the tune sound discovered rather than declared, while Goldstein and Cardenas surround it with carefully placed details.

The numerical titles might suggest order, but Swallow uses them to emphasize relationship rather than measurement. Each piece gains meaning through the musicians’ responses to one another. The end effect is an album that is modest in presentation but substantial in feeling, a late-career statement whose assurance lies in how little it needs to insist on itself.

Mick Goodrick/Fred Hersch: Feebles, Fables and Ferns (ECM 2876)

| Tyran Grillo

Mick Goodrick/Fred Hersch
Feebles, Fables and Ferns

Mick Goodrick guitar
Fred Hersch piano
Recorded August 1988 at Classic Sound Studio, NYC
Engineer: A. T. Michael MacDonald
Remixed 2025 by Chris Allen
Original recording produced by Fred Hersch
Cover photo: Jean-Guy Lathuilière
An ECM Production
Release date: June 19, 2026

Recorded at Fred Hersch’s New York studio in August 1988, Feebles, Fables and Ferns documents the only recorded meeting between Hersch and guitarist Mick Goodrick, then fellow fixtures of Boston’s jazz community. Historical circumstance provides the frame, yet the deeper distinction resides in the remarkable ease of their exchange. The session carries almost none of the dust normally associated with an archival recovery. Its present tense remains intact, sealed within every pause and sudden melodic turn. Both musicians develop ideas in real time without crowding the music or steering it toward predetermined conclusions. Their attentiveness suggests a shared space in which each voice can enter fully while leaving the other unclaimed. Goodrick, an influential teacher whose sparse discography never adequately reflected his stature, is especially compelling. His quietly inventive improvising reveals why Julian Lage, Pat Metheny, Wolfgang Muthspiel, and so many other guitarists have regarded him so highly. He seems able to bend a phrase around the interior of a thought, decorating its walls without obscuring their mystery.

That rapport animates a lively program of originals, standards, and one open improvisation. Goodrick’s title composition, first heard on 1979’s In Pas(s)ing, emerges here as a compact study in interlocking lines. Hersch and Goodrick’s melodic phrases remain tight yet fluid, while rhythmically astute changes seem to discover their destination only upon reaching it.

“Falling Grace,” one of two Steve Swallow tunes in the set, brings a livelier angle to that exchange. Retaining its composer’s crooked smile, it folds playfulness into sardonic self-awareness while maintaining considerable lyrical poise. Hersch answers that wit with buoyant precision, while Goodrick phrases across it from oblique vantage points, tugging at the seams without tearing the fabric. Swallow’s “Amazing” later enters through Goodrick’s “Away 10,” moving through dimly illuminated memories that appear to recognize us before we recognize them. What was laid down casually in a studio nearly four decades ago has acquired meanings unavailable to its creators, proving that music can continue thinking after its makers have left the room. Time has not merely preserved these performances but has collaborated with them.

Within that expanding temporal space, “Five Excursions” unfolds as a surreal yet welcoming chain of improvisations. Its tentative beginnings resemble a constellation being plotted by instruments uncertain of the sky behind them. A few pinpointed tones establish provisional coordinates, after which the music opens into interlocking geometries. Hersch and Goodrick appear to reverse-engineer causes for effects already hovering in the air. Silence becomes a working material rather than an interruption, allowing each idea to cast a longer shadow.

As Johnny Green’s “Out of Nowhere” blossoms into the foreground, the album enters a region of crystalline wit evocative of Chick Corea’s ECM classics. Clever syncopation and deft motivic interchange make the performance feel perpetually on the verge of levitation. Hersch rearranges the tune’s internal gravity while Goodrick sends bright phrases skimming along its altered surface, each musician alert to the comic potential inside sophistication.

Hersch’s “Heartsong” draws the session toward a more openly radiant center. The composition pumps richness through its chambers, yet its emotional amplitude remains governed by a profound introversion. Goodrick understands how much the tune contains and resists the temptation to excavate everything at once. Even during his fastest lines, every note retains a private place in the larger design. Hersch, for his part, stays within reach, grounding uplift in touch and harmonic clarity.

Mal Waldron’s “Soul Eyes,” originally written with John Coltrane’s sound in mind, offers a final field of inquiry for instruments far removed from that conception. Guitar and piano open from within, allowing secrets to emerge as subtle alterations of perspective. Goodrick homes in on details that another improviser might treat as mere filler. Minute changes in the harmonic terrain acquire enormous consequence beneath his attention, with a bent inflection or delayed resolution suddenly becoming the axis around which the piece turns. Hersch’s lyricism operates simultaneously inside the drama and beyond its frame. He inhabits the melody while quietly altering the conditions under which it can be understood.

Feebles, Fables and Ferns stands as an unusually intimate portrait of two restless musical minds meeting on equal terms. Its archival unearthing offers more than access to a lost session; it returns a form of attention that now feels almost radical. Hersch and Goodrick listen without attempting to absorb one another, preserving difference as the very substance of communion. Their duetting gradually becomes a demonstration that freedom can deepen when another consciousness is fully present.