Rolf Lislevand archlute, chitarrone Recorded 2022-23 at Moosestudios, Evje, Norway by Rolf Lislevand Mixed October 2024 by Manfred Eicher, Rolf Lislevand, and Michael Hinreiner (engineer) at Bavaria Musikstudios Cover photo: Fidel Sclavo Produced by Manfred Eicher and Rolf Lislevand Release date: August 29, 2025
Nearly a decade after his last appearance on ECM, early music specialist Rolf Lislevand returns to the New Series with another solo program, shifting focus now from the court of Louis XIV to 17th-century Italy. The album’s title is a nod to Il libro primo, a musician or writer’s first volume of works that, as Lislevand notes in the album’s booklet, “can often hold the most inspired and radical creations of an artist.” Like the more formalized Opus primum, it carries a certain creative charge, affording listeners a glimpse into the artist’s most foundational thoughts in a realm of lively experimentation and recalibration of existing rules.
It’s also an exciting realm to explore for proving that the lutenist’s repertoire is far more vast and varied than the fairweather listener may mistake it to be. Take, for example, the program’s two opening works by Johann Hieronymus Kapsberger (c. 1580-1651) and Giovanni Paolo Foscarini (c. 1600-1647). Whereas the former’s Toccata terza greets the dawn like eyelashes fluttering into wakefulness, the latter’s Tasteggiata is its nocturnal other, revealing a strikingly modern atmosphere that Lislevand likens to the French impressionists and even to Carla Bley. Neither characterization is misplaced, given the improvisational elements incorporated into the present renderings, which allow for something ethereally raw to spring forth.
And what of the fantastical arpeggios that open Kapsberger’s Toccata sesta, added by Lislevand and seemingly drawn from the same well? In them is the promise of life and love, all unraveled with a meticulous sort of freedom. The mid-tempo feel of Kapsberger’s Toccata quinta strikes that same balance of flourishing and nourishing, never letting go of the Baroque’s architectural sensibilities.
A highlight is the Corrente con le sue spezzate of Bernardo Gianoncelli (d. c. 1650). Despite being the latest work on the program in terms of publication, dating to the end of his life, it is a veritable flower of a tune. With a clear bass line as pistil and sparkling ornamentations as petals, it sways to the wind of Lislevand’s organic touch. It also epitomizes the nuove musiche approach of the times, which went against the polyphonic grain of the Renaissance by favoring deeper rhythmic interplays through which staid motifs were recontextualized. One might liken such a movement to Hollywood’s propensity to remake its own cultural products, an impulse that (profit motives aside) points to the seemingly universal need to repackage the past in the aesthetics of the new so that audiences can connect to the same emotional content on more immediately relatable terms.
Thoughtful inclusions are to be found in two Recercadas by Diego Ortiz (c. 1510-1576). Despite their spatial and temporal differences, Lislevand places Ortiz and Kapsberger on the same shelf for their syncopations and expressive colorations. Each spins increasingly complex relationships from deceptively simple beginnings, growing fractally with every reiteration.
Yet the pinnacle for me is Lislevand’s original Passacaglia al modo mio, which is at once a distillation and loving expansion of the passacaglia form. It combines many of the elements found in its surroundings, including a robust “left hand” in the bass and a lithe “right hand” in the overlying melody. It also changes faces multiple times from start to finish, its improvisational layers paying homage to Barbara Strozzi, Bach, Beethoven, and Keith Jarrett. All the while, it maintains a haunting sense of familiarity, especially in the concluding progression, which invites us into its circularity like a child comforted by a mother’s embrace.
Special mention must be made of the recording, captured in a barn in northern Norway by Lislevand himself, engineered by Michael Hinreiner, and mixed by both Lislevand and Hinreiner alongside producer Manfred Eicher in Munich. Although the archlute is primary, some of the pieces originated on the Baroque guitar and chitarrone (or theorbo), which is also played here and distinguished by its darker, more rounded tone. Instead of enveloping these instruments in a wash of artificial sound, the reverb draws out their inner essence with tasteful details of wood and strings.
But thou, when thou prayest, enter into thy closet, and when thou hast shut thy door, pray to thy Father which is in secret, and thy Father which seeth in secret shall reward thee openly. –Matthew 6:6
Rodion Romanovich Raskalnikov is a murderer. To say as much is to betray everything and nothing about Crime and Punishment, the plot of which he is the central protagonist. But what has he—and will he—become? Such is the bigger question Fyodor Dostoevsky examines throughout his 1866 masterpiece.
In its opening act, we see enough of Raskalnikov’s contemplations to know that he is an unsettled individual, one who lives in the shadows because there is so little light to be had. Stepping out from his rented closet one hot July evening, “as if indecisively,” he is already waist-deep in melancholia. His modest lodgings do not constitute a place of rest or meditation. If anything, he has turned the Bible verse quoted above on its head. Rather than pray to the Father, he throws the doors of his heart wide open to the Devil, whose ever-encroaching impulses are given the freedom to sow themselves in his soil and absorb the tainted nutrients of his self-aggrandizement.
It is no surprise that the first words he utters are not to a friend, a person on the street, or to us. Rather, they are to himself. Internal dialogue is his magnetic north, and in following it, he leads us by proxy into a web of characters so electric and alive (even, if not especially, those hurtling toward death) that his fate can only be an object of our curiosity. Before we get to know him, he is already wondering: “Am I really capable of that?” thus alluding, of course, to the murder he has already contemplated and played out in his head and which, almost in the same breath, he dismisses as fantasy. And yet, fantasy is more than the realization of a desire. It is the very force by which he learns to desire. So strong is this drive that he begins to question whether it comes from within or from without. “If not reason, then the devil!” he spits forth, pitting the impulse to kill in a false dichotomy. So, too, does the Devil cloak himself in reason.
Or, more accurately, if not pure reason, then its tainted cousin of casuistry, the process by which the baseless effort to justify immorality becomes a self-fulfilling Ouroboros. This is why we so often find Raskalnikov talking to himself and why passersby take him to be a careless drunk. In his mind, the answers to all moral questions have been primed and ready but must be taken by force to ring true. Ironically, this may just be the most genuine thing about him.
Of the catalytic murder, the victim of which, Alyona Ivanovna, is universally hated for her shady pawnbrokering and abusive nature, we are given a relatively brief and merciless account, so that by the time the deed is done, we are invited to regard it with visceral dismissal. In the subsequent adrenaline rush, he becomes enchanted by its unfolding, as well as by the fact that an unsuspecting second victim had to be involved after walking in on the scene in progress. The translator’s introduction rightly puts it this way: “Crime and Punishment is a highly unusual mystery novel: the most mystified character in it is the murderer himself.”
That said, one would be mistaken in thinking that Raskalnikov’s torment is a result of his heinous crime. He has been in its clutches long before we first encounter him. It did not come pouring in from a tear in the fabric of time the moment he wielded that fatal axe. It is the result of the exhausting back and forth between his heart and soul that has besought him since childhood. Hence, the dream he has early on in the novel, in which he takes the form of a boy regarding a crowd of drunken rabble-rousers in the rural town where he grew up. Fearful of their coarseness, he clings to his father, a figure now absent in his life and perhaps already a model of indifference then. One of the men launches into a verbal tirade that culminates in him beating a horse to death in full view of the assembled onlookers. Young Raskalnikov cannot bear the sight, and neither can his adult self. After the dream, “the mere thought of it made me vomit in realityand plunged me into horror,” even while knowing that the manner in which the horse was dispatched reflects his desire to carry out the same. Furthermore, on the night of the murder, we are told, “never for a single moment during the whole time could he believe in the feasibility of his designs,” as if this were an excuse for their imminent manifestation.
It is significant, too, that the killer in his dream should be named Mikolka, a diminutive of Nikolas that means “victory of the people.” It conveys, in no uncertain terms, that if the destitute are to find a way out of their predicament, it must be done through violence. All of which points to a sociopolitical subtext that becomes more familiar as the narrative progresses. It is the very idealism that has buried its talons in Raskalnikov’s mind to the point of needing to overthrow the established mechanisms of power under which he knows order and, to risk belaboring the word, reason. He wants so much to rank among the “geniuses” who inhabit his waking thoughts, when he is still nothing more than the dreamed-of boy seeking refuge in his father in the face of senseless killing.
Various names, it turns out, are equally emblematic of inner tensions. Raskolnikov, for one, comes from the word raskolnik, meaning “schismatic,” referring to religious separatism while also implying a splitting of self. And then there is the friend from his university days, Dmitri Prokofich Razumikhin, whose surname means “to bring to reason.” Indeed, it is Razumikhin who cuts to the quick of our antihero with almost indulgent aplomb as he strives to “make a human being out of you, after all.” It is also he who helps us throw the parameters of his decrepit reunitee’s worldview into relief. According to said worldview, he observes, “crime is a protest against the abnormality of the social order—that alone and nothing more.” So it is that Raskalnikov’s justificational acrobatics trace a roadmap of interpretation for our benefit. As his enthusiastic acquaintance goes on to say, “Nature isn’t taken into account, nature is driven out, nature is not supposed to be.” Which is entirely accurate because Socialism, in its quest to vanquish hierarchy and oppression, fails to recognize that we are always at war with ourselves. In rejecting the notion of a living soul, it reduces the human condition to unalloyed materialism.
Others are quick to interject their own opinions on these nascent ideals. Among them is Porfiry Petrovich, lead investigator of Alyona’s murder, who is duly fascinated by an article that his main suspect once published titled “On Crime.” Porfiry summarizes its thesis as follows:
“The ordinary must live in obedience and have no right to transgress the law, because they are, after all, ordinary. While the extraordinary have the right to commit all sorts of crimes and in various ways to transgress the law, because in point of fact they are extraordinary.”
To which its author replies:
“I merely suggested that an ‘extraordinary’ man has the right…that is, not an official right, but his own right, to allow his conscience to…step over certain obstacles, and then only in the event that the fulfillment of his idea—sometimes perhaps salutary for the whole of mankind—calls for it.”
Here, we are given insight into his intellectual straw grasping. For even as Raskalnikov expresses this sentiment, he must already know that the philosophy of fulfillment is, at best, a phonetically borrowed loan word in the translation of his life. Still, he is insistent on one thing:
“I only believe in my main idea. It consists precisely in people being divided generally, according to the law of nature, into two categories: a lower one, ordinary people, who are, so to speak, material serving solely for the reproduction of their own kind; and people proper—that is, those who have the gift or talent of speaking a new word in their environment.”
Phrased differently, instead of simply reproducing through what is natural, the extraordinary creates something out of nothing through what is supernatural. Raskalnikov fancies himself, or at least would like to be, one of those “extraordinary” people who reject God yet wish to hold His power.
And so, his search for redemption ends up being a recapitulation of what makes him so flawed in the first place: namely, his humanity. Unable to take Nihilism to its most logical conclusion yet incapable of playing the role of the young radical, either, he is forced to choose between himself and…himself. With nowhere left to run but inward, he cracks his conscience open like an egg, scrambles the contents, and throws them into the gaping mouths of his listeners. Among those caught in his defenestrations is Sonya Semyonova Marmeladov, the daughter of a former official-turned-alcoholic.
During a climactic meeting with Sonya, Raskalnikov asks her to read to him the account of Jesus raising Lazarus from the dead, as recorded in chapter 11 of the Gospel of John. In listening to it, he is met by his greatest adversary: God himself. He may not believe in the Bible, but the weight of it is too much for his feeble shoulders. Even in a mind pierced by existential ennui, he has to admit that some things are best left untouched. Either way, the “second chance” offered in Lazarus’s resurrection is undeniably alluring to the bedraggled idealist, who leverages this intimate connection with Sonya as an opportunity to impatiently unlock too many doors in the advent calendar of his heart far ahead of Christmas, so to speak. When he tells her that “it wasn’t a human being I killed, it was a principle!” he is at once revealing his weakness and the fact that his remorse has nothing to do with the crime itself but with its aftermath. But no such act can occur in a vacuum, and this realization pains him to no end. In his attempts to blame the demonic for choices that were ultimately his own, he is no different than the “ordinary” people of his disdain.
At the same time, he is assaulted by an all-consuming apathy, which is, beyond the carnival laughter that is the novel’s leitmotif, the key signature of his life. As our narrator would have it: “Evil is the final ambiguity. Reason cannot accept it; rationalizing ideologies denies its existence.” In light of this, we can see that indifference is the greatest horror, as typified by the following narratorial observation: “His heart was empty and blank. He did not want to reflect. Even his anguish had gone; and not a trace remained of his former energy, when he had left the house determined to ‘end it all!’ Total apathy had taken its place.”
In reading this, I was reminded of what English preacher Charles Spurgeon, who was sermonizing at the same time Dostoevsky was penning his novel, and for whom indifference or lethargy was one of the most wicked influences on the convicted soul and something to be struggled against:
“I would far rather have a man an earnest, intense opposer of the gospel than have him careless and indifferent. You cannot do much with a man if he will not speak about religion, or will not come to hear what you have to say concerning the things of God. You might as well have him a downright infidel, like a very leviathan covered with scales of blasphemy, as have him a mere earth-worm wriggling away out of reach.”
We might easily lay this polemical transparency over Raskalnikov’s life, which marks time by the rhythms of a dank and battered city, itself a force of influence on almost every page.Appropriately enough, it takes the utterly deplorable Arkady Ivanovich Svidrigailov, former employer of Raskalnikov’s sister and an unrepentant sensualist, to give us an accurate characterization of the same when he soliloquizes: “One seldom finds a place where there are so many gloomy, sharp, and strange influences on the soul of man as in Petersburg.”
Not one to be proselytized to, Raskalnikov is quick to call out Svidrigailov for enigmatizing an environment that feeds so readily into his lecherous lifestyle. To this, Svidrigailov replies:
“In this debauchery there’s at least something permanent, even based on nature, and not subject to fantasy, something that abides in the blood like a perpetually burning coal, eternally inflaming, which for a long time, even with age, one may not be able to extinguish so easily. Wouldn’t you agree that it’s an occupation of sorts?”
From the perspective of one who has no real occupation (when asked at one point what he does for work, he responds, “I think”), Raskalnikov knows there is nothing to be had in this dialogue. Svidrigailov’s solution to their intellectual quagmire is to proclaim that “what every man of us needs is air, air, air, sir.” However, this is a false proposition, for where can one find air in a place that suffocates by default?
As the most obvious foil for Raskalnikov, Svidrigailov exaggerates some of his traits while subverting others in aggregate. He makes no excuses for himself and, if anything, seems to rather enjoy his position of authority insofar as he, too, is able to deprive others of breath without apparent consequence. At one point in their exchange, he also offers the clearest characterization of Raskalnikov himself:
“You walk out of the house with your head still high. After twenty steps you lower it and put your hands behind your back. You look but apparently no longer see anything either in front of you or to the sides. Finally you begin moving your lips and talking to yourself, sometimes freeing one hand and declaiming, and finally you stop in the middle of the street for a long time.”
In addition to painting him in stark likeness, and because he renders what was once a private detail into a barbed fact, he exposes the hypocrisy of Nihilism, which is supposed to be a net positive by treating everything (and everyone) as expendable, liberating the self from the shackles of accountability. And yet, Raskalnikov is constantly seeking judgment, inviting it from near and far, all the while shocked at his own insolence for letting certain incriminating details slip. The effect is such that he constantly attributes meetings to chance and miracle (“it was as if someone had come to his service”) when it’s clear he had a conscious hand in their denouement. Even when he tries to rationalize his violence through some sort of Robin Hood complex (“For one life, thousands of lives saved from decay and corruption”), he goes against the grain of his faith by upholding a moral good.
What distinguishes Nihilism from the Postmodernism of today is that, where the former avows that everything is equally meaningless, the latter claims that everything is equally meaningful. Common to both extremes, however, is the broken promise that either can be a viable escape from the suffering of living in a world bound by sin. What he fears the most is being thought of as innocent, which is why he is so perplexed by how he attracts sympathy and affection without even trying. “But why do they love me so, when I’m unworthy of it!” he cries toward the novel’s conclusion. “Oh, how I hate them all!” If anything, however, his hatred is not of people but of the mercy they carry like a cross, for it is the middle ground he cannot bear to inhabit. By the same token, mercy is the only possibility for redemption and shows that he was never cut out to be a dutiful anarchist. As Dostoevsky so eloquently phrases it: “He would have given anything in the world to be left alone, yet he felt himself that he could not have remained alone for a minute.”
As Raskalnikov gets closer to the possibility of a turnaround, he cannot entertain his lack of resolve as anything other than a failure of principle. Unlike the men of influence he admires from afar, whose exploits were never punished and who “endured their steps” with profound and domineering indifference, he grants himself no right to take that step, and this he regards as his greatest crime: not that he took a human life but that he failed to endure his own steps, deferring instead to confession.
If the only chance at escape is to hit rock bottom, if appreciating life is built on denying its inherent value, then he must be willing to undergo the ideological detox that primes him for love’s fresh coat of paint. Because no matter how much he may deny it, we were never designed to live alone.
*The images in this review were created using artificial intelligence (specifically, ChatGPT). The words they accompany were created using actual intelligence (specifically, my own).
“You wish to see, listen; hearing is a step towards vision.” –Saint Bernard of Clairvaux (ca. 1090-1153)
The act of looking has long been likened to that of listening. Visual art, by no mere coincidence, is often spoken of in compositional terms, as great paintings and sculptures may be likened to symphonies in complexity and coordination. In music itself, sight reading is the quintessential form of looking as listening: The studied mind can track attention across a score and hear the music without a single musician present. But what of listening as an act of looking? Such has been the ethos of ECM Records since its inception.
Although the label has come to have a certain “look” to its admirers, it achieves in its aesthetic presentation not a look but a sound. One listens to an ECM album cover—be it a somber black-and-white photograph, an abstract painting, or a typographic assembly—by hearing it through the eyes. Although the images themselves are not necessarily reflective of the music, and only occasionally of those performing it, they do provide a framework for the disc sheathed within. As was already demonstrated in this book’s predecessor, Sleeves of Desire: A Cover Story, an ECM album is a liminal reality in which the self before and the self after find cohesion at the intersection of life and art.
In the case of ECM, it’s not the cover that necessarily provides insight into the music but, if anything, the music that provides insight into the cover. One example that comes immediately to mind is the montage that graces Pat Metheny’s New Chautauqua:
What could Dieter Rehm’s photo of the Autobahn between Zurich and Munich have to do with such a distinctly American sound? Perhaps nothing when viewed from that POV. But flip the telescope around, turning it into a microscope, and the open road now becomes a universal call to nomadism and to the magnitude of the unknown, of which Metheny’s music is a maverick flagbearer. And herein lies the attraction of the ECM-album-as-object: It invites us to step outside our skins as a way of more fully inhabiting them.
“In terms of the gaze,” writes Jean-Luc Nancy, “the subject is referred back to itself as object. In terms of listening, it is to itself that the subject refers or refers back.” It may feel natural to separate these two acts. Still, the full package of an ECM album turns closed circuits into open ones, reconnecting us with something childlike, primal if you will, by allowing us to feel that tingle of excitement every time we press PLAY and, after five seconds of anticipation, are thrown into some of the most beautiful dislocations imaginable in recorded music. As La Monte Young once put it to Tony Conrad: “Isn’t it wonderful if someone listens to something he is ordinarily supposed to look at?” Indeed, we can be sure of reuniting with that same wonder when experiencing the unusual harmony that can only be found between such a counterpoint of sound and image. For how can one behold Jim Bengston’s stark monochromatic landforms on Lachrymae and not want to traverse them with Paul Hindemith’s Trauermusik as guide?
Not only is there a relationship to be found between covers and the albums they grace, but there is also much to discover in new juxtapositions. Because the images in Windfall Light are presented somewhat thematically, whether by photographer or visual motif, we are invited to explore associations we might not otherwise have made. One noteworthy spread, for example, pairs Robert Schumann: In Concert with Angel Song, thereby stimulating our curiosity for the unseen electricity between them.
Furthermore, the book contains five richly varied essays to immerse ourselves in.
In “When Twilight Comes,” German journalist Thomas Steinfeld dutifully expresses the viability of ECM’s visual identity as necessarily open-ended: “None of these pictures is an illustration in the narrow sense of the word. None of them refers to either the music or the musicians as a decoration. None of them pretends to give an interpretation or even to be interpreted on its own.” They are, rather, accompaniments. “Each is a hieroglyph,” he goes on to say, “free from much of its potential meaning, a work of dreamlike qualities, taken from nothing, a sudden objection against the profane and its often inescapable presence.” Steinfeld also notes the prevalence of water in ECM album covers—not as a reflective but a dynamic force—in addition to abstracts, street scenes, and less definable paeans to silence. Regarding the rare portraits of the actual featured musicians (Paul Motian, Meredith Monk, Keith Jarrett, the Art Ensemble of Chicago, Charles Lloyd, etc.), he wonders: “Is this an accident, an honor, a matter of circumstance, or devotion?”
Author and museum curator Katharina Epprecht goes a step further in evoking the term “Transmedia Images.” By the title of her contribution, she means to suggest that ECM’s covers possess an interdisciplinary adjacency. Rather than being tautological loops, they are part of a “vast puzzle,” each a doorway into other senses and materialities. Thus, it is not the image’s ability to illustrate the music but rather “the immensely refined way that it handles unexpected shifts of meaning” that any listener will inevitably encounter. And while the images may be “based on correspondence to the character and quality of the music,” they are not beholden to it. Hence their potential as catalysts for personal transformation. “[T]he carefully packaged silver discs,” she waxes most literally, “are light and portable companions through life, motivating us to engage in contemplation, to pause for a moment.” In that respect, they allow us to understand more about our place in the world by questioning the many borders we draw around, through, over, and under it. Epprecht even provides a quintessential example of her own in Re: Pasolini:
Of this cover, she observes the following: “All of the gracious Virgin Mary’s senses are concentrated on her child, while the ears of the donkey unconsciously and reflexively register every sound. The instinctive perception of animals is unbiased and undeviating. I can think of no other picture that more touchingly elevates maternal attentiveness and unadulterated hearing to a metaphor.” Therefore, it’s as much the choice of image as its content that inspires us to regard the old as new, and vice versa.
British writer Geoff Andrew takes us yet another step deeper into intersectionality in “Leur musique: Eicher/Godard – Sound/Image.” Here, the concern is with the cinematic awareness that has long been at the heart of producer Manfred Eicher’s approach to mise-en-scène. Because both he and filmmaker Jean-Luc Godard are fond of “juxtaposing, combining and mixing up elements which most people in their respective fields would never dream of bringing together,” it was only natural that Godard’s work would come to be associated with such seminal recordings as Suspended Night, which features a still from his mangum opus, Histoire(s) du Cinema, and Soul of Things, which references Éloge de l’amour:
Perhaps not surprisingly, these are already borrowings from other sources—quotations of quotations (and is not classical music the same?). Other Godard touchpoints include Notre musique for Asturiana and Passion for Cello and Trivium.
One could hardly imagine such a book as Windfall Light without including the perspective of at least one ECM musician, and in pianist and composer Ketil Bjørnstad, we are given a most suitable ambassador. In “Landscapes and Soundscapes,” he looks not at the spatial but at the temporal. In speaking of the timeless quality of the covers, he notes a preference for monochrome and Nordic landscapes and atmospheres. “Being produced by Manfred Eicher is a purification process for a musician,” he reveals. In so doing, he leaves an implied question hanging in the air: Does a cover photograph or painting also undergo a sort of purification process? When disassociated from its original context, does not the image open itself to infinite possibilities? Bjørnstad again: “Just as great composers and painters are recognizable down to the smallest phrase or brushstroke, ECM’s music and visual world are recognizable without the slightest danger of anyone calling this stagnation.” Thus, the more this recognition settles in our gray matter, the more we come to equate the landscape with the soundscape.
Last but certainly not least is “Polyphonic Pictures” by Lars Müller, whose publishing imprint has given us this fine volume. His offering is a relatively zoomed-out perspective on the questions at hand. Going so far as to describe the covers and music of ECM as “libertarian”—at least in the sense that they elide the intervention of power structures that all too often infect recorded media—he characterizes them as “afterimages of memorized circumstances far more than they are depictions of things that have been seen.” In that sense, they grow with listeners in connection to lived experience. This take resonates with me at the deepest personal level, as even one glimpse of a beloved album cover invokes a reel of memories, associations, and impressions. Rather than their technical aspects, it is their eventfulness, their movement in stillness, and their visceral foundations that make them come alive. And so, in his ordering and layout of the images, he has created for us a self-avowed “visual score.” Ultimately, they are only as delible as the paper they’re printed on, and so they can only live on in the mind’s eye, which, if it’s not obvious by now, is more accurately depicted as an ear.
In November of 2022, ECM released this boxed edition compiling all 12 of Meredith Monk’s New Series discs to celebrate her 80th birthday. The set also includes a 300-page book reprising the original liner notes, along with new texts and interviews, photographs, archival documents, press quotes, and more. The result is more than a commemoration but a testament to the strength of the human spirit to make itself heard even in the face of inevitable entropy.
Manfred Eicher speaks of two important organs in the composer and singer’s oeuvre: their inspiration and their visual quality. In both, she finds a perfect partner in the producer, who has honed this approach across the territories of other singular artists, though none with quite the same combination of whimsy, ritual, and universalism.
In his essay, “The Worlds of Meredith Monk,” Frank J. Oteri characterizes the music as follows: “It paradoxically feels as if it was created at the very beginning of time and yet sounds completely new.” And while the works recorded here are scores in their own right since so much of her output defies standard notation, there is, he observes, a consistency that transcends the frameworks of their articulation. As part of a “living repertoire,” they seek out our ears as if they were extensions of themselves, thoughts on opposite sides of the brain spinning a seemingly impossible neural connection across oceans of time.
In an artist statement titled “The Soul’s Messenger,” Monk speaks of what the voice was able to reveal to her in the absence of its cultural reference points:
“Sometime in the mid 1960s, as I was vocalizing in my studio, I suddenly had a revelation that the voice could have the same flexibility and range of movement as a spine or a foot, and that I could find and build a personal vocabulary for my voice just as one makes movement based on a particular body. I realized then that within the voice are myriad characters, landscapes, colors, textures, ways of producing sound, wordless messages. I intuitively sensed the rich and ancient power of the first human instrument and by exploring its limitless possibilities I felt that I was coming home to my family and my blood.”
In other words, the voice was no longer an expression of the physical; it was physicality incarnate. “I began playing with what a vocal gesture would be,” she continues. “How would the voice jump, spin, spiral, fall? How would I abstract the sound of a laugh, of sobbing, of shouting, into a musical phrase?” Since then, her ”daily work” has not been to refine her singing so much as open it to its unadulterated imperfections, for in them are veins of possibility. These “gifts from a larger and wiser realm” are dug up like archaeological discoveries after long periods of waiting, each an old world made new.
At the age of three, Monk was diagnosed with strabismus, whereupon her mother enrolled her in a Dalcroze eurhythmics program, a technique that integrates music with movement. This experience, she recalls, “influenced everything I’ve done. It’s why dance and movement and film are so integral to my music. It’s why I see music so visually.” It’s also why the body has figured so viscerally in her live performances. Movement, dance, and shaping of sound all come across in the studio, not least of all because of Eicher’s attention to detail and Monk’s willingness to see where it leads. Without the shadow of infirmity hanging in the balance, questions of perfection become self-fulfilling prophecies.
Nowhere is the beauty of being off kilter expressed with such genuine poetry as in 1981’s Dolmen Music. In an excerpt from an interview by Ingo Bierman for his video series ECM50 | 1969-2019, Monk describes working with Eicher on this seminal session and how, after laying down Gotham Lullaby, she recorded a second take after concerns over her voice cracking in the first:
“It was technically perfect, but it really didn’t have that spirit, the kind of magic that the first take had. I have always respected Manfred for recognizing that, because you can edit yourself out of existence and get everything right, but there is something about the emotional continuity that communicates more deeply.”
The chamber program of which it is a part is quite varied and offers as full a portrait of Monk as you’re likely to find in one place. From the koan-like humor of The Tale to the 24-minute title piece, a larger narrative unfolds in almost liturgical fashion, each a step toward mortal awareness, with dashes of urban morbidity thrown in where it counts.
A touching piece of ECM lore worth mentioning is that Collin Walcott was a dear friend and frequent collaborator of Monk early on. He was, in fact, responsible for introducing her to Eicher and served as co-producer for Dolmen Music (playing violin and percussion on the album as well), which, along with Turtle Dreams, was thus shepherded into the ECM New Series stable after the imprint was created.
Speaking of Turtle Dreams, it makes for an enchanting companion. Although Monk’s performances used to confuse critics for their equal incorporation of dance, theater, and music, this 1983 follow-up shows her ethos to be based in the sounding body. Where this album’s predecessor regarded primordial realities, this one reflects the dissonance of living in the city through what she calls “Manhattan folk music.” Its intimate combination of keyboards and voices is nonetheless grand in its emotional scope, a dance with silence that sustains itself on contradictions and their resolutions and leaves room for what she calls “places to breathe, live, and play.”
All of this feels like a prelude to Do You Be. Released in 1987, Monk’s third album for ECM contains a melange of pieces from The Games: a science fiction opera and Acts from Under and Above, while the album’s title piece is from Vessel: an opera epic. Its incorporation of explicit words rather than the liminal spaces of and between feelings with which she was normally concerned places us at the center of a quiet storm of communication. The culminating effect is one of the voice as an instrument of memory, a beacon of futures that come to us as warnings.
Not coincidentally, Book of Days(1990) expands on that metaphor with even greater intensity in reimagining the incidental music to Monk’s film of the same name. Having seen the film, I can confirm its sense of dislocation and engagement with the human condition writ large. The story, set in Medieval times, tells of a young Jewish girl named Eva who is transfixed by visions of the modern world. Finding little comfort in her grandfather’s Torahic interpretations, she seeks solace in a local madwoman before her entire village succumbs to the plague. At the end, workmen who inadvertently unearth the village centuries later find Eva’s clairvoyant drawings of humanity’s demise. More than a soundtrack, the album is cinema in and of itself, morphing into weighted pathos.
Such ruminations of desolation were even more firmly on Monk’s mind when, at the end of 1989, while in residence at the Leighton Artists Colony in Banff, Monk found herself looking out her window at the Canadian Rockies. Despite being there to work on her opera ATLAS, she took inspiration from the scenery and produced a set of a cappella pieces that would become Facing North (1992). Conceived as a duet for her and Robert Een, it is a reflection of a place of cold uncoverings. The opera itself also made its way onto ECM. Over the course of three acts, ATLAS(1993) tells the life of Alexandra Daniels, an explorer who learns that the real journey is internal. This ambitious piece shows a transparent approach to instrumentation. Unlike the bombastic walls of sound that can dominate canonical opera, its accompaniment emerges from within instead of being forced from without. Interestingly, Eicher and Monk decided to cut the opera’s conclusion. “In the live performance,” she admits, “it was a crucial part of the whole. In the audio form, it became more of an epilogue, which seemed to both of us to make too much of a closure instead of letting the listener remain in motion at the end of the journey.” Such is the quintessential expression of movement through music, and how the soul breaks through the cracks in our voices is indicative of the necessity of imperfection to reveal self-worth.
Said cracks run even deeper in Volcano Songs(1997). As manifestations of human archetypes, these metaphysical pieces pay deference to Monk’s ongoing ethos of “always trying to explore forms that balance rigor with freedom.” Her melding with singer Katie Geissinger is astonishing to behold. Another program of strong variety, it includes such vital works as New York Requiem and Three Heavens and Hells, both of which deal with the transience of life and our regard for human suffering. Similar themes are explored in mercy(2002) and Songs of Ascension(2011), both of which represent collaborations with sculptor and installation artist Ann Hamilton. Whereas the former is built around the idea that the mouth can harm as much as heal, the latter was originally performed in an eight-story tower designed by Hamilton. In both, the instruments are just as vocal as the voices (and vice versa) in their explorations of fragility. As I wrote in my original review of mercy, “Monk’s is not a world in which the voice is primary but rather a voice in which the world is primary.” I stand by that statement and would point to these as Exhibits A and B. Nestled between them is 2008’s impermanence. A distinctly chromatic work, it eschews standard narrative in favor of a feeling, a connection to somewhere beyond the immediacy of experience.
Piano Songs, released in 2014, is a remarkable cross-section of Monk’s life and career, with purity and sameness through difference in mind, containing such touchstones as Paris, a piece from 1972 that marks her return to the piano after focusing intensely on the voice, and Ellis Island from 1981, which ties history and memory into one inexorable package. Last is On Behalf of Nature(2016), which speaks for the voiceless, the abused, and the forgotten. It has the most connective tissue of all, bleeding as much through the leaves as from the soil in which they are born.
If any red thread can be said to run through the above tapestry, it is that selves were made to expand. However, part of being human is realizing that with that expansion comes the responsibility of charting our way through all the extra space. With Monk at our side, we can feel sure of placing our feet on loving ground.
Life has a way of reshuffling priorities from time to time. Since my last “synchronicity update,” I have abandoned academia to pursue a career as a full-time editor for a digital marketing firm, welcomed a third and fourth child into my growing family, mourned the death of my father-in-law (and the near-death of my father), and, most recently, moved house. All told, I have found it especially difficult to review—let alone listen to—new music with any degree of consistency during the past few years. However, after getting all of my ducks in a row, I am glad to report that as of today, I am once more caught up with ECM in my writing endeavors. I continue to be humbled not only by the label’s staggering output but also by the attention and kindness you have all shown me. Whether you have been reading this blog from the beginning or are newly exploring the catalogue, I can only hope that my reactions and ruminations can bring you closer to the music and guide you toward enriching discoveries along the way. Keep your eyes peeled for further surprises and changes as I devote more time to updating and refining some of the mechanics of the website for a better user experience. It has been a long and tedious process, but the results will be worth it.
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir Tallinn Chamber Orchestra Tõnu Kaljuste conductor Recorded September 2022 Methodist Church, Tallinn Engineer: Tammo Sumera Design: Sascha Kleis Produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: April 25, 2025
“Fear not that thy life shall come to an end, but rather that it shall never have a beginning.” –John Henry Newman
The title of Tõnu Kaljuste’s lovingly curated program of works by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt comes from its leading composition, Littlemore Tractus. Like much of what is presented here, it is somewhat older (dating from 2000) but newly arranged by the conductor (in 2022). Scored for mixed choir and orchestra, it dramatizes words from the 1843 sermon “Wisdom and Innocence” preached by John Henry Newman in Littlemore, Oxford. In it, the English cardinal seeks refuge in the Lord, set apart from a world turning circles around its self-interest. Like a tornado in reverse, Pärt’s rendering transitions from destruction to the calm before the storm, serving listeners with something intangible. Even in the seven Greater Antiphons I-VII, a 2015 string arrangement of the Seven Magnificat-Antiphons from 1988, we can feel the tension between that which is touched and that which is felt. Each is a stained glass window, allowing us insight into that one place where light can only reach by grace: the heart. The last of these, “O Emmanuel,” is the magnificence of holiness distilled.
Cantique des degrés for mixed choir and orchestra (1999/2002) is a dynamic setting of Psalm 121, in which David looks to the Lord, ever sustaining and filled with life. Its parabolic structure, from internal to external and back again, ascends the steps to the Temple of Solomon, but casts a final look backward for want of other souls to save. The choir is recessive, never dominating the foreground even at its most glorious. This is followed by Sequentia for string orchestra and percussion (2014/2015). Originally written as part of the Robert Wilson production, Adam’s Passion, it offers a subliminal meditation on Christ’s death, burial, and resurrection. These Words… (2008) is scored for the same combination of instruments. No less expressive for its lack of text, it quotes Pärt’s own Psalom (last heard on 1996’s Litany) as an inward-looking catalyst.
L’abbé Agathon for soprano and string orchestra (2004/2008) is reprised from its appearance on Adam’s Lament in 2012, led by soloist Maria Listra in a much more intimate and contemplative interpretation. Based on a legend from the fourth century regarding an encounter between the Abbot Agathon and a leper (who is really an angel in disguise come to test his faith), it tells the story with programmatic flair, replete with a string-heavy transfiguration as the angel ultimately ascends heavenward.
The album ends with two supplications. Where Veni creator for mixed choir and orchestra (2006/2009) is a deep cry for forgiveness, Vater unser for mixed choir, piano, and string orchestra (2005/2019) sets the Lord’s Prayer. Thus, wisdom and innocence are shown to be things that none of us possesses except by the cross.
This is not music that one discovers but that one welcomes as a gift. From depth to depth, it anoints with the oil of understanding that God is indeed with us, wrathful yet forgiving of the harm we have inflicted upon his creation.
Alice Zawadzki Fred Thomas Misha Mullov-Abbado Za Górami
Alice Zawadzki voice, violin Fred Thomas piano, vielle, drums Misha Mullov-Abbado double bass Recorded June 2023 at Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano Engineer: Stefano Amerio Cover painting: Emmanuel Barcilon Produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: September 13, 2024
Collected on our travels and taught to us by our friends, these are songs we have learnt and loved together. Gathered from Argentina, France, Venezuela, Poland, and the deep well of Sephardic culture, these folk tales speak to the moon, the mountains, the rain, the madness of humans, and the prophecies of birds.
The above is more than a collective artist statement from Alice Zawadzki (voice, violin), Fred Thomas (piano, vielle, drums), and Misha Mullov-Abbado (double bass). It’s also an example of how traditions, regardless of geographical distance, are organs of a larger body. Said body is literal, not metaphorical, insofar as it connects all of humanity at the internal level (the blood), even when the external (the voice) seems so disparate. The album’s title, Za Górami, says the same. Although it translates to “Behind the Mountains,” it is the Polish idiomatic equivalent of “Once upon a time…,” less a prompting of place than of possibility—not unlike the selections gathered here.
Within the trio’s curation of material, there is a liberal sprinkling of Sephardic songs. And yet, while some of the most well-worn treasures of the repertoire, including “Los Bilbilikos” (The Nightingales) and the lullaby, “Nani Nani,” are to be expected, the tact of each arrangement is remarkable. Even when the latter builds to an almost rapturous conclusion, it never loses sight of slumber’s healing effect. Such restraint is only made possible by a receding musicianship that lets the verses speak for themselves. This is increasingly rare to hear in Ladino programs, which can feel over-arranged as early music ensembles seek to outdo one another, favoring the interpreters over the interpreted. Not so in the hands of Zawadzki, who pours vocal plaster into “Dezile A Mi Amor” (Tell My Love) and “Arvoles Lloran Por Lluvias” (The Trees Weep For Rain) as if they were footprints in a landscape to be disturbed as little as possible. The tone and shape she brings to even wordless improvisations constitute natural delineations of their source material.
In Gustavo Santaolalla’s “Suéltate Las Cintas” (Untie The Ribbons), we find a most suitable modern companion. Steeped in the composer’s characteristically cinematic qualities, it lends itself to broader strokes in an instrumental economy. Thomas’s pianism is a warm evening breeze that equalizes the ambient air of its chamber and the lovers breathing it in. Its denouement alongside Mullov-Abbado’s heartbeat weaves a veil of privacy before Zawadzki renders their ecstasy a poetic afterimage. Another kindred spirit awaits in “Tonada De Luna Llena” (Song Of The Full Moon) by Venezuelan singer Simón Díaz, which yields some of the most evocative descriptions:
I saw a black heron Fighting with the river That’s how your heart Falls in love with mine
The moon, even when not explicitly mentioned, is a constant presence in these songs, shining on the maiden in “Je Suis Trop Jeunette” (I’m Too Young, after Nicolas Gombert) who dreams of being swept away from her family. Her internal conflict is only heightened by the prepared piano in the upper registers, which carries over into the title song by Zawadzki, after the Polish traditional about a girl who defies her mother and ends up dancing her life away. “Gentle Lady,” Thomas’s setting of James Joyce, is a folk song in and of itself, stepping out of time to unravel its literary knot with grace.
ECM listeners familiar with the label projects of Savina Yannatou, Arianna Savall, and Amina Alaoui will feel swathed in comfort here, even as they are caught up in the unique flow that only this trio can bring forth from the hillsides of their wanderings. How fortunate we are that their paths have aligned on this side of the mountains.
Yuuko Shiokawa violin András Schiff piano Recorded December 2015 (Brahms) and January 2019 (Schumann) Auditorio Stelio Molo RSI, Lugano Engineer: Stephan Schellmann Cover photo: Nadia F. Romanini Produced by Manfred Eicher Release date: October 11, 2024
In their second full disc for ECM New Series, violinist Yuuko Shiokawa and pianist András Schiff present two 19th-century sonatas of the highest caliber by Johannes Brahms (1833-1897) and Robert Schumann (1810-1856). The first half of the program is taken by Brahms’s Violin Sonata No. 1 in G major, op. 78. Composed in 1878, immediately after his violin concerto, it is affectionately known as the “Regenliedsonate” (Rain Sonata) for references to his two songs, “Regenlied” (Rain Song) and “Nachklang” (Lingering Sound), both gifted to Clara Schumann for her 54th birthday. We can easily share in her gratitude for finding those melodies she so cherished incorporated into a sonata of abundant riches, especially when considering that Brahms burned his early attempts at the genre. “Regenlied” opens the first and third movements, growing from the earth not as a sprout but as a fully formed tree. Like time-lapse photography, it allows us to see an entire life cycle in hindsight before we can fully grasp what is being reflected upon. Between the seamless notecraft in the violin and the piano’s dynamic underpinning, there is an orchestral sensibility at play. Despite the lively development, the outer husk is rooted in melancholy and emotional density. It whispers when it dances, shouts when it prays. The central Adagio is more funereal by contrast. As the violin works its lines from inner to outer sanctum, it never lets the wind get in the way of its grief. Meanwhile, the piano is more insistent and rouses its companion from slumber into the sharper edges of reality, leading it through every turn thereof without so much as a nick. The final stretch works through shaded pathways and hard-to-reach areas with sublime attention to detail, ending on a transcendent double stop.
Although Brahms’ great admirer Robert Schumann had never written a violin sonata, at the urging of Ferdinand David (concertmaster from the Leipzig Gewandhaus and the dedicatee of Mendelssohn’s violin concerto), he eventually relented. However, being displeased with his first attempt, he dedicated the Violin Sonata No. 2 in d minor, op. 121, to David instead. Clara and violinist Joseph Joachim gave its premiere in 1853. A massive piece in four parts, it turns the concept of “chamber music” on its head. Unlike this program’s accompanying sonata, it takes its time to mature (at 13 minutes, the opening movement alone is exactly half the length of Brahms’ entire sonata). It is also a profound litmus test of any duo’s attempts at the form, and in that respect, Schiff and Shiokawa defer to the score instead of their egos. The second movement is a soft burst of energy, giving shape to each motivic cell as if it were a brief dance to be savored before its steps are forgotten. From flowing to syncopated, we are carried through the third movement on the back of a groundswell that always keeps its shape, only enlarging and reducing before morphing into a tender staccato. The final movement is a masterclass in controlled drama that feels made for these four hands.
The sensitive playing, which gives its fullest, most heartfelt attention to every detail, is only matched by the recording. Engineer Stephan Schellmann brings a somewhat distant quality to the proceedings so as not to cloud the listener’s judgment with virtuosity. Instead, we are invited to sit in the back of the room, letting the music find us of its own volition, ready and waiting.
Estonian Philharmonic Chamber Choir Tallinn Chamber Orchestra Tõnu Kaljuste conductor Veiko Tubin reciter Annika Lõhmus, Triin Sakermaa soprano Maria Valdmaa soprano Iris Oja mezzo-soprano Indrek Vau trumpet Madis Metsamart percussion Linda Vood flute Recorded October/November 2020 at Methodist Church, Tallinn Engineer: Tammo Sumera Cover photo: Mari Kaljuste Executive producer: Manfred Eicher Release date: September 8, 2023
“I do not use folk song. It is folk song that uses me.”
The above words, famously spoken by Veljo Tormis (1930-2017), ring truer than ever in Reminiscentiae, the first album under conductor Tõnu Kaljuste devoted to the Estonian composer since his passing. The program guides listeners through a chain of foundational works, many of which receive their world premiere recordings here. None speaks to the ethos at hand quite like Tornikell minu külas (The Tower Bell in My Village). Scored for choir, two sopranos, reciter, and bell, it is the result of a commission by Kaljuste in 1978, who noted that many church bells were silent in Soviet Estonia, rendering houses of worship little more than empty shells. Because the tower bell signaled to all, regardless of age or creed, to take pause and know that the divine was watching over them, it was anathema to a self-interested secular government. And so, Tormis incorporated native folk songs to amplify the voice of the people, along with verses by Portuguese poet Fernando Pessoa, whose evocations (spoken here in Estonian by reciter Veiko Tubin) set a profound precedent: “I can see as much of the universe from my village as can be seen from anywhere on earth.” Through the tolling bell dotting the music as it unfolds, this sentiment reveals an underlying philosophical refrain that teeters between the sacred and the profane. As it continues to resound, only the soul can sing in return without fear of being heard by the wrong ears.
Mure murrab meele (Worry Breaks the Spirit)for choir and orchestra (1972/2020) is among a handful of works arranged by Kaljuste that also include Helletused (Herding Calls) for choir, soprano, and orchestra (1982/2020) and Hamleti laul I (Hamlet’s Song I)for choir and orchestra (1965/2020). Whereas the former intertwines memories of childhood with rural traditions, the latter sets the work of Estonian poet Paul-Eerik Rummo.This dark and brooding piece finds Hamlet confronted with discomforting repetitions and images he would much rather escape in favor of a self-sufficient world. As time and tide march on without him, he is left in stasis, pacing circles around his regrets.
Longtime listeners will rejoice to hear “Lauliku lapsepõli” (The Singer’s Childhood), reprised from 1999’s Litany To Thunder, in the full context of Kurvameelsed laulud (Melancholy Songs)for mezzo-soprano and orchestra (1979). This tripartite work cuts into the night like a knife into dark wood, leaving behind a distinct array of melodic shapes. It mixes youthful naivety with geriatric wisdom, while the orchestra adds selective commentary along the way.
All of these songs are spokes to the hub of the Reminiscentiae for orchestra. Composed between 1962 and 1969, they represent a cycle of all four seasons in a series of vignettes, of which Sügismaastikud (Autumn Landscapes) is the most cinematic. Of particular note are “Üle taeva jooksevad pilved” (Clouds Racing Across the Sky), which sweeps us up in its delicate urgency, and “Tuul kõnnumaa kohal” (Wind Along the Heath), with its tense drama. I dare say either would fit perfectly into a Hayao Miyazaki film. Talvemustrid (Winter Patterns) slows its heartbeat to the rhythm of hibernation. It rewards us with a view of the Northern Lights, while a trumpet resounds below in appreciation. The wind returns in Kevadkillud (Spring Sketches), only much smoother and more accommodating to changes in direction. As flora make themselves known in “Lehtivad pungad” (Buds Leafing Out), we feel the shift in the air before dances leap across the landscape, resting in the cuckoo’s call. Suvemotiivid (Summer Motifs) moves from arid climates, through a thunderstorm, toward a tender evening. Also included in the cycle is Kolm mul oli kaunist sõna (Three I Had Those Words of Beauty), which features Lina Vood on flute. It is a pastoral masterpiece that, along with the rest, allows us to appreciate Tormis anew through an instrumental lens.
Although Tormis’s music was rarely heard outside his native land until ECM opened the door, now that it has become a part of the global landscape, how privileged we are to sit at its feet and contemplate its observations at a time when people and places are burning at the stake. If anything, this is the album’s purpose: to unfold our memories until they are big enough to fit more of our thoughts, musings, and written words. Like time itself, it holds only as much as it is given.
Between Sound and Space: ECM Records and Beyond 