That Old New Music

The ECM New Series

by Peter Burwasser

The records with the famously sparse black and white graphics first started appearing in 1969, featuring stunningly expressive, if not exactly crowd-pleasing performances by jazz avant-garde artists including Keith Jarrett, Paul Bley and the Art Ensemble of Chicago. Fifteen years later, ECM founder Manfred Eicher debuted a new venture, ECM New Series, to introduce the music of Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. That album was Tabula Rasa, and with a single stroke, it ushered in a vital and hugely influential way of making new music in the post-serial environment. Since then, ECM New Series has championed many of the now well-regarded leaders of the emotive, post-Soviet music scene that Pärt belongs to, including György Kurtág, Valentin Silvestrov and Giya Kancheli. ECM also has an interest in American and Western European new music, but that thrust has been more in a supporting role than a leading one.

We are now at the 40-year anniversary of Edition of Contemporary Music, with well over 1,000 releases along the way, an inspirational landmark of a dedication to excellence and a faith in the marketplace to respond to such lofty values. At this juncture, there are three new CDs that nicely represent the cumulative impact of this label. There is, appropriately, a new Pärt release, In Principio. The music is no less powerful, on a basic level, than what was on that 1969 disc, but I do not hear anything new. Pärt seems to be caught in a time warp, applying old formulas to music that is merely labeled as new. The work of the late Alfred Schnittke is represented by the Symphony No. 9, a snapshot of the fascinatingly messy transition of the deeply troubled, yet enormously significant Communist-era cultural milieu into our present zeitgeist. And then there is Bach. Wither this anachronistic anomaly? Apparently, Manfred Eicher is a Bach freak, and who can blame him? The latest manifestation of his healthy obsession is a completely spellbinding performance of the Two and Three Part Inventions and the French Suite No. 5, played by pianist Till Fellner.

It would be naïve to suggest that the successful ECM run should be a model for the struggling giants of the recording industry. They have been designed to operate on a vastly larger scale, and must appeal to wide audiences. But there must be some lesson in the formula of finding superb artists to play intriguing and unusual music, recording it beautifully and putting it into elegant packages.

(p_burwasser@citypaper.net)