72 THENEWYORKER,DECEMBER2, 2019
The Danes bring tonal heft and rhythmic vigor to late Beethoven.
MUSICAL EVENTS
A BEAM OF MUSIC
The Danish String Quartet extends the ECM sound.BY ALEXROSS
ILLUSTRATION BY DANIEL KRALL
T
he German record label Edition of
Contemporary Music, or ECM,
which recently celebrated its fiftieth an-
niversary, first made its name with ele-
gant, atmospheric jazz albums that turned
away from the melee of the post-bop
avant-garde. Its most famous product,
from 1974, was Keith Jarrett’s “The Köln
Concert,” which, to its creator’s chagrin,
became a mellow soundtrack to innu-
merable make-out sessions and coffee-
house transactions. ECM also estab-
lished itself as a purveyor of classical
minimalism, with best-selling disks de-
voted to Steve Reich and Arvo Pärt. The
label’s austere design aesthetic—block
letters, black-and-white photography,
sparse notes—was consistent to the point
of self-parody. Circa 1999, no sophisti-
cated stereo stand was complete with-
out an ECM CD showing, say, a picture
of a collapsed stone wall.
Stock images aside, ECM is one of
the greatest labels in the history of re-
cording. Manfred Eicher, who founded
ECM and remains its sole proprietor,
has forged a syncretic vision in which
jazz and classical traditions intelligently
intermingle. ECM’s catalogue of some
sixteen hundred albums contains abra-
sive sounds as well as soothing ones,
clouds of dissonance alongside shimmer-
ing triads. All benefit from a crisply re-
verberant acoustic in which an instru-ment’s timbre is nearly as important as
the music played on it. Simply put, Eich-
er’s releases tend to sound better than
other people’s. Some of ECM’s best disks
were made in league with the Norwe-
gian recording engineer Jan Erik Kong-
shaug, who died earlier this month.
Just as important is Eicher’s knack for
sustaining long-term relationships with
artists. In the jazz world, to record for
ECM was to enter a community of the
elect, bridging gaps between freewheel-
ing European sophisticates and veteran
American progressives. At the beginning
of November, Jazz at Lincoln Center
hosted a celebration of ECM, bringing
in a remarkable parade of notables. Jack
DeJohnette and Wadada Leo Smith,
elder statesmen from the Association for
the Advancement of Creative Musicians,
joined such eclectic younger stars as Vijay
Iyer, Ethan Iverson, and Craig Taborn.
Indeed, too much talent was crowded
into one evening. When the unclassifiable
Meredith Monk came onstage, to per-
form “Gotham Lullaby,” from her ep-
ochal 1981 record, “Dolmen Music,” I
wanted her to keep going indefinitely.
Eicher’s achievement in the classical
sphere has equal weight. When, in 1984,
he began championing the music of
Pärt, he also launched a multi-decade
partnership with the Latvian violinist
Gidon Kremer, who went on to explore
the haunted worlds of Mieczysław Wein-
berg, Sofia Gubaidulina, and Giya
Kancheli. In time, ECM’s house artists
set down landmarks not only in new
music but also in the core repertory. If I
were naming my favorite albums of Bach’s
solo-string music, I might begin with
Kremer’s 2005 account of the sonatas and
partitas. I then would have to choose be-
tween Thomas Demenga’s traversal of
the cello suites and Kim Kashkashian’s
rendition of them on viola. András Schiff
has recorded revelatory Schubert on the
fortepiano; Carolin Widmann and Dénes
Várjon made a ferociously potent disk of
the Schumann violin sonatas.
As the decades have gone by, the ques-
tion of an “ECM aesthetic” has receded.
What matters most is Eicher’s relent-
less commitment to fostering artists he
admires. His monumental documenta-
tion of Monk’s career may prove to be
his proudest legacy. Like the best book
editors, theatre directors, and gallery cu-
rators, he offers talented people both a