From Soundtrack to Chamber Music

Albums released by ECM New Series often pose challenges to the act of listening, if not the more fundamental act of “making music,” in which the semantics of both of those words may be put to the test. This Friday will see the release of ars moriendi (the art of dying), a collection (it might be unfair to invoke the noun “suite”) of nine tracks. As usual, Amazon.com has created a Web page for pre-ordering this album.

The idea behind this collection is the brain child of Paul Giger. Over the course of the tracks, he plays two decidedly different bowed-string instruments, a contemporary violin and a violino d’amore, an eleven-string “relative” of the contemporary violin family, distinguished by a set of sympathetic strings which vibrate in resonance with the bowed strings. Sonority is clearly a priority to Giger.

He is joined by a percussionist, Pudi Lehmann, who specializes in both gongs and hand-drumming techniques associated with Indian Classical Music. He also performs with Marie-Louise Dähler, who specializes in non-standard keyboards, and alto vocalist Franz Vitzthum. On two tracks the instrumentalists are joined by the members of the Carmina Quartett: violinists Matthias Enderle and Susanne Frank, violist Wendy Champney, and cellist Stephan Goerner. On that same track Lehmann also blows a conch shell.

The overall structure of the album seems to be based on three movements entitled “Agony,” which Giger had originally composed for the soundtrack of a film. In their original version they had individual titles: “Atmosphere,” “Sechzigplus” (sixty-plus), and “Die bösen Mütter” (the bad mothers). These are interleaved with both sacred and secular excerpts of music by Johann Sebastian Bach and two very old Swiss folk songs, the second based on yodeling. This leaves the listener with a fair amount of content to process. Sadly, the notes that Giger provided for the accompanying booklet tend to impede such processing by overloading the reader with details.

The good news is that all of the performers provide first-rate interpretations of the music they are playing. It would not be difficult to dispense with any narrative associations with the album title. The Bach performances hold up on their own particularly well; and, if the context for those performances may be more enigmatic than one might wish for, the overall flow is not particularly difficult to follow, even in Giger’s opening solo on violino d’amore, which is almost twenty minutes in duration.

Personally, I find listening to this album to be the sort of experience that would prompt Spock to raise his left eyebrow; but a bit more familiarity with each of the tracks may overcome any skepticism.