Only Silence Is More Beautiful

ECM has altered the possibilities of listening. Founded in Munich in 1969 by Manfred Eicher, the Edition of Contemporary Music advanced the conviction that a recording studio could participate in the invention of music, its architecture becoming a second instrument whose strings were strung across the space between a note and its disappearance. From Mal Waldron’s Free at Last onward, the label cultivated an ethics of attention capacious enough to accommodate the Art Ensemble of Chicago’s ferocities alongside the concentrated stillnesses of Paul Bley. By 1987, when Norwegian director Jan Horne made Bare stillheten er vakrere (Only Silence Is More Beautiful), that conviction had acquired the heft of an institution while retaining the beautiful precariousness of an experiment. Horne’s film begins with a paradox of direction. A road recedes from the camera as Eicher revisits the familiar aspiration to make “the most beautiful sound next to silence,” his words yielding to “Soria Maria”…