A road trip that changed everything

It might have been in 1980 when Manfred Eicher – the founder and producer of the record company ECM – drove his car from Stuttgart to Zürich and suddenly heard something so amazing from the radio, that he just had to stop the car and listen on. Only later did he find out that the music broadcasted by Radio Yerevan was the piece called Tabula rasa, a double concerto from 1977 by Estonian composer Arvo Pärt. According to Eicher, he had never heard something like this before, and immediately he had an idea that this is the kind of music he wanted to record and release.

And so it happened. In 1984, ECM released the CD Tabula rasa, the first fruit of Manfred Eicher’s cooperation with Arvo Pärt, which changed everything. It was this CD that brought Pärt’s music to such a wide audience all over the world for the first time. And it was this CD that launched a whole new label of ECM recordings – ECM New Series – under which the most important all-Pärt albums and many of his first recordings have been released.

Since then, Pärt’s music has gained the love of a vast and surprisingly diverse audience, the music critics among them, outweighing by far the usual expectations to the popularity of classical music. His legacy has not only changed the course of contemporary classical music, but also left its footprints into the pop culture in a broader sense. His works have found their way into many films, choreographies, art and theatre projects, and they echo from the music of many pop artists as well.