ars moriendi is the seventh ECM album by Swiss violinist and composer Paul Giger, a meditation on transience that sets his own pieces beside three works by Bach. The title refers to the late medieval devotional books that taught readers how to die well. Giger applies the idea to music, a sound that comes into being, lasts and passes into silence. Much of the material was written for Christian Labhart's documentary on the painter Giovanni Segantini, and it was recorded in Maloja, where Segantini spent his last years.

The main sessions took place in January 2015 at the Chiesa Bianca in Maloja, with Peter Laenger as engineer. The long opening track was added in 2021, recorded in Walenstadt. Giger plays violin and his eleven-string violino d'amore. Harpsichordist Marie-Louise Dähler, his partner on the earlier Towards Silence, also plays chest organ, and Pudi Lehmann brings gongs, singing bowls and frame drum. Countertenor Franz Vitzthum and the Carmina Quartett complete the ensemble. The booklet reproduces paintings by Segantini alongside Giger's notes in German and English.

Guggisberglied runs almost nineteen minutes. It is built on an old Swiss folk song of unrequited love and death. Apart from the sound of water, everything comes from the violino d'amore, bowed, plucked and struck. The melody surfaces only in fragments until the closing minutes. Zäuerli mit Migrationshintergrund takes the natural yodel of Appenzell into microtonal territory, over harpsichord, gongs and double bass. Vitzthum sings Bach's Erbarme dich from the St Matthew Passion with the Carmina Quartett and chest organ. Between these, three Agony pieces from the film score and two Bach duets for violin and harpsichord keep the mood suspended.

In London Jazz News (2022), Graham Spry described a high-concept project "as likely to appeal to a jazz as a classical music audience". Textura found the album "exudes grace and humanity and is, more often than not, transfixing". Giger's ECM history goes back to Chartres in 1989, and this album returns to the mix of Bach and free writing he explored with Dähler.

CD edition, ECM New Series 2756, released on 26 August 2022.