Playing his acclaimed 8.5-hour concert work 'SLEEP' to a live audience curled up in sleeping bags is a profound experience, composer and pianist Max Richter tells Kathryn Ryan.
“The audience, that community of listeners, are in the centre of the work and the music is the sort of landscape.”
Photo: Mike Terry
Max Richter was born in Germany and raised in England, where he lives now with his wife Yulia and children.
His musical compositions have often referenced real-world problems like the refugee crisis.
“I think creativity by nature has an activist dimension. Creativity is about exploration, trying to figure things out, trying to go where you haven’t been before, trying to challenge yourself and the ideas and assumptions around you."
Richter music straddles the genres of classical and electronic, but he sees no boundaries between the two.
“All aspects of our culture are moving away from categories, they are moving beyond boundaries, beyond traditional confines and accepted categorisations. The online universe, the internet, social media, streaming, of course, all these things have come together to make a much more pluralistic musical space.”
Richter and his partner have recently built a recording studio in a forest - Art Farm - where visiting artists will be invited to work.
“The idea is to make a context, a forum, where different creative disciplines can collide almost like in a laboratory, putting things in a test tube and just seeing what happens.”
“One day you could have a Hollywood movie coming through here and the next week a bunch of kids doing a demo.”
His own exploration of music began as a child.
“I always had music going round in my head, even as a tiny child, really before I knew what composing was, what music even was. I had bits of music floating around my head and I would almost play with them like I would play with my other toys. It took me a little while to come to understand that not everyone had music going round in their head.”
Richter was a somewhat solitary child and music helped him make sense of the world until he later found his "tribe".
“I was very shy and quite solitary and not sporty in a sporty school in a country where I was a foreigner and I was interested in books and music.
“Certainly, as a kid, I found the world incomprehensible and still do!”
Richter received classical music training at London's Royal Academy of Music and always had a concurrent interest in contemporary electronica.
“I never felt that there was a category difference between them I never really accepted that, that to me was wrong.
“Within classical music, certainly when I was studying, there was good music which was very complicated music which hardly anyone wanted to listen to and then there was bad music which was basically everything else. And so, I wanted to ignore that and just follow the material into whatever medium it felt like it wanted to go into.”
His great mentor at the Royal Academy was Italian composer Luciano Berio who he continued taking lessons from after graduation.
“He was very influential to me. I just knew the guy was a genius, basically, so it meant I took seriously everything he said. Which was in contrast to the way I’d been torturing all of my professors at university.
“He basically said 'you need to get to the heart of what you’re doing rather than just write millions of complicated notes', which is what I’d been taught to do at university, so he really pointed me in the direction of simplifying my language.”
The 'SLEEP' project came about in response to the boom of mobile technology, Richter says.
“Things were getting very, very busy around the time that the internet and 4G moved into our pockets. So social media was suddenly everywhere all the time. it suggested itself that it would be a nice thing to do, to make a piece of music which could function like a holiday, something which could foster restfulness and a piece which could be experienced and inhabited while sleeping.”
We live in a chronically sleep-deprived culture, Richter says, and he was interested in making music that “inhabits a boundary space between sleeping and wakefulness.”
There are close links between music and sleep, he says.
“The process whereby memories are structured and turned into knowledge and learning can be supported by low-frequency, repetitive sounds.”
Playing 'SLEEP' to a live audience curled up in sleeping bags is a “profound” experience, Richter says.
“The musicians are accompanying the thing that is happening in the room. So, the audience, that community of listeners, are in the centre of the work and the music is the sort of landscape.”
'SLEEP' connects to the ancient tradition of the lullaby, he says.
“The lullaby is a universal, it’s pretty much in every world culture, and I think it points to something very profound about the way music and the human mind fit together. There is something about music that connects it to sleep.”
Max Richter has just released a new album called Exiles.
