Composer Max Richter redefine the audience’s experience in SLEEP
Words by Tom Faber.
For someone whose music has such a subtle, delicate fingerprint, Max Richter has had a seismic influence over the past decade in music. His signature sound rejects classical music’s convoluted flourishes, focusing instead on emotive, accessible string and piano figures interwoven with electronic sounds. He influenced a whole school of composers, including Nils Frahm, Ólafur Arnalds and Jóhann Jóhannsson, to perform contemplative music to arena-sized crowds.
While he continues to refine his musical style, the German-born British composer, 54, ceaselessly seeks to meet his listeners in new spaces. He has composed for ballet, television (Black Mirror) and film (Ad Astra, Arrival, Waltz with Bashir). His ambitious 2015 project Sleep was an 8½-hour piece performed to audiences sleeping in museums. These formal experiments are underpinned by
intellectual inquiries, like his new album, Voices, which incorporates readings from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights.
Your compositions have addressed the Iraq War, the 7/7 London bombings and Guantanamo Bay. Is your music always a response to something?
If you’re an artist, the work you make is your response to being alive, part of figuring out what it’s all about. Creative works are spaces to think, where I ask “What if?” questions and the listener brings their biography to it. The musical work becomes a conversational space.
Is your music a conversation or a monologue? After all, you’re expressing and the audience is listening.
That’s the magic of live performance—you hear back. You understand what you’ve made for the first time when people hear it. I’ve built a minimal musical language over the years in order to allow that conversational space. When I was trained as a composer, the orthodoxy was to write very complex music, impossible to play and impossible to listen to. That felt like an authoritarian position, so instead I took elements away from my work to open a space for the listener to inhabit without being lectured at.
What “space” did you want to create with Sleep?
A Sleep performance is half-concert, half-gallery work, with people in hundreds of beds. The musicians accompany what’s going on in the room, rather than projecting a text to a passive audience, so it overturns the power dynamics between performers and listeners.
Why do you so often place narrators in your work, ranging from Eleanor Roosevelt to Murakami to Kafka?
It’s about clarity, almost like a front door for the piece that listeners can walk through. In Voices, I wanted to use the Universal Declaration of Human Rights because I think it’s the most astounding document, made more relevant since we’re a long way from its goals and only getting further away.
In the press, your music is described with contrived genre tags like “neo-classical” and “post-minimal.” What does “classical music” mean today?
Classical music describes a culture rather than the musical material itself. It describes a set of social attitudes and rituals, which are actually problematic. People have to go to a concert hall, sit quietly, they’re not allowed to clap. There are power structures implied by the old man standing at the front telling everyone what to do. This stops people from being able to simply encounter the sounds. Classical music, in its purest sense, is one of the greatest achievements of humanity. On another level, it’s got a slightly oppressive, authoritarian aspect to it.