Max Richter
speaker
132 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Max Richter’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
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Appearances
You know, there are many... tools which you might use, but also if you're coming from a dance music perspective or an EDM perspective, there's a kind of interpenetration of tools. So everyone's using the same things and that I think has led to a kind of an openness to materials and methods. And the other thing I think is that streaming has happened.
So unlike when I was a kid, if I heard something that I loved and wanted to know more about, I had to open up my piggy bank, get the pocket money out, take the risk, go to the record store. This is a whole chain of actions and processes and investment and commitment to hear that sound. Whereas now you literally just click your mouse and there it is, you know, all the music in the world.
So that's meant that people have no risk in terms of just following their enthusiasms through the musical universe. And that's meant that people are listening much more widely, I think.
Is that absolutely right? Yeah.
Well, for me, you know, as a kid, I was going, did a very straightforward sort of composer education, you know, piano lessons as a kid and then university and conservatory and all of those things.
But I had a simultaneous kind of enthusiasm for the music I was hearing, you know, from the charts, which at that time was, you know, early, the early punk, early electronic music and the sort of tail end of prog and jazz. you know, experimental, whatever, wasn't really post-rock in those days, but, you know, can and nigh and sort of that kind of stuff. So a lot of different languages.
And it seemed to me always quite natural that I should, you know, be working with those tools as well. I see it really as... simply a continuation of a process that's happened to the orchestra from the beginning, really. All through the 18th and 19th century, the orchestra grows, both in size and in terms of available colors. Different instruments get added. And composers have always pushed
against you know the possible and tried to go into new spaces you have to look at what happens to the piano keyboard in beethoven's lifetime you know just longer and longer and longer right so um so you know we're always looking for new things new colors new possibilities and for me the electronics um are really just a you know the palette getting bigger
No, I grew up in the UK. I was born in Germany. We moved to the UK when I was really very young. I was like three.
Sure, of course. Yeah, yeah. I mean, for me, you know, hearing Kraftwerk for the first time, which was when I was about 12 or 13, Absolutely blew my mind and was completely formative for me. I heard this music on a TV show. It was the opening of Autobahn and I just had never heard anything like it. And I was intoxicated and I wrote a letter to the BBC saying,
and said, please tell me what the music is for this program. I posted it in the post box, waited six weeks, got a reply back, it's Kraftwerk Autobahn. Right, so then I know what it is, so then I get my pocket money out, get on the bus into town, get to the record shop. I mean, it sounds crazy now, right?
Anyway, so, you know, days and weeks later, I get this record, put it on the record player and, you know, hearing the bass line at the beginning of Autobahn, it's like my life has changed, you know, absolutely transformed. And yeah, you know, from then on, I just knew I wanted to get my hands on a synthesizer.
Oh, yeah. No, I was, you know, practicing the piano and I was into music.
Yeah, so... Okay, so maybe I need to sort of do this kind of chronologically. So basically, I trained at a time, you know, at university and then at the Academy in London, and then I went to Florence and studied with Berio there. So a very sort of straightforward process. academic composer training. And at that time there was an orthodoxy about the kind of music you should write. And this was,
kind of complexity, basically. It was sort of post-Boulez, you know, total serialism, plus, plus, plus. And if you were interested in tonal music, it just meant you were stupid. Literally, that was the attitude. You can write that, but you are stupid.
Okay, so tonal music is what we're used to hearing in pop music or most of the music around us. It's music based around the tonal system, which is a structure of triads. It comes from, well, it was codified really by Bach. But tonality itself, the tonal system, is really like a cultural elaboration of the harmonic series.
The harmonic series is something from physics, and it's to do with numerical physical relationships. And the tonal system is like an expression of that. Right. So... Does that make any sense? That's what the tonal system is.
Exactly, right. So it's like this amazing resource, kind of lexicon of musical possibility where we're saturated with it, you know? That doesn't mean it's exhausted. There's lots to come from tonality.
Well, yeah. So what happened is that there was this sort of – there was like a historical view of – like musical, inverted commas, progress. And what happens is that as music history goes along, it moves from Bach into the Romantics, and the Romantics basically add dissonance. Now dissonance is like tones which are foreign to the chords that we're hearing, foreign to the key that we're hearing.
So you get a piling up of dissonance. And then towards the very end of the 19th century, early 20th century, you get this kind of... It's like a big wave of dissonance that sort of breaks. And you get into a situation where you take away the tonal centre. And various people start to try and think of ways of writing music which are not to do with tonality. And it's kind of...
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