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
bracing slash terrifying slash confusing slash interesting it's kind of all of those things and you get uh one of the ways that people try to organize music in the absence of a tonal center so you know we don't have our familiar chords anymore how do we organize those sounds so one of the ways of organizing it was a thing called serialism which schoenberg comes up with um
around 1908 910 around there and um uh actually slightly later sorry more like 12 13 15. um and he um and this is to do with like putting tones in a predetermined order and building sort of geometrical structures out of tones. It sounds very abstract, and that's because it is. It's actually nothing to do with like the sensation and feeling of music. From the head, not the heart.
It's like taking music and turning it into this kind of abstract system.
Basically, that's the 20th century. It gets more and more of that. Yeah.
schoenberg starts off uh making series of pitches and then you get duration and rhythm and and dynamics and all kinds of things so everything's like systematized and it becomes this really weird sort of arms race of uh abstraction so that's what i was supposed to be writing when i was a kid um and i was like i did do that for a while very complex very abstract sort of music
you know, very hard to understand or love. And then I just, I'd got to study with Berio and I showed him this piano piece of mine, which is in the tradition of like student composers, piano pieces, which are impossible to play really hard, you know, just so dead, so difficult, you know, and he looked at it and he was just like, is this actually what you want to be doing really with your time?
What is music for? Why are you doing this? You know, asking sort of really profound questions, really sick, you know, basic fundamental questions about what music was. And so that kind of in a way, unsettled me. And then around the same time, we were starting to hear the music of the kind of new tonal music coming out of the Baltic states. So this is and these sorts of composers.
Plus, I had been playing loads of minimal music as part of a six piano group. So we played, you know, Steve Reich's pianos, the early Philip Glass things, lots of kind of pulse-y sort of minimal music. And all these things kind of piled up on me, really. And so I just kind of thought, hang on a minute. Why am I doing this other stuff when here's an alternative? Here's a potential alternative.
new language for me, new language, which can, where I can be very direct about what I'm trying to say. And that to me ultimately made much more sense.
Yeah, I think that happens a lot in culture, right?
That's right. Yeah. I mean, every listener is bringing, well, put it this way, they're listening through the prism of their biography, right? Yeah. Every piece of music they've heard informs the way they hear what they're hearing in that moment. And there's something really beautiful about that.
I don't know. I'm certainly trying to do the maximum with the minimum.
every note is there for a reason and i try to you know i try very hard to make things to make the things i'm i'm writing um come over or connect in as direct a way as possible and that means they are quite sort of um they're sort of low information zones in a way you know i'm trying to um sort of achieve a kind of a very lean, direct, uh, expression.
Um, I think if we, you know, minimalism in music, we think of like the early glass and Reich pieces, which are very pattern based, um, I mean, I work a lot with patterns because there's something very fundamental in music to do with patterns. It goes all the way back. Well, all the way back. Mozart's all made of patterns. It just is. Bach, the same. So
I do work with those things, but that isn't my sort of main thing. Or rather, it's not a thing in itself.
Yes, no. I would rather... if I can tell the story in a way where the kind of technical aspect of the music also, um, expresses, um, what I'm trying to say, then I will do that because that enriches the experience of the listener. You know what I mean? Like, I don't know. I mean, it sort of, imagine like a trivial example.
Say I wrote a piece called Falling, say, and it was just made out of lines of notes which descended, something like that. I mean, you could imagine a piece like that. And if you could make something satisfying musically, I mean, that's kind of a mad example because it's sort of very banal, but you know what I mean? If there's something about the musical texture itself,
which can embody the subject matter, then I will definitely try and do that. I enjoy those kinds of things.
Yes. Yeah. I mean, I work a lot with... I suppose you call redundancy, redundant information. I mean, that's something I've taken from the minimalists, you know, this idea of continually, how could you describe it? You know, if you work, say, with repeated material, in a sense, you're sort of always in the same place. You're re-experiencing the same moment.
And so if you make small shifts and changes, you get the experience of novelty, but within a known space. I mean, for me, one of the things I like to do is I like the listener to, in a sense, learn the territory of a piece while the piece is happening.
Showing 41–60 of 132 · page 3 of 7
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