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
And then once you've sort of marked out the basic terrain, then you can sort of make changes which will be very affecting. Say, for example, a piece of mine like say the dream music in sleep. This is very, very simple music. You have piano chords which are regular. They happen absolutely regularly. You have subsonic bass tone which happens absolutely regularly. The piano chords themselves...
are a thing called a chain of suspensions, which is something I borrowed from the Baroque. So it is a kind of a known thing. So we have a lot of different things, all of which are in a way familiar to us at some level. And because I repeat them, they become very familiar to us.
So then when I make very small changes by introducing, for example, a melody line, it's like a character walking into a room that we know very well. So that kind of a grammar, that kind of a structure, that can be very effective.
Um, I mean, for me, writing a piece of music is like trying to, it is like trying to make a space or there's an element of sort of architecture or landscape about it. You know, there's a kind of a, um,
Yeah, I mean, I think it's interesting, isn't it? Because, yeah, I mean, like, for example, say in the Vivaldi project, so that this is recomposed. So where I took, I basically took the Four Seasons, the very famous piece of Vivaldi. And, and kind of did a, like an off road trip through Vivaldi's landscape. That's kind of how I see it. And for me, this is like a personal project.
I fell in love with the original when I was a kid, and then I heard it when people were trying to sell you insurance on the phone or something, something ghastly or in an elevator, just depressing, depressing experiences. So for me, it's a salvage mission to try and reconnect with the original. So...
Really, yeah, I was sort of faced with how to connect my language or what I was doing with the Vivaldi. And I did that via the, we talked about this already, via the medium of pattern. When you look at the Four Seasons, the original, some of those pages, you think, well, that kind of looks like John Adams or, you know, it's just like these patterns.
Because it's really just patterns sort of with jump cuts. That's how Vivaldi has made a lot of that material. It's very modern, actually, in kind of structurally. And I thought, aha, these are patterns. I can get with this. So I used that kind of principle and connected my language with Vivaldi's language via that idea.
But as you say, there are plenty of other musical traditions where if you tried to connect them with the Vivaldi, they might be quite a lot less successful. Or they wouldn't make as much sense. I guess I had this kind of skeleton key of the idea of patterns.
I think music has always done this. I mean, you know, variation forms, the idea of a fantasia on whatever it might be, you I mean, Vivaldi did it with Vivaldi's own music. Bach rewrote, reworked, you know, so many different of his own pieces. Also Vivaldi, of course. If you think of someone like Liszt or Brahms, you know, they were writing variations, versions of other people's music.
It's a process as old as composition. Yeah. Because, you know, once a piece of material is sort of out there, it just kind of floats around in the sort of global musical mind and people catch on to these things and they think, hang on a minute, I like that. I want to do this with it, you know. And I think it's a very natural thing.
Yeah, I mean, for me, so this project is called Inner Landscape. And the record is about kind of polarities and reconciling polarities. So I'm working with disparate means. So acoustic instruments, electronic instruments, looking at themes from the natural world, the human world, and also as implied in the title, which you can miss here as inner landscape, as an internal landscape.
So we're deliberately playing with that idea of the external and the human and the societal. So, yeah, for me, you know, writing a piece of music and, you know, we've already mentioned this idea is sort of half of the conversation in a way. The other half of the conversation is what that listener will bring to it. And that's actually what I'm really interested in hearing.
For me, it's really fascinating to hear to discover what people make of things, because that actually tells me a lot about what I've done.
I mean, I think, you know, ultimately music is really a feeling thing. It's such an interesting language because it's It is very conceptual. There's a lot of thinking going on, a lot of conceptualizing, planning, strategy, architectural schemes, ideas about structure, ideas about how to move through time in a piece of music. How fast is it? Where is the energy? How does the architecture work?
Very conceptual, but ultimately, it's totally a feeling thing. A listener doesn't go, oh, that was a 13-bath thing and then there was a dominant preparation and blah, blah, blah. They don't think that. They either kind of nod their head and go, hmm, or they walk out of the room. It's like there's a – or they tap their feet. There's something – it's completely a sort of visceral sensory experience.
Thank you.
So it is paradoxical in that sense.
right yeah i mean i think and again i guess that goes back to this idea that of trying to have a language which is very direct and plain um and in a way not hiding those things because you know a lot within music there's a lot of artifice there's almost like misdirection or slight of hand you know look over here and now this is happening you know um
So I'm sort of, I've been trying to get towards a situation where the material speaks very directly and plainly. So in other words, it's not, It's not necessary to think of it in a kind of analytical way, but you can just listen to it.
Showing 61–80 of 132 · page 4 of 7
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