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
Yeah. Well, this is one of the other paradoxes, isn't it? I mean, when you hear a piece of music, if you sort of connect with it in any way, you do feel like you're being spoken to about something and you're sharing something of the consciousness of the person who made that piece or who played it. And this is, again, one of the great puzzles of music. You know, we feel it.
Look, this is just air bouncing around. Right. And yet, you know, there is something very profound going on. Yeah. But I mean, it's just such a paradoxical and interesting thing.
It's a very dark song. It's a song about loss and everything falling to pieces, right? Yeah.
um it's hilarious right because i think um at one point it was even used as a kind of campaign song absolutely yeah over and over again not just at one point people love it i can answer them it's like really are you even listening no no they are not yeah no i mean it's interesting that isn't it i mean he's obviously a brilliant songwriter and it's a very clever piece of writing
because it's actually the blackest irony, right? That song.
Well, in the record itself, you have composed music, so instrumental music, which has been written down. And then you have essentially found objects, interludes, really, between the composed music. So you've got this sort of polarity operating in the piece all the time. And that's, I guess, sort of speaks to the idea of polarities.
And this, for me, I guess, leans into the societal aspect of the record and the time that we're living in. You know, we live in a very polarized time. A historical moment is a moment where people who have mild disagreements can't even speak to one another.
And I guess in trying to have these different kinds of objects live with one another, the electronic, the acoustic, the found object, the intentionally written music, putting these things into a kind of fruitful unity, I guess I'm making a kind of a small plea for coexistence and listening.
I can see both sides of this. I have the radio on in my kitchen during all waking hours. But it's set at such a level so that if I'm cooking, I can hear the music. Because I like to be surprised. I like to hear things that I haven't heard or wasn't expecting to hear. On the other hand, if I listen to music, if I put a record on, then I will sit and listen to that music with full concentration.
Because that is what the artist will have intended. So I guess that's a sort of, it's like a contract.
Okay, so Sleep comes from, I guess, about 2013, 2014, when 4G internet moved into our pockets. So that meant we then had social media 24-7 in our pockets. And Yulia, my partner, and I were talking about this and the sort of societal effects of it. And of course, loads of fun, very interesting, but also significant psychological load and pressure.
So I was thinking about the way that large-scale artworks a long movie, a big painting, say a big Rothko or something, a big novel, Anna Karenina or something, you can use it as a way to kind of
kind of blanket out reality and just concentrate on that and extended duration music can have that effect right um so i thought okay so i'm going to make a piece which can be like a big pause button you'll put on and you can just like zone out for eight hours um And so that's what sleep is. It's at one level a kind of a lullaby, at one level a kind of a protest song.
You know, the idea of constant productivity. Yeah. So it's a kind of like, let's just stop for a second. Hmm. Yeah, so that was Sleep. It's a music for piano, organ, synthesizers, string, quintet, and soprano.
Yes, exactly. So the piece isn't really to be, well, you can experience it any way you like, but I intended it really to just be inhabited, to be slept through. More like, again, like a landscape rather than a concert. And actually for us, you know, when we started to play the piece live, it was a bit of a learning curve because we realized that we weren't really playing a concert.
You know, it looked a bit like a concert, even though, of course, we had, you know, 500 people in beds in front of us. But there was still us and an audience. And we thought, okay, so we, you know, we went into kind of our default setting as musicians and we tried to project this piece into the space. And actually, you know, very quickly we realized this was not what we should be doing.
What we were doing is we were accompanying something that is happening in the room. Right. which is, you know, a community of strangers, hundreds of people who don't know one another, who've come together and basically trusted one another to be sort of in this very vulnerable state and go on this journey through the night together. And really, we were just accompanying this thing that's happening.
So it's a very different dynamic.
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. And also... Yeah, to try and sort of, I guess, question the sort of hierarchical aspect of, you know, music as this, you know, again, going back to the Romantics or the modernists, you know, this idea of
greatness you know you know you have the sort of the great composer who writes the great piece and then we all have to listen and sort of shut up and behave and you know try to absorb the greatness you know is it you know it's just i want to try and get away from that idea
Showing 81–100 of 132 · page 5 of 7
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