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. So, I mean, this comes... So this is the 24 postcards. Yeah, the... I guess really the thing that kind of prompted this was, you know, hearing that crazy frog ringtone everywhere. I don't know if anyone remembers that, but pretty traumatic. Just hearing this thing going off all the time.
And I suddenly thought to myself, look, there's all these millions of little loudspeakers going around the world. You know, we could actually, you know, this is a space for music, music. You know, it could be a creative space. So I wrote, yeah, all these little fragments. And just almost like treated them like Polaroids, you know, just little snapshots of a moment.
Yeah, for people to use as ringtones.
Yes. Yeah. I mean, obviously, I had sort of ideas from a purely musical point of view, what kinds of things I should be doing. But I had no real data, you know. And actually around, you know, it's funny to think, but 2012, 2013, around there, there hadn't been that much research about the effects of music and sound on sleep. There's been a ton recently. But there wasn't an awful lot out there.
I called up a friend of mine, David Eagleman, who is a neuroscientist.
Okay, well, you know, David, he's an absolute live wire and so sort of multidimensional. So he pointed me at some stuff. And I just sort of checked through a few things. And just to kind of, it was like a sense check, really, just to make sure that what I was planning to do would actually have some beneficial effect.
I guess the big thing is, and this for me compositionally was beautiful, is that, you know, some people have demonstrated that using like repetitive low frequency tones can, you know, elongate slow wave sleep so you get better information processing and memory, that kind of stuff. So that for me was great because I love the sort of low end and subsonics. It's all over my work for decades.
So I was then able to reach into that space for sleep, which was great.
Almost, yeah. I mean, down at sort of 25, 30, 35, 40 kind of thing where you sort of hear it and sort of feel it.
Well, I would love someone to do that.
But I don't think it's been done.
There's kind of no one way, honestly. I mean, I guess this goes back to childhood, really, for me. I've always had just music going around in my head. When I was a tiny kid, I thought everyone always had music going around in their head. Later on, I was like, no, this is not happening to everybody. So I've always got sort of just little fragments, things bubbling away.
I'm, you know, if I have a project, a specific thing to do, then it's partly just, I guess, trying to assemble little atoms into something and seeing which things stick together and how they interrelate and then you can build structures. It's like, in a way, it's like any kind of process, you know, it's like,
macro and micro in parallel um i guess the big thing that i really uh and and i think probably most creative people have this that i really love is when the material starts to feel like it has a kind of intentionality you know things things start to sort of happen in the material um And that's then very exciting. Then it's about following that material kind of where it wants to go.
And sometimes, actually, it's... it actually sort of goes somewhere outside the project. And you think, oh, no, no, this is a different piece. This is not what I'm doing right now. But okay, you know, you keep going. But it's something else. So there's the writing process is like continuous, basically. And the individual projects have sort of dotted lines around them. But there's actually just
Yeah, I mean, I think... I mean, in my case, it's sort of both of those. You know, if I, I don't know, if I'm, when I'm making coffee in the morning, I hear something on the radio that I love, you know, it will be sort of there as well. It'll be kind of, you know, it'll be around for a while.
It depends. I mean, I do work on paper. So most, you know, the beginning of at some point towards the beginning of a project, there will be a lot of writing on paper. You know, I'm a pianist. I play. That's my sort of sketch pad. So I will also be just trying stuff. But a lot of the time, I'll be sort of playing and writing with that kind of process.
And then depending on what it is, I will at some point probably get the computer involved, whether that's just, you know, scoring whatever it is I've done, making sort of copies, or if it's something which is, you know, more about sound itself, then maybe working with the synthesizers or the computer in terms of like shaping material. So, yeah.
Definitely, yeah. The finished piece is like a negative map of the things you didn't do with it, right?
Um, I don't know. I mean, I guess in a way, variation forms in music fill that space a little bit. You know, they do, you know, if you listen to the Goldbergs, you know, you've got 31 different ways to make that journey. Right. You know, and of course there are many more, but that's, that's all you had time for.
Showing 101–120 of 132 · page 6 of 7
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