288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
1h 10m
5 speakers
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Hello, everyone. Welcome to the Mindscape Podcast. I'm your host, Sean Carroll. Sometimes I wonder what Henry David Thoreau would have thought of the modern world. Thoreau, among other things, wrote Walden about his experience sort of escaping from the hustle and bustle of modern life back in the mid-19th century. Our modern life is a lot more hustly and bustly than that, not just in terms of what we're doing, but in terms of what we're hearing and seeing. All of the buzzing, blooming confusion around us is amplified in our modern world of electronics and streaming and cell phones and so forth. What is the role of something like classical music in an environment like that? Popular music famously can interrupt into your attention, right? It can be catchy, it can be loud, it can be fast-paced, and maybe you hear it in the background or in a store and you get a little bit of it and you recognize the song and it contributes to the atmosphere. But at least the stereotype of classical music is you're supposed to sit and listen to it.
You're supposed to give your attention over to this intricately constructed, careful piece of music. Do we really have time for things like that anymore? Some people do, of course, but maybe fewer people than did before. Someone who has very, very successfully pushed against this worry about modern classical music is today's guest, Max Richter. Max is a classical composer in a very real sense, but someone who has completely embraced the modern world rather than trying to fight against it. You can go to his Wikipedia page and find that he has passed one billion streams for his music and over a million album sales. Very, very good by the... Standards of Modern Classical Music. But he's a composer who works in a variety of media.
He has solo albums. He does commissions for classical ensembles. He also works with the ballet and scores, TV shows and films, films like Arrival, TV shows like The Leftovers on HBO, Black Mirror from the UK. And he's even been very successful at crafting little pieces of music that can be used as ringtones on your phone.
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