Max Richter
Appearances
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
And it seemed to me always quite natural that I should, you know, be working with those tools as well. I see it really as... simply a continuation of a process that's happened to the orchestra from the beginning, really. All through the 18th and 19th century, the orchestra grows, both in size and in terms of available colors. Different instruments get added. And composers have always pushed
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
against you know the possible and tried to go into new spaces you have to look at what happens to the piano keyboard in beethoven's lifetime you know just longer and longer and longer right so um so you know we're always looking for new things new colors new possibilities and for me the electronics um are really just a you know the palette getting bigger
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
No, I grew up in the UK. I was born in Germany. We moved to the UK when I was really very young. I was like three.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Sure, of course. Yeah, yeah. I mean, for me, you know, hearing Kraftwerk for the first time, which was when I was about 12 or 13, Absolutely blew my mind and was completely formative for me. I heard this music on a TV show. It was the opening of Autobahn and I just had never heard anything like it. And I was intoxicated and I wrote a letter to the BBC saying,
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
and said, please tell me what the music is for this program. I posted it in the post box, waited six weeks, got a reply back, it's Kraftwerk Autobahn. Right, so then I know what it is, so then I get my pocket money out, get on the bus into town, get to the record shop. I mean, it sounds crazy now, right?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Anyway, so, you know, days and weeks later, I get this record, put it on the record player and, you know, hearing the bass line at the beginning of Autobahn, it's like my life has changed, you know, absolutely transformed. And yeah, you know, from then on, I just knew I wanted to get my hands on a synthesizer.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Oh, yeah. No, I was, you know, practicing the piano and I was into music.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yeah, so... Okay, so maybe I need to sort of do this kind of chronologically. So basically, I trained at a time, you know, at university and then at the Academy in London, and then I went to Florence and studied with Berio there. So a very sort of straightforward process. academic composer training. And at that time there was an orthodoxy about the kind of music you should write. And this was,
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
kind of complexity, basically. It was sort of post-Boulez, you know, total serialism, plus, plus, plus. And if you were interested in tonal music, it just meant you were stupid. Literally, that was the attitude. You can write that, but you are stupid.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Okay, so tonal music is what we're used to hearing in pop music or most of the music around us. It's music based around the tonal system, which is a structure of triads. It comes from, well, it was codified really by Bach. But tonality itself, the tonal system, is really like a cultural elaboration of the harmonic series.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
The harmonic series is something from physics, and it's to do with numerical physical relationships. And the tonal system is like an expression of that. Right. So... Does that make any sense? That's what the tonal system is.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Exactly, right. So it's like this amazing resource, kind of lexicon of musical possibility where we're saturated with it, you know? That doesn't mean it's exhausted. There's lots to come from tonality.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Well, yeah. So what happened is that there was this sort of – there was like a historical view of – like musical, inverted commas, progress. And what happens is that as music history goes along, it moves from Bach into the Romantics, and the Romantics basically add dissonance. Now dissonance is like tones which are foreign to the chords that we're hearing, foreign to the key that we're hearing.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
So you get a piling up of dissonance. And then towards the very end of the 19th century, early 20th century, you get this kind of... It's like a big wave of dissonance that sort of breaks. And you get into a situation where you take away the tonal centre. And various people start to try and think of ways of writing music which are not to do with tonality. And it's kind of...
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
It's like taking music and turning it into this kind of abstract system.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Basically, that's the 20th century. It gets more and more of that. Yeah.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yeah, I think that happens a lot in culture, right?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
I don't know. I'm certainly trying to do the maximum with the minimum.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
I do work with those things, but that isn't my sort of main thing. Or rather, it's not a thing in itself.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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,
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
which can embody the subject matter, then I will definitely try and do that. I enjoy those kinds of things.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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...
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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,
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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...
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Thank you.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
So it is paradoxical in that sense.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
It's a very dark song. It's a song about loss and everything falling to pieces, right? Yeah.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
because it's actually the blackest irony, right? That song.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Because that is what the artist will have intended. So I guess that's a sort of, it's like a contract.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
So it's a very different dynamic.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yeah, for people to use as ringtones.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
I called up a friend of mine, David Eagleman, who is a neuroscientist.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
So I was then able to reach into that space for sleep, which was great.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Well, I would love someone to do that.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
But I don't think it's been done.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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,
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Hi, great to be here.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Definitely, yeah. The finished piece is like a negative map of the things you didn't do with it, right?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
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.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yeah. I mean, playing music live is really... in a way the most authentic, the realist, most direct musical experience we have. It's a setting where you really get to experience the conversational aspect of music, in real time. You're there in the room. It's a one-time thing. It's a unique occasion. So it's super exciting, and I think we all love doing it. So yeah, I have a new record coming.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
It depends what it is. If somebody's commissioned something, say an orchestral piece or ballet or whatever it might be, then yes. Then I write it all down. We make a score. Then here is the score. And then, you know, it's over to whoever it is who's playing the piece or conducting it. Other times, you know, say it's a film project, then, you know, I'll be recording it here at the studio.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
And there'll be a sort of a dialogue back and forth with director, editor in terms of how it should all work. That's much more conversational kind of a process. Or if it's a solo album, then it's me sitting in this room writing away and then recording it and then doing absolutely every aspect of it myself.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yeah. Yeah, it's completely different. It's fundamentally a collaborative thing. Music is, well, a TV show is not a symphony, right? There are other things going on. There are actors. There's a story. So quite naturally, the music has to be any part of something. But what's the best way for the music to be part of the thing? That's what we're trying to figure out.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
We're trying to figure out what is the music that feels innate or inevitable within the world of that story. And that's something which you arrive at by experiment and conversation and luck sometimes.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yeah, I mean, there's a million different ways. I mean, quite often I'll write things from the page, from the script. So then I'm just dealing with the themes, the psychology of the thing or whatever it might be, the drama. Other times, you'll get scenes or a whole cut of a thing and then you're responding to the visuals. Yeah, it varies.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yeah, yeah. It's something which is involving and connected in a really deep way, I think, to... I mean, for me, you know, the experience of being a person, how we relate to one another, all of these things, you know, it's a very, it's a very simultaneously very simple and very mysterious thing.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
And I really enjoy that about it, actually, you know, the fact that it's kind of endlessly elusive in a way.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Well, I think, yeah. I mean, I think for composers, I mean, probably for all musicians ultimately, there's a few different things, aren't there? I mean, you have to just learn, learn, learn. Learn everything you can learn and then keep learning. Technical stuff, historical stuff, you know, just be immersed with it. And then I think try to figure out what it is
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
that you've got, which is the thing that really makes you, you. You know, that bit of your biography, that bit of your story, which is really, which no one else has got, right? Because that's what you write from, and that's where you, that's your sort of origin point, and that, you know, everyone has a unique version of that. And I think if, you know, I think,
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Ultimately, it's probably the best thing you've got, right?
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Right? I agree. I mean, I think if you can do that, first of all, you're sort of having more fun probably because you're just being you. Um, but you also have to have a lot of, in a way, trust in that, you know, because we tend to sort of get a bit anxious about being ourselves, but, but actually, you know, it's the best thing you can do.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Thank you. It's a pleasure.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
In fact, it's out in a couple of days. So yeah, we thought we'll take it on the road and see what happens.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yes, I play. I mean, I play piano. I'm playing various keyboards, computers, gizmos of all sorts. And then there's a string ensemble.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yeah, this is the first time we've really put it together in a kind of a planned way. I mean, I've played a lot of concerts over the years, but we've never really gone out on a tour like a band. So that's what I'm doing now.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yeah, I'm excited about it, actually. I love putting the music out into the real world and seeing what happens. Because I think it's a little bit like testing a theory. I write a bunch of stuff on a piece of paper. And I have ideas about what that might be and what it might turn into. And part one of learning what it is, is the recording process.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
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
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
But really part two, and maybe the most important part, is finding out what happens when you put it in a room with human beings. And also, actually, audiences are different around the world. They really are. There's different energies, different enthusiasms. And yeah, it's always a really fun thing to do.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yeah, you really get a sense of it. You really get a sense when people are listening, when they're engaged, you know, when they're sort of when they're really connected, you really feel it. And yeah, it's this moment to moment experience for us as performers and for the audience.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
He got cross.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Oh, that's so funny. Well, yeah, there's a weird thing with coughing, isn't there? Yeah. We've had it a few times. You know, and sometimes you think, you know, one, as you say, one person will start coughing and then it sort of sets off this sort of ripple of like, it's like a permission has been given, you know, and then everyone starts doing it.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
But also, I wonder whether coughing isn't, you know, sometimes like you'll get loads of coughing between numbers. And it's almost like a substitute for applause. Okay. You know, where people are like, no, we're not allowed to clap because it's like not finished. It's like between movements, but we will cough. So you get this sort of huge, it's a strange thing.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Probably a sort of dead guy, you know. So there is that perception. So it's something, I think, in the sort of public consciousness, it's a bit like a museum. It's this thing that comes from history. But really, it's a living thing.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
It's a thing, human beings telling stories with sound, writing things they're passionate about, trying to communicate those things, telling stories, responding to the world around them via the medium of music. I personally think classical music now is something which is really borderless
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
you know, we've got to a position now where it isn't really just about, you know, adding to the canon, you know, or, you know, sort of Bach, Beethoven, Brahms, you know, it isn't about that. Even though, You know, in a way, all music is about other music. But we've sort of escaped this idea of a sort of building on a canon.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
And there's this kind of wonderful multiplicity, this sort of wide openness of influence going on in music culture right now. So that ideally... we would kind of stop talking about classical music and we would just be talking about music.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
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
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
It's convenient, right? It is convenient. And of course, you know, marketing people and, you know, it's just kind of gives people a frame of reference. It's quite simple, you know. You know, here's your latest symphony cycle. Here's this, you know, whatever it might be, concerto, say, or, you know. And it's, yeah, I get why people kind of gravitate to that.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
But, you know, human beings, you know, we don't exist in boxes. We're multidimensional and we change our minds and we turn into other people. And music is really like that by nature, I think.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Yeah, I mean, I think there's a couple of things have happened. The first is that You know, musicians of all kinds are now working with the computer. So we've all got the same tools. You know, whether you're a conservatoire studying composition, you know, you'll be working with a notation program and maybe some samplers to make mock-ups or, you know, Max MSP or something like that.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
You know, there are many... tools which you might use, but also if you're coming from a dance music perspective or an EDM perspective, there's a kind of interpenetration of tools. So everyone's using the same things and that I think has led to a kind of an openness to materials and methods. And the other thing I think is that streaming has happened.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
So unlike when I was a kid, if I heard something that I loved and wanted to know more about, I had to open up my piggy bank, get the pocket money out, take the risk, go to the record store. This is a whole chain of actions and processes and investment and commitment to hear that sound. Whereas now you literally just click your mouse and there it is, you know, all the music in the world.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
So that's meant that people have no risk in terms of just following their enthusiasms through the musical universe. And that's meant that people are listening much more widely, I think.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Is that absolutely right? Yeah.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Well, for me, you know, as a kid, I was going, did a very straightforward sort of composer education, you know, piano lessons as a kid and then university and conservatory and all of those things.
Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
But I had a simultaneous kind of enthusiasm for the music I was hearing, you know, from the charts, which at that time was, you know, early, the early punk, early electronic music and the sort of tail end of prog and jazz. you know, experimental, whatever, wasn't really post-rock in those days, but, you know, can and nigh and sort of that kind of stuff. So a lot of different languages.