Sean Carroll's Mindscape: Science, Society, Philosophy, Culture, Arts, and Ideas
288 | Max Richter on the Meaning of Classical Music Today
Mon, 09 Sep 2024
It wasn't that long ago, historically speaking, that you might put on your tuxedo or floor-length evening gown to go out and hear a live opera or symphony. But today's world is faster, more technologically connected, and casual. Is there still a place for classical music in the contemporary environment? Max Richter, whose new album In a Landscape releases soon, proves that there is. We talk about what goes into making modern classical music, how musical styles evolve, and why every note should count.Support Mindscape on Patreon.Blog post with transcript: https://www.preposterousuniverse.com/podcast/2024/09/09/288-max-richter-on-the-meaning-of-classical-music-today/Max Richter trained in composition and piano at Edinburgh University, at the Royal Academy of Music, and with Luciano Berio in Florence. He was a co-founder of the ensemble Piano Circus. His first solo album, "Memoryhouse," was released in 2002. He has since released numerous solo albums, as well as extensive work on soundtracks for film and television, ballet, opera, and collaborations with visual artists.Web siteYouTubeSpotifyWikipediaSee Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.
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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.
So I love this ability to stretch from the ability to do a major performance at the Sydney Opera House, but also really vibe with how people are living today. And in this conversation, we get to what this kind of music means today, you know, how it fits in with the history of music and
how it fits in with how people listen to music right now, how the process of composing and creativity goes, and how it can be the case that music that is essentially non-vocal, right, almost purely instrumental music, he's done some vocal music things, but most of his music is just the instruments doing their part. How can that have a message? How can that have a theme?
How can that resonate with what we're thinking about something in the modern world? He has a new solo album called In a Landscape. It's a solo album, so it's just him constructing all the sounds recorded in his new home studio that he and his partner have put together.
And it's sort of a back and forth between these constructed pieces of music in a more or less traditional sense and little bits of found sounds, everyday life, the human world, the natural world, all fitting it together in a new way.
It gives us hope, this kind of interview you're just about to hear, that classical music is not going away, that it can be super vibrant and absolutely part of the world moving forward. So with that, let's go. Max Richter, welcome to the Mindscape podcast.
Hi, great to be here.
I do appreciate you coming on. I understand that you are preparing for a world tour. And what is that about? What is that like? I mean, I think of world tours as being done by performers, and I think of you as a composer, but of course, you're a bit of both.
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.
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.
So what about the actual mechanics here? Are you playing piano? I know that you have electronic instruments in your music.
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.
And you've, correct me if I'm wrong, not done a world tour before. You've done plenty of individual performances, but this is like the Rolling Stones going on tour.
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.
Yeah, so exciting, intimidating, different?
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.
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.
Well, I was going to ask about that. I mean, how much do you feel you are feeling the emotions or reactions of the audience in real time? How much does that come across?
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.
I once went to a concert at Walt Disney Concert Hall, which I think is on your tour, right? So I went to a recital by Andres Schiff playing piano. And I don't know whether this is going to affect you or not, but the acoustics are very, very good in that hall. And for some reason, it was the time of year where everyone started coughing in the audience.
And it got so bad because once one person starts coughing, everyone else catches on, that Schiff actually stopped playing and stormed off of the stage. He did.
He got cross.
He did.
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.
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.
Well, that's a great segue because I want to give the audience a chance to just think about the idea of classical music. One of the ideas of classical music is that you don't clap when you're still in the middle of a chain of pieces that are connected together. I mean, how do you think about... What is your definition of classical music? Let's ask it that way.
Right.
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.
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
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.
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.
That would be great. It's never going to happen. I don't think we're too fond of putting things into boxes, right? It does help us think about things.
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.
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.
Well, I grew up enjoying bands like Emerson, Lake and Palmer, who would play the occasional Prokofiev or Holster or whatever. And there's also always been classical orchestras doing kind of gimmicky covers of popular music. But from what you're saying, it sounds like there's a bit more seriousness to the erasure of the boundaries.
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.
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.
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.
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.
I guess, yeah, I've never really thought of that impact, but that feeds into the idea that the boundaries should come down. There's no reason why someone can't make a playlist with Taylor Swift followed by something classical.
Is that absolutely right? Yeah.
And you also, the other thing about your music, so that the audience knows, is that you do, you're pretty eclectic in terms of instrumentation. And not only... conventionally understood instruments, but ambient sounds, electronic instruments, et cetera. I mean, what role do those things play, would you say?
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.
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.
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
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
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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.
Because Germany obviously has been in the vanguard of electronic music and experimental music.
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,
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?
It does, it's very different, different world.
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.
Were you already in love with classical music at this time?
Oh, yeah. No, I was, you know, practicing the piano and I was into music.
Okay, very good. Let's do our best to give the audience an idea of what your music sounds like, given that if we try to actually play some music for them, there are rights issues and lawyers will come in. So I will link to that, absolutely. But how would you describe your own approach within this eclectic musical universe?
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,
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.
Let me just interrupt to ask for an explanation of tonal versus the alternative.
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.
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.
I think it kind of makes sense. You know, probably a lot of people have seen those videos where people play the same three chords, right? You know, the root, the fourth, and the fifth, and it fits half the songs they've ever heard in their lives, right?
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.
But in your schools, this was looked down upon.
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.
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...
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
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.
It's like taking music and turning it into this kind of abstract system.
Yeah.
Basically, that's the 20th century. It gets more and more of that. Yeah.
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
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?
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.
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.
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.
It sounds like an amazingly familiar kind of story, not just in music, but in art, literature, maybe even like science and politics, where there's some super successful paradigm, tonal music, and so successful that it just gets done to death and people react against it. And maybe they go too far reacting against it. So there becomes more room for experimenting in some perpendicular direction.
Yeah, I think that happens a lot in culture, right?
Yeah. And it's part of the historic aspect of it, right? Like when you write a piece of music, the audience has heard other pieces of music, right? They've heard some of these things and they put it in that context, whether consciously or otherwise.
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.
So would you, and again, this is labels and I know they're never perfect, but again, the audience has to go out and find the music for themselves. So until then, would you count yourself as a minimalist composer?
I don't know. I'm certainly trying to do the maximum with the minimum.
Hmm.
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.
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
I do work with those things, but that isn't my sort of main thing. Or rather, it's not a thing in itself.
But it is a little bit in there. Are there explicitly geometric or mathematical ideas that go into your head when you're composing a piece of music?
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.
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,
which can embody the subject matter, then I will definitely try and do that. I enjoy those kinds of things.
Well, I have two different, completely uneducated ideas about music that I'm going to take advantage of you being here to run by you, and you can tell me whether I'm right or wrong. One... dealing with what we were just talking about, is that a lot of the pleasure of music comes from some competition between anticipation and novelty, right? There's a rhythm.
If you have no rhythm, if you have no structure at all, it's kind of not musical. But of course, if it's just repeating exactly the same thing over and over again, it's not musical either. So finding that sweet spot is a lot of the part of success story.
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.
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.
Okay.
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.
Do you think of different elements of your music as characters in a drama?
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,
quite hard to explain it but there's a sort of feeling of like trying to it's sort of world building a little bit yeah okay that's great that quality so you did mention um borrowing suspended chords from the baroque and and i should tell the audience you've done a whole album of reimagining vivaldi yes i have yeah that's yeah This episode of Mindscape is sponsored by BetterHelp.
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ways that DNA can be arranged, or fields or particles can be arranged, and they have different energies and different possibilities of survival. And the idea is that there's kind of isolated peaks where everything is good and happy, and then in the valleys in between them you're unstable.
So, for example, elephants are very successful, ants are very successful, but something that was halfway in between an elephant and an ant would not be successful, right?
So my crazy theory is that music is the same way, that there are different kinds of music that are individually successful and that there's reasons for internal coherence and so forth that they are successful and you can try to blend them, but it's never quite the same.
So there will always be orchestral music and there will always be pop music and there will always be jazz and there will always be talking to each other, but a little bit different. That's my theory. What do you think?
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.
And is this, you know, among people who might be thought of as classical composers of your generation, do some of them completely reject the historical perspective? Or is it very common for people to kind of be quoting and in conversation with their predecessors?
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.
Well, we already mentioned the audience reaction in real time when you're doing a performance. But it seems like your new album, tell us about your new album, because the quote that comes with it is, it is an open conversation with the audience.
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.
The idea of spatial structures seems to be very common, whether it's like a landscape or, you know, you mentioned different patterns out there in the world, walking to a room and so forth. But at the end of the day, it's sound that you're making. How much of that connection is personal versus like, oh, here is the theory of why these sounds kind of fit into this spatial structure?
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.
You know, I had a music teacher in junior high school who was the one who explained to us that if you just listen to a pop song, there are things called verses and choruses and instrumental sections and guitar solos and drum solos. And that had, very embarrassed to say that it never really occurred to me, not being a, you know, practicing performer of music myself.
I just, like you say, I just sort of, enjoyed the thing, the song, as a gestalt. And this idea of structure warmed my proto-physicist heart. Then I could see layers there that I hadn't seen before. But I suspect a lot of musicians and composers don't realize the extent to which the audience doesn't appreciate some of the structural bells and whistles that they have.
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.
But that was interesting because you use the phrase speaks very directly and plainly. But a lot of the music is instrumental, right? And when you describe it, it's clear that... In your mind, there are often, you know, words or themes or things that could be expressed verbally that are attached to it. How close is that connection there when you say like a certain piece is about the Iraq war?
But I wouldn't know that if I were just listening to it, right?
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.
And I guess now that I'm just thinking of this right now, so I might be embarrassed to say this, but it makes me think of Bruce Springsteen's song, Born in the USA. I don't know if you know it, but the music is sort of anthemic, right? And, you know, it makes you feel given the title that this is some patriotic anthem or whatever, but the words are telling a very different story.
And so many people don't get that because they don't listen to the words.
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.
Yeah. So the other thing you say about In a Landscape is that it asks the audience to consider the dualities in their own life. And that was just sort of pregnant with meaning there. I didn't want to unpack it for you. So what are the dualities we're thinking about here?
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.
It's very, very problematic.
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.
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Well, the listening does matter, and here is the topic I'm most interested in hearing your thoughts about. I once had a friend who was a musician who would come over to our house, and if I had music playing in the background, he would ask me to turn it off. He did not want there to be any music if you could not sit silently and listen to it.
But I guess there's layers, there's different approaches here. Where do you come down on the, if there's music at all, you'd better be paying close attention to it question?
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.
Well, usually that's what the artist intends, but you do have this famous record called Sleep, not really a record, a piece. Tell the audience about that, because I just love the whole concept.
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.
Wow.
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.
But the eight hours is not chosen as a random number. It is meant to allow you to put the music on while you are sleeping at night.
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.
And maybe in some sense, a more truthful acknowledgement of the fact that music, like anything else, is just one aspect of the life that is going on all around us. So rather than insisting that you stop everything else and pay attention, work it into the fabric.
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
Well, and the other manifestation of that, which I truly love, is that rather than being annoyed or frustrated that in the smartphone era someone might use your music as a ringtone, you leaned into that. You said, all right, here's a bunch of ringtones for you.
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.
Well, there's a difference between greatness and grandiosity, right? Yeah. And for, well, it reminds me of, again, completely randomly, very recently, someone pointed out that The most reproduced example of visual art in the history of the world is probably, do you want to guess? I don't know, actually. The portrait of Abraham Lincoln on the U.S. penny. Really?
Just because there's so many pennies out there, right? Of course, right. Okay, fair enough. So little bits of art all around. Why not make it good? Yeah, exactly. Exactly. And is it true that for sleep, you thought a little bit about sleep, about the neuroscience of sleep, about what's going on in people's brains when they're asleep?
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.
Former guest of the podcast.
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.
When you say the word subsonic, do you mean literally too low to hear? We don't know we're experiencing it?
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.
So has anyone done the obvious follow-up study of seeing what happens to people's brains while they're listening to your composition and they're sleeping?
Well, I would love someone to do that.
Okay, good.
But I don't think it's been done.
Throw it out there. I'm sure we have some neuroscience grad students who are looking for a good PhD project. That might just be it. Okay, the other thing I wanted to talk about, I can't let you go without asking, you know, I always have these sort of
craft questions like what is it like to be a composer uh in the way that you're doing it i mean i i hate asking this question but it's the standard one where do you get your ideas for a tune is it random do you like sit down and think okay now i will come up with a melody or a harmony um it it's i i
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
writing going on all the time well that's a fascinating thing to say because i've never heard a musical composer say that but i've heard many many fiction writers say that right once they get characters they go places that they had no idea Yeah, exactly.
I do think that I am one of those people who always has music bouncing around in their heads, but it's music that has been written and recorded by other people. So I think that it would be very hard for me to break out of that and make something new, having been exposed to so many really good pieces of music already in my life.
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.
And then in that process, once you go from, well, sorry, let me just back up and be very down to earth. Do you then go to the piano or do you have other instruments you go to or do you go to a piece of paper and start writing a score?
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.
And that always leaves you with many more ideas and paths, ideas sketched out and paths walked down than you can possibly fit into the final piece, right? Do those stay with you when you hear a piece of music that you have composed, you recall all the things you didn't do?
Definitely, yeah. The finished piece is like a negative map of the things you didn't do with it, right?
Yeah.
describes the territory and there's another you know there's a million other universes out there with all the different versions right have you or anyone else done a an album or a piece around that idea like you know here the paths not walked down for this final thing that we end up with
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.
OK, and then for someone like you, you're established. You've made a name for yourself, to say the least. Do you hand over the music to performers? Or is it, I don't know, how does it work?
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.
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.
I guess that is true. I forgot to ask about this process of collaborating with a movie or TV director or what have you. I mean, that sounds very different to me than sitting down and writing a solo album or, you know, sorry, the word went out of my head, a commissioned symphony.
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.
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.
Are you presented with basically the film without a soundtrack and you start filling in?
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.
I mean, the theme that seems to come through over and over again is that music is not independent of the rest of our sensoria, right? The rest of what we are experiencing and related to in our everyday lives.
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.
And I really enjoy that about it, actually, you know, the fact that it's kind of endlessly elusive in a way.
All right, last question then. Any advice for the teenagers in the audience who have made the somewhat foolhardy decision to try to make a living being a composer of music or a performer for that matter?
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
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,
Ultimately, it's probably the best thing you've got, right?
This is great. This is good advice for no matter what you're growing up to be, I think.
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.
Good. Perfect. I like ending on the optimistic note and that was a perfect place to stop. So Max Victor, thanks so much for being on the Mindscape podcast.
Thank you. It's a pleasure.