THE SLUMBER PARTY’S OVER
Composer Max Richter’s next step after Sleep is a global phenomenon
When I speak to Max Richter using Zoom, he is sitting in front of a bookshelf in his home studio. On it, I can identify only two titles, a huge Beatles volume and a smaller book on Bach — a fitting combination, I suggest, for this 54-year-old Anglo-German composer who bestrides the worlds of contemporary and classical music. Richter laughs.
“That’s the complete Beatles scores,” he says, “literally every note they recorded transcribed by some very eccentric Japanese people.” As for Bach, he says: “My first musical memory as a very small child is listening to Bach with an intuition that there was a governing logic behind those sounds. I found that incredibly exciting. But I loved The Beatles too, and I had the feeling that there was a connection.”
During a 25-year career, he has written music for ballet, opera, theatre and art installations, released several mainly instrumental solo albums, and been featured on more than 50 film and TV soundtracks. But he achieved global fame only five years ago, as the composer who wanted to send the world to sleep.
In 2015, Deutsche Grammophon released Sleep, an eight-and-ahalf-hour concept album of what Richter calls “sonic surfaces” — slow, elegant variations on a handful of simple themes performed on piano, strings and synthesizers alongside wordless melodies sung by the soprano Grace Davidson.
Five years on, Sleep has become an international phenomenon, clocking up more than 450 million streams and more than 100,000 CD sales, and reaching the top of the U.S. classical albums chart. It has been performed live by Richter in marathon overnight concerts around the world to audiences reclining (and often dozing) in beds. There is now a personalized Sleep app for mobile phones and a documentary film, Max Richter’s Sleep, to be released in September.
“Its success did surprise me,” Richter admits with a slightly bewildered laugh. “I don’t really ever have any expectations that anyone will listen to anything I do. I write the music that I’d like to hear.”
Richter has released his first album since Sleep. On Voices, the composer blends his soundscapes with passages from the 1948 Universal Declaration of Human Rights, read by U.S. actress KiKi Layne and other anonymous speakers in more than 70 languages.
More than a decade in gestation, “it started as quite an angry piece,” says Richter, a response to the socalled “Torture memos,” U.S. government documents detailing the use of “enhanced interrogation” during the War on Terror.
This is not the first time Richter has incorporated spoken word into his music. His 2004 album The Blue Notebooks features the actress Tilda Swinton reading from Kafka, while musician Robert Wyatt reads texts by Haruki Murakami on Songs From Before (2006). Yet by taking a text such as the Universal Declaration, isn’t Richter risking presenting statements that are already so well-known as to feel almost banal? “But are the words familiar?” he asks. “Obviously it’s a foundational text in terms of the development of the post-war era and I think most of us know the broad strokes. But there’s a lot of interesting, surprising stuff in there. I feel like it’s a document that’s hiding in plain sight.”
He has made a few alterations. “I have adapted it a little bit, here and there. For example, the first article says people should treat one another in the spirit of ‘brotherhood’, which I’ve changed to ‘community.’ That might be considered taking liberties, but it’s an aspirational text, a sort of proposition or provocation, and obviously it is of its time.”
Voices had its première in London in February, with a live performance involving 60 musicians, and was recorded immediately afterward. “It was a stroke of luck to be able to rehearse it, tweak it, perform it and get it in the can before lockdown,” says Richter. “So I have been able to get on with all the mixing and post-production.”
The music of Voices shares many of the gentle, sonorous aspects of Sleep, with its slow progressions and atmospheric combination of strings with electronica. There is also a heavy bass presence, which the composer ascribes to what he calls his “upside down orchestra” with its unusual ratio of instruments. The music is scored for a dozen double basses, 24 cellos, six violas, eight violins and one harp.
“I am really quite a bass head,” laughs Richter. “You should see me in my kitchen. The radio is on from morning to night, hovering between BBC 6 Music and Radio 3, so you walk in and make a cup of tea and you might be greeted by Mozart or some Berlin techno you’ve never heard before.”
Richter was born in Hamelin, West Germany, in 1966, to German parents. The family relocated to Bedford, Lincolnshire, when he was four years old. “I prefer to think of myself as a European composer,” he says, “if we can still say that after Brexit.”
He studied classical music, but became enthralled by electronica in his very early teens.
“I heard Kraftwerk on a TV documentary and wrote to the BBC saying ‘what is that sound?’ Kraftwerk are the godhead. After that, I had to have a synthesizer, but in those days they cost as much as a house, so I got busy with a soldering iron and started building these things in my bedroom.”