Music that Changed Me

Composer Max Richter

Max Richter has found success in many genres. Recomposed, Vivaldi’s Four Seasons reimagined with electronics and orchestra, was a worldwide bestseller and he has written music for ballets, film and TV scores including, most recently, My Brilliant Friend. VOICES, his new album for Decca, is a ‘hopeful work about potential solutions to the world’s problems’ based on the Universal Declaration of Human Rights.

My first conscious listening memory was hearing JS Bach, in particular the Double Violin Concerto. We were still living in Germany so I can’t have been more than three. I was transported not just by the music’s emotion but by the perception that there was a governing logic at work behind these sounds. I felt that there was something underneath, a grammar that made it happen. That’s where it all started, wanting to discover what that grammar was.

At the age of 13 I heard an extraordinary piece of music on a TV documentary and I became obsessed with finding out what it was. I wrote to the BBC and six weeks later I got a letter back saying it was KRAFTWERK’S ‘Autobahn’. It’s a playful piece of music but also quite experimental. My first thought was: I’ve got to get myself a synthesizer. I’d been taking piano lessons, doing my Mozart and Beethoven like everyone, until I heard this extraordinary instrument. When I found out it cost as much as a house I started buying components and making my own. My father was an engineer so soldering in the bedroom wasn’t so unusual! The fuse was lit for my adventures in electronic music.

The other musical explosion that went off in my mind in adolescence was MAHLER. I’ve chosen Symphony No. 9 conducted by John Barbirolli, who has an incredible naturalness and spontaneity in his performance with the Berlin Philharmonic. I don’t listen to Mahler much now because I did a lifetime’s worth, hours a day in a ten-year period!

I used to practise the piano when I came home from school, which coincided with the time when the milkman came to collect his money. He heard me playing, and because he was interested in experimental music he started delivering records for me along with the milk. I heard music from the early-1970s New York scene – early Philip Glass and Steve Reich – and this made a big impression on me.

I studied at Edinburgh University, and until that point my historical understanding of music only went as far as the Tudors. DAVID MUNROW’S groundbreaking collection The Art of Courtly Love became a source book and I discovered Machaut, Dufay and their contemporaries. What amazed me was the role of geometry and mathematics as a basic structuring principle – the isorhythmic method. It seemed also to connect to a lot of things I was interested in, which more recent music has embraced. Renaissance and Elizabethan music has been a mainstay of my musical listening ever since.

While I was at the Royal Academy, I heard the Hilliard Ensemble give the UK premiere of ARVO PÄRT’S Passio.

I’d been writing complicated, borderline unplayable music, and I was wrestling with the idea that I was only writing for other composers. Encountering Pärt’s direct music was an amazing experience; Passio feels simple but it subtly evolves and has this brilliant architectural moment at the end. It made me reassess what I was doing with my language. Later I went to study with Berio and he reinforced that feeling. He said, ‘Yes this is impressively complicated, but what are you getting at and why are doing this?’ That set me on the path of simplifying my musical language.

I love the boldness of XENAKIS’S music, the sense that he’s an inventor. Jonchaies, scored for 109 musicians, is from the mid-’70s: golden-age Xenakis. He showed that music could be the embodiment of an idea, the sonic realisation of a theory… almost documentary music. I’ve used that principle in my projects, such as the score for the sci-fi movie Ad Astra, where I made computer-modelled instruments out of data from the Voyager probes. It’s quite a Xenakis thing to do!