Max Richter Quotes
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I was living in a suburban town north of London, dutifully practicing my Mozart sonatas. And the milkman who delivered the milk in the mornings was kind of milkman by day, composer-artist by night.
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'Spring One' probably has only four bars of Vivaldi in it, but it feels like it's all Vivaldi. It's odd. It's a bit like walking around a sculpture, you just sort of see it from a different angle.
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Sleep is probably my favorite activity. I wrote this piece out of gratitude that I'm able to sleep well as an offering to people who don't.
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'Sleep' is a project I've been thinking about for many years. It just seems like society has been moving more and more in a direction where we needed it. Our psychological space is being increasingly populated by data. And we expend an enormous amount of energy curating data.
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When I'm working with pictures, with images and storytelling, it's really about the sentiment and the emotional trajectory of the characters. That's really where the music lives, I think. That's what I'm focused on; that's what I respond to most strongly.
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The thing that makes me want to write a piece of music is having something to talk about, you know? Something I want to get across. Because I'm a composer, music is my first language, and that's what I reach for when I want to convey something.
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When we go to sleep ordinarily, we're doing something really private. It's kind of an intimate, private connection with our sort of physical humanity.
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'Black Mirror' obviously has its own universe, with a very strong fingerprint and strong themes, and I was intrigued on reading. It's such a powerful piece of storytelling.
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I lived in Scotland a long time, and I became aware of Mogwai really from the beginning. They seemed to be fusing hard music structure and sort of raw sonics. They're just very creative thinkers, musical thinkers.
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Often, especially young artists, you feel like you should be doing something. And I think that can be very destructive because creativity is about connecting with the stuff that's deep inside you and making something out of that.
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I came from a Conservatoire background where the idea of complexity was very much bound up with good music - good music was seen as complex and difficult to understand.
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It's true that many of the best-known composers were German or Austrian, but we should remember how good the music tradition is in Britain, too, because it has an informality and a fluidity that should really be celebrated.
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Sleeping and being asleep is one of my favorite activities. Really, what I wanted to do is provide a landscape or a musical place where people could fall asleep.
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We've all got stories to tell that no one else knows. We've all got this truly unique experience of being. So I would say cultivate that, because then also you're cultivating something which is very natural to you.
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If somebody says, 'Well, what are your favorite composers?' really, what they are saying is, 'What are your favorite composers apart from Bach?' Because obviously, Bach is your favorite composer if you are involved in music at all.
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There's different ways to approach music for sleeping. Things like white noise are functional, like a lullaby. This is more like an inquiry, a question about how music and sleep fit together.
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I assumed no one would ever listen to my music, and for quite a lot of years, I was right.
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I think, as human beings, we all have a fundamental mode, a basic way of relating to the rest of reality, and for me, it's always instinctively been about sound making and trying to extract information, grammar, meaning from sound making. That's been my way of navigating reality that's very personal; a painter might say they make marks or look.
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We're chronically sleep-deprived as a culture. We're constantly on.
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In Germany, people feel like they own classical music, that it is somehow theirs. Over there, everyone still learns to play, and the great composers don't seem alien.
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It feels like when novelists say they find their characters are doing things they never thought they'd do, the material comes alive, and that's how I feel making music.
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When I got the call about 'Arrival,' I was doubtful because the piece had had a life on cinema already, and we were getting to the point where the original context was sort of lost, and I didn't want that to happen. On the other hand, 'Arrival' itself is a political film because it's about unification and getting beyond boundaries.
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That childhood passion and involvement and being really submerged in something, that's the kind of state I'm looking for all the time - and preserving that sense of magical possibility and wonder that children have. I think, for artists, if you can stay connected to that, then you are in a good place.
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When I was a kid, there were really only two possible futures in the foreground, which were Orwell's '1984' and Huxley's 'Brave New World'.