Max Richter: Composing Reflections on a Broken Society

It’s difficult to overstate both the success and subsequent influence of German-born, British composer Max Richter. With a classical, conservatoire music education and years spent experimenting and finding his sound, Richter’s second album, The Blue Notebooks caught fire.

The piece On The Nature Of Daylight (2004), in particular, having since become ubiquitous in film, television and beyond (updated in 2018 with a music video starring Elisabeth Moss of Mad Men/The Handmaid’s Tale fame, following on from Tilda Swinton speaking on the original album).

He’s conquered the world of film and television, scoring films such as Ad Astra and Miss Sloane, and television such as Black Mirror and Taboo. He’s also added many solo albums to his oeuvre, including Recomposed by Max Richter: Vivaldi – The Four Seasons, in which he reinvents a great work by one of the greats. I can’t imagine a more daunting task, but Richter does it with his trademark elegance.

Fittingly, Richter was born in the German town of Hamelin, the town from which the ‘Pied Piper of Hamelin’ story originates. Having been based in Berlin for several years, arguably the world’s capital of the avant-garde, he’s now back living in the UK (he grew up in Bedford).

“I was in Berlin for eight or nine years”, he says in his accent that does touch on both the Germanic and the English background. “It is almost like a laboratory where there’s a lot of inventing happening. But for various reasons we came back to the UK recently.”

Richter recently released his ninth solo album, Voices. He crowd-sourced readings of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights to be used in lead-single, All Human Beings, plus a special reading from actress Kiki Layne (If Beale Street Could Talk), receiving hundreds of submissions in over 70 languages.

Considering he’s been working on this project for many years, I mention that I’m particularly struck by the timing of this release, amidst the social upheaval of the global pandemic, closely followed by the George Floyd protests worldwide.

“I started working on this in 2010 with Mercy,” Richter explains. “That’s now the last track on the album. That was made in response to the events in Guantanamo Bay. I wrote Mercy as a place to think about these things and to try and make sense of it. And then I started to talk to Yulia Mahr, my creative partner who is a filmmaker and anthropologist, about making it into a bigger music and film piece. So Voices is the outcome of that 10 years, conversational process.”

With regards to the timing of this release, “unfortunately, social justice and rights seem to be under question all the time. So sadly, this release is always going to be relevant in a way. But we premiered it in early February at The Barbican (the famous concert hall and arts center in North London) and went straight into recording it with the same group of musicians afterwards. So this particular timing was pure chance.”

I put to Richter that, having watched the incredibly powerful music video for All Human Beings, its reading of the Declaration of Human Rights left me questioning if we have, as a species, been living according to that declaration. Sadly, a positive answer does not spring to mind immediately. “That, for me, is why I wanted to put the Declaration at the centre of the piece,” Richter says.

“It’s a document that is 70 years old now, coming out of the greatest crisis humanity has ever managed to inflict on itself, The Second World War. Nevertheless, it is a hopeful document. It lit the fuse for postwar liberal consensus, and helped the world develop in the second half of the twentieth century. But in the last 10 years or so, it feels like that consensus has started to unravel with the rise of populism, xenophobia, the pressures of technology and the environment, increasing authoritarianism.

"And most recently, the outrage against violence towards African Americans. It’s easy to feel a bit hopeless, but the Declaration does, in a way, hold a lot of answers. The text is common sense. So I wanted to reflect on that.”

With Richter being so prolific in the world of film and television, I can’t help but ask for his personal highlight reel from that side of his work. “Waltz With Bashir is certainly a highlight because it’s one of the first things I did,” he recalls.

“It’s an amazing piece of filmmaking from Ari (Folman, director). Absolutely incredible. Actually, his next film, The Congress, which didn’t get noticed properly, is also a wonderful film and I really enjoyed making the music for that. Hostiles, Scott Cooper’s film; that’s an amazing piece of cinema. Christian Bale is astounding in that. Black Mirror is, of course, a wonderful thing to be a part of. The visuals in Ad Astra are spectacular, James Gray is another excellent filmmaker. You can create a beautiful relationship between the music and the purely visual in a film like that.”

As we speak, Richter, alongside his record label Deutsche Grammophon, has just released the app version of his Sleep project that began back in 2015, premiering as an eight-hour concert to an audience in beds between the hours of midnight and 8am in London. The full album can be streamed in its full night’s sleep-length glory, or in a condensed, one hour version as From Sleep.

On the strangeness of performing to a sleeping audience, Richter says that “it was almost an anti-performance. Normally when you perform something live, you’re trying to reach out and be very direct, and project the material. But with a Sleep performance, all those dynamics are totally shuffled. The energy on the stage is completely different, it’s a real communal journey through the night.”

The aforementioned London premiere was as part of BBC Radio 3’s Science and Mind weekend, and (perhaps unsurprisingly) remains the longest broadcast in the station’s history, also setting a Guinness Record for the same reason.

The new app of the same name enables users to create personalised musical sessions for a chosen period. Each of the sessions – Sleep, Meditate and Focus – has its own musical sequence, developed in collaboration with Richter, who he has composed a new wake-up alarm sound for the app.

“I think the in-house developers Deutsche Grammophon have come up with something really beautiful with this app,” he adds. “I almost feel like it’s why the iPhone was invented. [laughs]”

In terms of Richter’s studio, it’s “a fairly unglamorous place! It’s a tiny room, seven feet by seven feet — full of boxes and gizmos, piles of synthesizers, and a lot of books, manuscript papers and computers. Very cluttered! But a very creative space that I like being in. I love analogue sounds; all the solo albums were recorded on tape, except for Sleep which would have been impossible. For plugins, I love all the Soundtoys stuff. They’re pretty classic nowadays and I think those are all great. All of their FilterFreak things are great and their EQ is very good. Altiverb is pretty much essential.”

As life in these times becomes increasingly bonkers for us all, some restful sleep, meditation and focus sound wonderful — with the new Sleep app offering all three of these, be sure to go download that from your phone’s app store.

And as Voices releases on July 31st, it’s set to perhaps be Richter’s biggest political statement yet, not that he’s ever been quiet in that regard. It promises to be another elegant and unmissable album from this inimitable composer, quite arguably a genius.