Always beginning

On the opposite end of it all, this conversation across time, we find Max Richter – a Romantic of another kind, whose medium is not words but another, far more expansive language which eludes them. Composer, producer, postminimalist, popstar: he is the leading iconoclast of the contemporary classical world, a trojan horse who dared to revolutionise an old world from within it. Who else could reimagine Vivaldi and unveil it at Berlin’s techno mecca, Berghain? Could as capably blend with the Marrinsky Ballet as he does Black Mirror? The swell and retreat of a symphony has commanded our hearts for hundreds of years, but when Richter melded that sound with once impossible electronic textures - creating space where there was only excess - he introduced a new way of feeling.

His ninth album, In A Landscape, arrives after a tenure spanning two decades which began in ridicule and crests with being one of the most popular and influential composers of all time. He first learned the rules in order to break them, training classically at the University of Edinburgh, London’s Royal Academy of Music and with Luciano Berio in Florence. But as an autonomous artist, he found himself drawn to minimalist disruptors including Brian Eno, Philip Glass and Julia Wolfe. This was a new harmonic language: one which demanded space, simplicity, repetition and insistence. Something both full and empty, capable of communicating emotion more directly than anything he had encountered before.

With this discipline as his pole star, his music has pervaded modern culture across film, television, ballet and theatre. His breakthrough album, The Blue Notebooks (2004), crystallised and protested against the Iraq War - memorably featuring readings of Kafka and Miłosz by Tilda Swinton - while his 2015 magnum opus, the eight-and-a-half-hour Sleep, used neuroscience to appeal to the sleeping body and active mind. It remains the most streamed classical record of all time. His music has also appeared in Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island, Ari Folman’s Waltz With Bashir and the Oscar-winning Arrival by Denis Villeneuve. Now, at the age of 58, Richter has just completed the music for Margaret Atwood’s post-apocalyptic MADDADDAM in a three-act ballet taking to the stage this autumn.

He is often the soundtrack to society’s ills, having dedicated his career to holding up a mirror to our own shattered image – but though the journey of a Max Richter album may take you through a necessary darkness, it also leaves you with a feeling of hope. He speaks to me from his studio space and minimalist haven, Studio Richter Mahr, which he co-founded with his partner, the visual artist Yulia Mahr. The space is flooded with light.

“The creative challenge is always the same. You’re faced with an enormous question mark,” Richter tells me. He is unaffected and articulates himself with an incredible clarity; someone who is more fascinated with what is happening in the world than his supposed place within it. “You feel there’s something you want to say that’s kind of out there, and you have an idea what that is and also no idea at all. The writing process is moving out into that unknown space, discovering things and assembling them into some kind of grammar, something that has intention. It’s like a science experiment, really. I do think, at the beginning, that it always feels impossible. You’re faced with that blank sheet of paper, an empty space, and it feels too enormous to respond to that. But it’s a very human process.”

In A Landscape, once felt in the dark, took on a shape of co-existing contradictions. “This record does have a thematic sort of spine, which is about this idea of putting things in strong contrast to one another – polarities – into relationships which are fruitful, interesting and elevating. I wanted to do that because it allowed me to talk a little bit about the world,” Richter explains. “A lot of what I do is driven by a sense of what’s out there right now, and right now we are polarised in all kinds of ways: societally, politically, and in terms of distribution of resources, all those things. But also, we’re divided against ourselves psychologically by this wonderful immersive Internet we’ve created. We’re in a position where two people who have a mild disagreement can’t even communicate properly with each other, which is really sad, right? I think this is something creative work can comment on and take a position on, and I guess the record is trying to seek harmony between disparate elements.”

These polarities have always been felt across Richter’s work, but now, they are brought into focus: electronic music and instrumental music; composed and found sounds – and, above all, our external and internal landscape. “Making a new project is figuring out, to some extent, who you are in the world now. When you look at things you’ve written in the past, it almost feels as if they’re written by an entirely different person because we write from our biography a lot of the time. We are always beginning,” says Richter.

In A Landscape began from a place of forced solitude in the summer of 2022. He had been working tirelessly on MADDADDAM, an orchestral project on a large scale, before finding himself ill with Covid. “I was lying in bed, feeling a bit miserable, and it was an opportunity to take stock and reflect upon what was going on,” he says, “because you’re forced to really stop.” The idea for the solo record emerged from a desire to retreat back to the fundamentals after working at the other extremity for so long: “I wanted to see what I could find in those colours now.”

This was the first record of his to be made in Studio Richter-Mahr. Previously, the space he worked from for years on end was a six-and-a-half-foot cube, which he could stand in – but just about. He and Mahr started to nurture a pipe dream of what the perfect space would be to bring work into the world, where creativity could be in communion with nature that reminds you that a screen is not the only lens through which you can look out into the world. An opportunity arose for them to purchase an old tractor shed in the Oxfordshire woods, and without any funding or institutional support, they recycled it into a studio for early-stage artists to take up residency and pass it forward. The composers Anna Meredith and Nala Sinephro had both worked on their latest respective records in its environment. “As creative people are often city dwellers, getting out of town does give you a different perspective and a different tempo,” Richter believes. “Out here, nothing much happens, right? So, in a way, it asks you some big questions.”

For Richter himself, it allowed him to explore the leading edge of thought: if he wanted to try something on the piano, the recording studio and instrument was right there. “You can work as instantly as a novelist,” he remarks. “I think the other thing is the sound of the building itself. Because it’s an oak room, it really has its own kind of character – as I hoped it would have. Acoustic instruments love wooden rooms, it’s just to do with the way that the spectrum is reflected by the material. It’s quite dark-sounding, and I like things to sound just a little on the dark side. It’s also an incredibly quiet room. When you go in there, you feel like your ears have gone a bit funny because it’s just so quiet. The noise floor, you can’t even measure it – it’s just not there. We worked very carefully with acousticians and studio design people to give it the sonic fingerprint I wanted. I think you can hear the building in the record.”

Richter’s strength has always derived from his instinct for restraint. What is unsaid somehow speaks louder. I ask him about his feelings towards minimalism. “It was quite a short-lived moment in music, in a way … I really like that quiet, sort of hardcore early minimalism which I heard as a kid. It absolutely floored me. What I take from it is this idea of economy and making every little object count. When I’m writing, I’ve got a choice: either write that not, or don’t write that note. I want the minimum amount of material that can tell the story; you can’t hide behind the colours. The notes themselves have to add up to something, a grammar that sits behind the music, and a lot of the time, I need to take stuff away for it to feel right. It’s a balancing process.”

A lot of classical music is something Richter refers to as “rich in data” – technical difficulty for difficulty’s sake. Early in his career, his instinct to create at the opposite extremity was unthinkable. “I studied at a time when there was an orthodoxy in classical music. Modernism, and really the kind of work I wanted to do, was met with an attitude of, ‘No, you cannot do that if you’re even remotely serious about being a composer. You literally cannot’. And actually, that was what made me start recording.”

He found himself in a situation where no orchestra would perform his material. “It was like, you could write tonal music if you wanted to write tonal music – it just means you’re an idiot, so welcome to your idiotic career,” he laughs. The only way, he determined, for his music to be given its due attention was to record it and remove all obstacles of understanding. Richter has been attributed by many as a crucial force in democratising classical music in the modern age.

“What I wanted to do is convey my feeling, experience or question to the listener as if it were a conversation,” he explains. “I try to be as clear and as straightforward with the material as I possibly can, because if you’re talking about something, you want to try to make yourself understood. There’s no point in hiding it behind loads of complexity. It was a totally different approach to what I was taught was acceptable in classical music, which is all about a piece of music essentially being like a mathematical proof, right? It’s like, ‘Here is this incredibly complicated thing that only I understand, deal with it’. It’s such a different power structure, such a different idea of what society is. A different idea of what a listener and composer relationship should be. Different, in every way, from what I wanted to do. I mean, even those composers of the modernist tradition, they’re all avowedly left-wing, but it’s actually a kind of authoritarian way of going about culture. It’s very weird, that dualism.”

When Richter released his 2002 debut album, Memoryhouse, he remarks quite bluntly and with no small amount of amusement, that “no one cared.” With the release of his first track, he believed his life was going to transform on a dime – but the world did not flinch. “It wasn’t reviewed, wasn’t advertised, basically no one bought it, and they shut the label down and deleted it,” he recalls. “I just thought, ‘Okay, that’s great. No one is listening, so I can just keep doing whatever I want to do.’”

The world’s oblivion afforded Richter a kind of limitless freedom. But the more he composed, the more people started to pay attention until a small (“you could literally count them on two hands”) underground faction of supporters and fellow composers emerged. When his breakout record The Blue Notebooks arrived two years later on the far-reaching experimental label FatCat Records, responsible for the likes of Sigur Rós, Animal Collective and Frightened Rabbit, he discovered that the people who understood his work were not of the classical music world at all.

“Classical music culture is, on one level, museum culture,” Richter observes. “It’s not like fine art, where new things and old things are treated as equally interesting. People feel fine about going to see a contemporary painting, but that’s not the case in classical music. There’s all kinds of gatekeeping and it’s very unfortunate, really. I mean, some classical music culture has really opened up over the last couple of years, but there’s still this kind of ‘thou-shalt-not’ attitude. I’ve had total critical disregard, and then it moved onto ‘this isn’t proper classical music’ criticism – but I’ve never really thought about it much because I can’t control it. What I can control are the notes I write on the page. I see that as my business.”

His own personal influence in the classical sphere is something he meets with indifference, but the overarching influences he has seen over his decade-spanning career he dissects with interest. “There’s this universality of the toolkit, which I think is huge,” he explains. He shows me an unassuming grey box, an EMU synthesiser, which at the start of his career commanded around £5,000 each – and if you wanted to emulate an orchestra, you’d need about twenty of them. “There was a natural barrier to people doing stuff back then, whereas now, I’ve got more processing power than that thing on this laptop I’m talking to you on right now – and so does everyone else.”

The second force at play is streaming, which though a mixed blessing for many artists, has completely democratised the classical genre. “When once these boundaries were maybe imposed by marketing categories in a physical record shop – you know, if you’re in the hip-hop section you’re in an entirely different space to the classical section – now, you’re only one click away from one to the other. Plus, you don’t have to put down your pocket money to try something, right? You can just follow your enthusiasms and your affections. Everyone’s listening so widely and encountering all kinds of music they maybe wouldn’t have otherwise, so you’ve got this real kind of plurality and feeling of limitless potential. It’s made a huge difference.”

Richter is also keen to draw parallels between his approach in classical music and the disciplines of EDM and hip-hop. “A lot of what I do is work with patterns. With Recomposed, I looked at Vivaldi’s atoms as building blocks I could extract patterns from, and then I can make pattern music. And that’s what dance music basically is, right? You’ve got all these interrelating mosaics of material. For me, the original minimal music is pattern music, all made of repetitive little cells. That kind of collaging of patterns is something I work with a lot, and I think there’s quite a close relationship between electronic music and what I do.”

“Love Song (After JE)” is the penultimate written track on In A Landscape. The elegiac piece draws on a “found object”, which is a violin line of Eccles dating nearly 300 years old being interwoven into Richter’s distinctly modern tapestry. “His piece is from quite a torrid opera which he wrote, but I just thought there’s a way to contextualise this music which speaks more to a muted emotionality, something tender, if you like,” he explains. “I like the idea of working with found materials. You see it in dub music and hip-hop, this layering of references sort of like a palimpsest – all these different things talking to one another vertically.”

Richter famously follows the abstract painter Rothko’s advice: to include an ounce of hope in every artwork (“10%, to make the tragic concept more endurable”). It’s something he has referred to as the “psychological responsibility” of producing art; the natural course of any work that aspires to catharsis. “We’re all responsible for our actions, whether that’s how you say hello to someone in the morning or whether it’s creative work. We have choices about how we do that which have outcomes and reactions. I guess I’m interested in putting work into the world which to me, at least, seems to be a net gain. I don’t want to just fill the world with noise. There’s already plenty of music, so if I’m going to add to that sum total, then I feel it should be something that needs saying – a meaningful contribution to a conversation I believe is important.”

For that reason, Richter wrote a new ending for In A Landscape rather than the one he envisioned. Initially, it was to conclude on “Love Song (After JE)”, but it felt like leaving his listener burdened with a heaviness. “It felt like a descent, in a way, and I really didn’t want it to do that. There’s already enough of that in the world, right? I wanted something that felt like the clouds have just parted a little,” he shares. And so “Movement, Before All Flowers” became an intentional parting gift, “a balancing object” at the end of our journey. It’s not quite happiness, not quite peace, but an act of release like the sigh at the end of a big feeling.

In A Landscape, as with all of Richter’s music, expresses the inexpressible. The feeling escapes words, but it’s one you’ve always known. “I’ve tried to make something which has a kind of warmth in a really challenging time. There’s so much wrong at the moment societally – we’re living in a multi-dimensionally difficult time, right? I feel like it’s a hopeful record, and I want to personally be as elevated as much as I can by the creative work I engage with. That’s not to say it’s happy-clappy, kumbaya material, it’s not about that. But I wanted to create a positive space for people to reflect on what’s going on.”

Everything is a work in progress, and Richter is driven, still, by that curiosity that drew him to his parents’ Bach and Beatles LPs on a cheap record player as a child. “Every project captures who I was at that moment, because we’re all turning into different people all the time,” he reflects. “And so I’ve learned how to make this record, but I don’t know anything about how I’m going to make the next one.”